Game Development Giant

So what is it like?

For merchants, as long as the revenue is high and the profit ratio is high, it is a successful product.

Therefore, Guild Wars 2 and Blade \u0026 Soul, which WoW players think have been dead for 10,000 years, are actually successful games. They have made enough money, but they just haven't made it from you.

For example, a game with an average of 100,000 people online and an average consumption of 100 yuan is certainly better for players than a game with an average of 10,000 people online and an average consumption of 2,000 yuan, because it doesn’t cost much money because there are more people playing, but for merchants , the latter is of course better than the former because it makes more money.

This is the domestic planning perspective on games.

In the eyes of game developers like them, let's call them game developers for now, it seems that they only make this game to get players to pay.

There were even more explicit remarks.

For example.

The planner also explained in detail that the huge difference in consumption power determines the optimal solution for domestic game charging.

Use your time to get more users for free. Conscientious planners will ensure the basic survival of these people in the game, and that's it. Why is this? They don't spend any money and still occupy server resources. What's the use of allowing them to survive?

Because in doing so, we are trying to retain them to maintain the game's ecology, and what is the purpose of maintaining the game's ecology? It’s very simple, make enough money from users with high spending power.

So the question arises, how to make the wealthy spend money to give them a good enough feeling without making it unbearable for the common people? Solved the problem or solved it in a short time. This game can already make a lot of money from the fees

All the money-making and money-making designs that you hate come from this - highly or even excessive commercialization that condenses countless planning efforts.

It can even be said that in the domestic game development environment. More than half of the workload of chief planners and numerical planners is here.

At that time, Jester was a passionate young man. Seeing that the planner of a large domestic game company was promoting his game design concept so unabashedly, Jester wanted to question him. After graduation, I chose to engage in game development.

I definitely want to develop a good game.

Without this ideal, I am afraid that few people would choose this industry. Because game development will be quite boring if it is done by people who are not interested.

And, there is the simplest question.

So much to say. We always talk about making money, but if we can’t even make good games, how can we make money?

When Jester questioned the other party like this.

But the other party directly retorted with a dismissive tone.

"Because the level of domestic players is too low." This sentence is said very euphemistically, but in fact, this is what the domestic game planner wants to express. This is the majority of domestic online game players. They are all a bunch of sbs, they don’t even know what a good game is and what a bad game is.

There are three types of players in the market.

One kind does not care about the quality of the game at all and plays games just to pass the time. The other kind pays more attention to the fun besides the quality of the game than the game itself, such as hooking up, killing, pure social interaction, etc. The other kind They have never played online games or have never played online games of even acceptable quality, so they are extremely insensitive to game quality or have very low ability to identify them.

These are the three types of players. Occupying the mainstream of domestic player groups.

Their ideas are very simple. They don't understand or don't care about the structure, gameplay, and values ​​of the game.

They do not do any summary thinking or planning. Their game world is a very simple word: happy or unhappy.

This is a very vague feeling. What is fun and what counts as fun? Every player and everyone has their own different concepts. What the developers have to do is to try their best to find all the cool points, including some designs that we may think are vulgar and can't be more vulgar and can't be worse.

For example, you can get a dragon-slaying sword for free by clicking on it, you can spawn unlimited monsters and kill them all over the place, you can upgrade to level 10 with one click, you can get hundreds of millions of damage with a single cut, and you can open a treasure box and open a bunch of miscellaneous things to cater to these players.

Why?

It is too difficult to cater to players who have high requirements for game quality, and the return ratio is too low.

The above three types of players are so satisfied. They can make whatever they want and people will buy it. If there are just a few rich people in there, they will get their money back, and if there is a group of them, they will make a lot of money.

In this case, why not do planners?

Don’t you think it’s incredible? Do you think there are such shameless people? Quite simply, it was because neither the domestic planners nor the domestic players at that time took the idea of ​​what a game should be into mind. In other words, in their eyes, this was just a game. That’s all.

