Throughout 2019, the domestic game market is not calm.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account Game Time VGtime (ID : VGTIME2015), author box.
We have witnessed that “Yu Sanjia” has gathered in mainland China within this generation, and we cannot avoid the shrinking of the industry caused by related policies such as the issue of restricted editions. The so-called joys and worries-the worries may be even greater.
But domestic games are still a year of progress in 2019. Looking at the “Steam Hot New Works” in the past 12 months, among them is There are 9 works by Chinese people. Being able to enter this list also means that they have achieved good results in terms of revenue. Taking this opportunity, I managed to hook up with several game producers and creators who are on the list (or not), and talked to them about the trivia and feelings of the past year.
Drink more water when stressful
Although I first met Awa at the recording site of a certain VG radio station, I actually lurked into the officially formed player group long before the release of “Virgin War”. It was originally set up by a “big and white” person who ran the teacher Jiujiaozi, but what I didn’t expect was that the producer often jumped out of the gag and occasionally opened a live broadcast on his own. impression.
Abo often takes very important things in one go, and it’s hard to tell whether this person has a clear mind or a good mentality. For example, relative to the sales of “Daughter of War”, he thinks that it is equally important to be able to play “Fire Emblem Wind Flower Snow Night” and “Devil May Cry 5” this year. For another example, when you talk about the “hard” development process of the past year, you sound flat and bland:
“(Overtime and overtime) There is no way to do this, which industry is not easy. One person who is doing an independent game is usually responsible for many aspects of production at the same time. Basically, it is impossible to avoid continuous and long-term work to ensure the coupling and pressure of various aspects Drink more water as you grow up. “
After playing St. Regis,Found that its strategy system is as attractive as “big”
Abo didn’t elaborate on the “high pressure”. It may be that it is not clear to me as a layman, or it may be that the trouble is from the game and is too trivial. As for whether drinking water can relieve stress, I have tried it anyway and it is not very useful. Ruo Nan of the “Shaped Knight” team mentioned a lot of trivial things. He recalled the past year and found a strange phenomenon:
“The day is fleeting, but the night is as good as the night. Take today, for example, as soon as you open your eyes in the morning, you get up and see an office building outside the Fifth Ring Road. I hurried back to the office at noon to ask about the progress of the report Originally, I was hoping to have a surprise on the first day of 2020, but it is still unknown. After that, I asked the guy who interviewed this week to talk with the publisher partners about the next progress, and again Send an email to Nintendo to urge the development of the Switch. After sending the email, stretch out and look up, it ’s already dark.
Plumped on the bed, and began to wonder if he would go to see other office buildings tomorrow? But it’s been a few months, and it seems that the Spring Festival is about to happen. I have to change the office quickly, or the whole team will be strangled in the pigeon cage now! There is still a lot of room for improvement in the animation of our game. Should we add another animation to add it? But I spoke to investors a few days ago and said that we will control the budget in 2020! The animated guy coming for an interview tomorrow looks very promising and should be able to top it! Ah yes, the demo that promised my friends hasn’t finished yet … “
Ruo Nan has played games for 10 years so far, and the past year has been called “the hardest year in 10 years.” It’s not that this state of busyness and anxiety hasn’t been encountered before-for example, “GDC was in a tattered youth hostel the night before, while stomping and modifying BUG”, and for example, “taking a photo with idol Hideo Kojima on Demo Day, Later, he also worked for Sony’s second party. ” The main reason is that for the first time in 10 years, he has participated in game development as a manager.
Ruo Nan’s technical accumulation also played some roles in the animation production of “Shaped Knight”
About work, almost all the game developers who talk to me have mentioned the problem of excessive investment. Unlike Ruo Nan’s managerial identity, Zac’s approach is wild, and he has worked for five years on the “Special Team to Save the World”. But exactly onePersonally, in the end, it basically became a busy job regardless of the place and location. He thought it was a very unhealthy state:
“Fatigue and anxiety will greatly affect creativity and the future of an industry. Because the domestic game industry is mostly dependent on the Internet industry, it is the Internet that pursues the interests of the mass market and homogenizes competition. The characteristics of the industry will inevitably be 996. If you do a good job in differentiated competition and have a unique game, you can make good works without 996. “
When overtime is unavoidable, how to adjust the mentality of the team and individuals becomes an important issue. Black, the author of The Amazing Cultivation Simulator, was particularly disgusted with using overtime as a measure of workload. Although it is an ideal state to not work overtime at all, whoever works in the team will be “pulled out of the office” once the work is completed that day. After all, making games is a creative work. Only by maintaining a relaxed state can it produce excellent content. .
Zhechuan, who lives in Next Studio, also mentioned that during the development of “Chasing the Doubt”, there is no mandatory overtime. Generally, it is because the work can not be completed or for his own work, “I want to fight for another one.” “. In the long run, if you want to make a good work, you still have to experience more life: creation can get a better life, and life can also accumulate for creation. This kind of “dynamic balance” can be regarded as a kind of welfare for games and creation.
Stagnation of body mass is obvious to all
I believe many people can perceive that gamers are “more and more tired”, in part because the industry is not so easy to make money. Wanda, the team leader of “Paperman”, also added that the development of stand-alone games is also relatively slow in China, and resources in all aspects are lacking.
The fact is true. According to the “2019 China Game Industry Annual Report”, although the actual sales of mobile games accounted for 64.9% of the overall sales, they also showed a slowdown in growth rate due to changes in user demand, The difficulty of acquisition has increased, and the competitiveness of new products has weakened. In 2019, the sales of stand-alone games in China increased by 341.4% year-on-year, but even this was only 640 million yuan, accounting for about 0.27% of the entire domestic game industry.
