Game Development Giant

Of course, in Jester's opinion, in this era, it is unwise to invest money in the research and development of such a top-notch sandbox game.

Because it is difficult, and secondly because the development time will be very long. Finally, and most importantly, it is difficult to recover the profit that the original investment should have brought. To be honest, even in the original "Heroes", Jester did not We are optimistic about its sales, and if we don’t look at his increase in console sales, we just look at the sales of this game that have exceeded 10 million so far, compared with the total investment in R\u0026D and sales of this game of 300 million US dollars.

So his return ratio is really not that surprising.

Jester made this game because he had to do it, but he was not optimistic about other game companies doing it. This time, Suzuki Yuu still made "Shenmue" as he did in history. This is actually what Jester did. It seems a little unwise.

Although Yu Suzuki participated in the development of "The Hero".

However, it is really difficult to master such a game without having seen countless similar games.

Many people say that the larger the game, the better it is to produce - because there is a lot of content that can be allowed, so you can make a lot of fun points, like Super Balotelli's original game of several megabytes can do it It's endless fun. Now that such a large-scale game allows so much content, isn't it easier to develop?

Could it be that, at worst, you can’t even make a super Balotelli content?

The actual situation cannot make such a simple analogy.

You can't have a game that has one or two gigabytes of capacity and requires five or even six discs to play with only a little bit of Super Balotelli's game content. If you dare to do that in such a game, then You will definitely have to bear the wrath of the players.

In a game of this scale, it is very difficult to put a lot of content into it and ensure that the content of the game is interesting. This is not only for current designers, but also for future designers. It's also a difficult question. If sandbox games were really that easy to make and all it took was someone with money to play, then Ubisoft wouldn't accuse people of being an industrial sandboxer.

The most common question game designers are asked when designing games is - 'Is it fun to do this? ’

Yes, wouldn’t it be interesting to design something like this?

Maybe domestic designers later faced too much pressure from their bosses or investors. The problem they often face is not the "it's fun to do this" problem, but another "it makes people spend more money" problem.

Perhaps this is the reason why domestic games cannot make fun games, because their focus is not on fun and interest.

Actually, is it fun to do this?

This is also the time when Jester tells others about a game idea. This seems to be the simplest question for developing a game, but it is actually the most difficult question to answer.

Jester also knows that many people, many designers, and even some academics are trying to define what is interesting. They want to give the game a specific concept, and then apply this concept when developing the game. , but in reality, the likelihood of doing so is slim.

In his memory, Jester remembered that Mark LeBlanc, a famous game designer in later generations, divided the fun in the game into eight categories.

Pleasure, friendship, fantasy, exploration, narrative, performance, challenge and compliance.

Although this classification of fun is an interesting attempt. But Jester feels that this classification is not helpful in actual combat, because there are endless problems and various problems, such as a certain idea or a certain mechanism of the game, or a boss battle, or anything else, which may be very difficult to talk about on paper. It's fun, but maybe it won't be the same once it's made into a game. Sometimes it may actually be fun to make, but only you think so. The thing about fun is, like humor. It relies entirely on subjective judgment.

How can such a thing have a strict academic definition?

In fact, now that the game has developed to this stage, it has become increasingly far away from the original definition of games. Just like sports, after many years of development, sports are no longer just sports and fitness.

In Jester's opinion. The essence of games is actually the most simple and mindless in its most primitive days. For example, a naive child can shoot pictures for a day, watch ants for a whole afternoon, such as pinball and Pacman. However, as the game industry develops for a long time, There will be a higher art. Creative and even philosophical pursuits. The target audience of the game may not be a group with high taste in the first place. People with picky tastes will gradually turn their interests to other fields, such as literature, philosophy, science, art, etc.

However, times have progressed, and so have games. Now you may be able to play Kaitouren happily for several hours, but if you release such a game now, the sales volume will definitely be far lower than before.

Jester once joined a QQ group in the domestic development industry before traveling through time. At that time, the group often discussed some game design issues. Everyone would think about how to make the action and impact exciting, and how to design the dungeon level to dig holes. What rules in the arena can create pitfalls, how does the game grow to create pitfalls for players, and which game does the character image come from? There are even people who often come up with some boring ideas just because they think the idea is interesting.

The most typical one is that Guo Weiwei's Three of Swords always keeps pace with the times in WOW.

However, what is very strange to Jester is that almost no one will discuss how to make this game fun and make it fun for players to play, that is, to have fun.

This is a very rare thing in the game development circles in Europe, America, and Japan that Jester knows.

Because the first question that needs to be clarified from the beginning of a game's development is, is it fun to do this?

Even though there are many failed games in Europe and the United States, they are boring and even embarrassing to play, but you can see that the designers have really worked very hard to design fun games.

Few domestic developers will work in this direction. The corresponding thing is to make a big fuss about numerical values, dig holes, and use stimulants.

It feels like, when you play a game normally, you may need to use your brain and exert a lot of effort to finally get through it. You breathe a sigh of relief and gain happiness.

Domestic games are like letting you turn on a cheat device to play a single-player game. Sweeping all the way will be fun at first, but after 5 minutes you will become bored with the character (maybe you have to renew for 5 minutes to remain invincible). So you look for the next krypton gold. Then loop.