But in the eyes of those who truly love this industry, this is not the case.

When Jester was speechless by the poster, the big domestic planner, and didn't know how to fight back, someone just asked the poster in a very ordinary tone, and the poster immediately said Became speechless.

What is the problem?

Very simple answer.

"Let me ask you, at what point did you start testing your game and discuss whether it is fun or not? Do you dare to tell me?"

is it fun.

What a simple question. As a planner, it is really the simplest question. Which game planner doesn't create this game from a fun perspective? Whoever plans to make this game will have such an idea in people who have played it.

This game is worth playing.

But unfortunately, domestic planning does not design games this way.

In fact, this domestic planning has said so much, but unfortunately the starting point is wrong, and no matter how much it is said, it is in vain. This planner's starting point is that if you want to make money, you have to abandon quality and create a pyramid structure.

But the problem is that making money and game quality are not in conflict.

Is gta5 fun? Make money or not? Is wow fun? Make money or not? Again, dota2, is lol fun? Make money or not? Is it technically difficult?

In the final analysis, the level is still not good enough.

You can only make something like this.

And why is this? Jester thought about it for a long time at that time, and even thought deeply about it after time travel. In fact, at the beginning, these planners even forgot their original intention of designing the game. There were too many things restricted by objective conditions. , in the end, I didn’t even know what I wanted to make.

Anyway, as long as it makes money, I don't care what it is.

As an ordinary person who is not in the gaming industry and has certain expectations for games, Jester's thoughts at the time were very simple. He did not have much power. What he could do was only contribute to the Chinese gaming industry. Make a little contribution.

Never play domestic online games.

If you compare various games to women.

This game that domestic planners call a success, combined with their presentation and solicitation methods, can only be regarded as a chicken on the street at best.

As a businessman, he is indeed successful.

But please don’t claim to be in the game industry. You are in the network service industry at best. Talking about your works purely from the concept of “game” is a piece of shit, because in Jester’s mind, there has never been a game. Games are simply treated as a pure commodity.

It's a little cold to talk about art.

It might be more appropriate to change it to handicrafts, but Jester still insisted on using the word art in the previous question.

Jester’s current thoughts are the same as when he founded Mars Entertainment.

That is to make a game with the attitude of making a work of art. This game can have various factors that attract players to play. However, making this game is definitely not just because of this. It must be, or it is You must have a craftsman’s spirit.

There are no such craftsmen in China who make games. Some are just businessmen. In their eyes, games are just a commodity. As long as they can sell money, they don't care what the thing is like. What they care about is The only thing is money, and it is money with low investment and high return.

And what about the craftsmen?

They treat this thing, this game, that they're making, first and foremost, as their child, and they like it, they love it, they're obsessed with it, and the reason they make it is they want everyone else to like it too. he.

In fact, there is such a view in the future domestic planning circles.

“Capital and the market will always determine products, and capital has no limit. Therefore, in order for the entire game industry to embark on the path of healthy development and healthy competition, all employees must have high quality; and to To degenerate the entire gaming industry, all it takes is one person to take off his pants and make money.”

Of course, this wasn't the most morbid opinion Jester had ever heard.

In fact, Jester had heard with his own ears that the chief planner of Ace Games of a top domestic large-scale game company taught his juniors this lesson.

It's very straightforward and straight to the point.

One sentence goes straight to the core of whether a game will make money.

That's what he said.

"Players are all idiots. And don't tell me that you have ideas and creativity. There are many creative people. If you want to come up with a new thing, has it been tested by the market? If it has not been tested by the market, it will die. Are you responsible if it drops? Do you know that it is good if only 5 out of 100 new games can survive? You just need to learn from those games that have been tested by the market."

While Jester was thinking about this in his mind, he looked under the stage which was becoming less silent.

Then, he saw the very young reporter and raised his hand first.

Judging from the location, this should be a reporter from Japan. (To be continued...)