Woody launched a survival game called “The Last Wood” on Steam last year, which has been recognized by some players. He believes that the policy pressure on making sea games is relatively small, but the changes in the market structure and the shrinking of the weight are obvious:
“Our survival skill is” good steel is used on the tip of the knife “, because the income ceiling of the game market is very clear now, you can sell a few copies, take off the platform and release, how much can you get after that Can be calculated. Therefore, it may be necessary to do it from the perspective of controlling costs, such as not to blindly expand the team, such as restraining the development scale, such as making cost trade-offs in technical details.
I understand that many developers have the kind of pursuit of perfection as an artist, but in some cases, this death is not sustainable. Some friends may see this as more utilitarian, but I think it is a kind of responsibility to the team and the player-making a finished product, even if there are many problems, it is better than half unsupportable, and finally has to give up . “
“The Last Wood”
Similar to Woody’s view, Abo also has a more sober understanding of “Daughter of Chess”: “Because PC and console games were not particularly popular in China, it is naturally impossible to encounter a cold winter.” Yes For him, the biggest obstacle is to find the right people to develop together, and then insist on finishing the game, and then choose the type you are familiar with, to minimize the number of problems that need to be solved in content production.
In response to this issue, Black also gave an interesting solution: “Either the hard core is hard to the end, or the machine is shaking to the end.” Because to a large extent, the essence of domestic independent games is simply because players give And the concern has increased, but in fact, people’s requirements for independent games are becoming more and more strict-developers on the one hand have higher requirements for the quality of the work, on the other hand, they have to deal with different segments of the players’ preferences.
However, when looking at the entire independent gaming industry, Zhechuan didn’t think it was just “domestic problems.” Because foreign independent game circles have long said “Indiepocalypse” (independence doomsday), everyone will more or less encounter market saturation and unstable financial conditions:
“In fact, the game has always been a very low success rate … Although there is still a wave of domestic dividends in the domestic Steam market, it has long since passed the age when Steam is domestically produced. Fortunately, the game itself is still young, and there is still a lot of space that no one has explored. As long as you can find these spaces and dig carefully, there is still a chance to be in the current market, especially in domesticeam market stands out. And based on our experience of developing “Sound of Suspect”, domestic players are very tolerant and supportive of truly original works. “
You can understand these charts as more and more games are released on Steam each year, and sales and income are getting lower and lower
It is not difficult to find that, while cherishing artistic ideals, it is their common view to make things “real”. In Zhechuan’s eyes, the explosions of “Taiwu Painting Volume”, “Chinese Parents” and “Posia Time” let him see the purchasing power of domestic Steam players, but there are very few explosions of the same level in 2019. It can be seen that although the domestic Steam market is indeed large enough to support some independent developers, it is not a yawning point. If you want to succeed, you still have to look at the level of the work. It is not recommended to take a shortcut to enter this market.
Nevertheless, overseas bestsellers still see some domestic games from time to time. In general, despite some setbacks, we have seen some new hope.
If a game is to succeed, it is undoubtedly very important to maintain word of mouth and handle the relationship between itself and the player. Among the producers I interviewed, there are also some cases that slowly climbed from the trough of bad reviews. When “The Last Wood” was first listed on Steam as an early access experience, there were too many BUGs that caused the evaluation to plummet and almost turned into “mostly bad reviews”. The author Woody now has a little bit of recollection in retrospect:
“In fact, we also had expectations in our hearts, and the version was not perfect. At that time, because of all kinds of reasons, I could only bite the bullet, but I didn’t expect such a large gap. After all, the feedback from the internal test before the sale was pretty good. EA, after we release it, we will keep it more and more daily. Our praises have risen from 50% to 70% in a few months, and we have also encountered various negative reviews. Some of them are really creative, some of them are “you do n’t know how to make games and listen to me”, even those who are just swearing.
There is really no good way to do this. It can only improve the quality of your game. And according to our observation, if the player is really angry to leave a bad comment, even if the response is not very helpful at the time, after all, they have already made this judgment, and they will not come back because of a few words. It’s better to spend more time to improve the game and then visit these players, you may win their recognition. “
There is definitely more than one “greeted old mother”, “The Great Cultivation Simulator” was plagued by plagiarism last year and annoyed the fans of “Circle the World”. In the most desperate moment, while maintaining the basis of strengthening the game’s own features, Black survived by “autism”. Now that the praise rate of the game has risen to 76% on Steam, it is a bit of a result:
“Autumn, hahaha. We will take seriously the questions that are raised sincerely. Players who are familiar with us should be very aware of this. Our feedback speed is almost days. For those who are not so sincere. Even with malicious content, in the beginning, they actually chose to argue, but later found that it didn’t make much sense, so they chose to close themselves.
By contrast, the situation of “Chasing the Suspicious Case” is completely different, and its evaluation is almost “all the way”, directly rising to “praise”. It may be that there are not too many word of mouth anxieties, and the producer Zhechuan was able to look at the bad reviews in a more calm and statistical way. He believes that “negative players” are mainly divided into two categories:
A group of players really don’t like your game, and point out the shortcomings very rationally, which is basically irreparable. On the contrary, it is another type of swearing, just because some points are momentarily emotional. At this time, the developer should not refute the player, but try to soothe the emotions of the player, so that he realizes the importance the team attaches to feedback, The effects of negative public opinion have the opportunity to recover after their mood is calm.
“Chasing the Doubt” is very creative based on the auditory reasoning of the player.
But sometimes it’s not wise to “give what the player wants.” For example, Abo feels that the producer needs to find out the player’s real needs from the bad reviews, and the rest is to see if there are ways to solve these problems. It is easy to ignore the advantages because of the advantages. Zach pointed out