Players are beaten to death by numerical values ​​and gain a short-term sense of pleasure. But when the medicine is too effective, I feel it is no fun, and I find that I can spend tens of thousands of krypton on it.

certainly. It is expected that very few domestic players will pay attention to the fun of a game. Instead, they will pursue the results of the game more. Even in some well-known game forums, players will discuss The focus is not on this aspect either. They would rather quote the classics and use the games played by each other as spiritual shareholders in the forum to get pleasure.

Yes, when Jester traveled through time, China had indeed become the second largest market for gaming in the world.

The largest market for online games and the second largest market for mobile games, but the reality is that although the market is constantly expanding. But in fact, all the money has been made by such a few companies. The domestic game industry is very miserable, employment is not optimistic, small game companies are closing down in minutes, and game companies that have established a foothold are not guaranteed day by day.

In the year when Jester traveled through time, many people said that the economy was in recession, and this was indeed the case. The Internet's winter was coming, but according to the laws of economics, this time should stimulate the development of the entertainment and game industry. But that didn't seem to be the case in China at that time. It seemed that such a law no longer worked.

The wave of bankruptcies of small and medium-sized game companies has erupted like a tsunami. Some industry executives have even said that 90% or even 99% of game companies, especially mobile game companies, will not survive this year.

Why is this so?

Because the giant effect is actually too terrible and terrible.

The combined mobile game revenue of Tencent and NetEase in the third quarter of 2015 exceeded 8.84 billion, and the two companies accounted for more than 60% of the market. The top 15 domestic game manufacturers have almost captured more than 90% of the mobile game market share, and the top 50 best-selling products account for nearly 80% of App Store game revenue.

In the game market, the money-making junk games are still making money, and the games made by these small and medium-sized game companies are actually no different from Tencent and NetEase.

Some people are unrealistically dreaming that Tencent can stand up and take up the cause of domestic games, but in fact, this kind of disorderly and brainless gaming environment is exactly what Tencent wants to see. The last thing that wants to wake up domestic players is game companies like Tencent. Because there are so many awakened gamers, who will play their games?

Jester once thought deeply about the ratio of investment in game research and development to revenue.

A free + krypton gold mobile game, after removing various advertising fees and taking commissions, the final profit will be 3 million in one month. After 6 to 12 months of operation, there will be a net profit of more than 2000W.

Compare this to the fact that if you use the same cost to make an excellent and fun paid game with no krypton gold, you can get $2 from it if you price it at $3. Then you have to sell 1660,000 copies to make the same profit as above. In fact, unless a 3-dollar game has one-in-a-million highlights, it is still difficult to stand out among the hundreds of thousands of games in the app store. It can already sell tens of thousands of copies. Not bad. Not to mention competing with those free games.

In this case, how do you get a company like Tencent to calm down and consider the most essential question of whether it is interesting to do this?

In fact, the global mobile game market is moving further and further on such a trend.

Even in the traditional game industry in Europe and the United States, DLC and krypton gold are increasingly included, because businessmen are always chasing profits.

Of course, there are also conscientious manufacturers like CDPR.

Jester remembered before that a very heated discussion broke out among domestic developers, and the argument was good-isnt-good-enough.

Being good is not being good enough.

In other words, just being excellent is not enough for a game or a game company.

A game carefully developed by a developer has poor sales. Although everyone thinks this game is very well done, no one will buy it because the competition in the European and American game industry is extremely fierce now. Your game is just a good one. There are always other companies making better and cheaper games than you.

In the future game market, if a game wants to survive from the wolf pack, it is not enough to just do well, because there are too many game companies doing well, and what you need is to do enough. Good.

And the current gaming environment is already countless times better than the future.

Although the competition in the current game industry is also fierce, and a large number of game companies close their doors every day, compared with the future environment, the present is simply paradise.

At least today's players are not so picky that it is not enough for a game to be excellent; what you have to do is be good enough.

This is actually the game development model that Jester has been promoting at Mars Entertainment for so many years. That is, when a game is approved, the discussion of whether it is interesting or not is always left to the discussion. First, all other external or internal conditions need to give way to this element.

That's what they've always done.

If a game abandoned all external modifications, such as graphics, and only used pixels to present it, would it be fun?

This is the internal small DEMO test that Mars Entertainment often does internally.

Therefore, Mars Entertainment has always produced high-quality games over the years.

Although there are a few games that are not satisfactory, players can still see the degree of care the design team puts into game development. They are not perfunctory with a game or players, but they are judging the players' preferences. Error, because the question of whether a game is fun to do this is a subjective question.

What a designer thinks is great may not necessarily be something that players think is great.

This is what Jester is most worried about about Suzuki Yu's "Shenmue". Will it erase the mistakes of the old "Shenmue"?

The original "Shenmue" was great, and it was a textbook classic in terms of the entire game design. In every aspect, it was almost the best in the industry at the time, but this game had an extremely critical problem.

Everything is fine, but it's not fun to play.

Suzuki Yu is a very paranoid person, and Jester is worried about this. (~^~)