Active selection of camp
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Western Entertainment” (ID: EW-Entertainment) .
Writer: EW Media | Intermediary Jiang (Game | E-sports | Pan TMT)
Review: Yan Wei
Previously, foreign media reported that “Cloud-first” game studio Mainframe Industries was led by Andreessen Horowitz with US $ 8.1 million. Among them, fist games, Maki.vc, Play Ventures, Sisu Game Ventures and Crowberry Capital followed in this round. cast.
Investors participating in this round of Mainframe Industries are mostly investment funds that focus on TMT and the game industry, and only fist games are game companies.
Mainframe Industries is a story-telling company in the field of cloud games, and the relationship between Fist Games and Tencent makes this follow-up investment more story-telling.
By observing the positional relationship between Mainframe Industries, Fist Games and Tencent, you can see that this time the fist game and investment reflect the awareness of the European and American cloud game R & D team to actively approach the Chinese 5G market, while It also indirectly shows that Tencent’s strategic thinking of pursuing internal R & D, external cooperation and overseas business is gradually being implemented.
Relevant in the past
The man chasing the tuyere
Mainframe Industries is a game studio from Northern Europe. It includes CCP Games (the developer of “Star Wars Eve”), Remedy (the developer of “Mind Killer” and “Control”) and Next Games (“The Walking Dead: We The developer of “World”, co-founded by developers in related studios, and the core business is the development of related cloud games.
The CEO and CTO of Mainframe Industries are Thor Gunnarsson and Kjartan Pierre Emilsson. The two founded Solfar Studios together in 2014 and received an angel round investment of 2.1 million euros in 2016, of which Shanda was the lead investor. The role appears.
Since 2014, when Facebook acquired Oculus, countless VR startups have sprung up. In 2016, VR products officially entered an explosive growth phase with the operation of first-tier manufacturers such as Oculus, HTC, and Sony.
At that time, Thor Gunnarsson and Kjartan Pierre Emilsson tried to enter the VR field to expand space. Kjartan Pierre Emilsson gave up the position of chief game designer of CCP Games for this reason. Previously, star products such as “Eve of Star Wars” came from His hand.
For Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, the experience of creating Solfar Studios was not as bright as the CCP period. Although he developed a work such as “Everest VR”, it did not exceed the height of “Eve of Star Wars”.
With the rapid decline of the entire VR industry after entering 2017, the cliff-like decline made him and Thor Gunnarsson’s entrepreneurship end in failure.
After regrouping, Thor Gunnarsson and Kjartan Pierre Emilsson started their second venture and set their goals in cloud games.
In April 2019, the two founded Mainframe Industries.
Different from the previous entrepreneurial leader Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, the second entrepreneurial leader is Thor Gunnarsson, compared to the obvious geek spirit in Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, Thor Gunnarsson focuses more on the market and business operations. In Solfar Studios’ system, Thor Gunnarsson is in charge of business matters as co-founder.
If the last venture was based on Kjartan Pierre Emilsson ’s instinctive response to technological innovation, this time targeting the cloud game is more of Thor Gunnarsson ’s thinking about the current game market reform.
On the one hand, after entering 2019, technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Sony have added cloud games. Compared with the previous VR concept, this time the cloud game concept will radiate a larger area. Despite the existing users of the game at this stage, with the deepening of the 5G concept, the incremental momentum of the single cloud game itself has gradually emerged.
On the other hand, Thor Gunnarsson believes that the value chain of cloud games will be composed of cloud computing providers, telecom operators, large commercial chip manufacturers, cloud game developers (development teams), and cloud game platforms. All of them need heavy assets or top technology to participate in it. There will not be the kind of small and medium-sized teams in VR at that time, which will eventually collapse the entire industry.
In addition, Thor Gunnarsson is full of confidence in Kjartan Pierre Emilsson in game research and development. The previous achievements at CCP Games are obvious to the industry. If the track is placed on a cloud game, it will maximize the use of Mainframe Industries. R & D strength.
It can be seen that Thor Gunnarsson and Kjartan Pierre Emilsson ’s entrepreneurial trajectory has an obvious “chasing the wind” characteristic. When VR first emerged in 2014, the two founded Solfar Studios and when the VR bubble was most inflated He got angel round of financing, and then withdrew because of the industry slump.
In the second venture, cloud gaming also just started to establish a company, and then when China ’s 5G “new infrastructure” accelerated, it received investment from a wholly-owned Chinese company.
Senior “China Connect” in the game circle
There are two development modes in front of Thor Gunnarsson and Kjartan Pierre Emilsson: one is a host-like game mode based on the X86 structure; the other is a mobile-like game mode based on the ARM structure. The former is the mainstream in the European, American and Japanese markets, while the latter dominates the Chinese market.
As “China Connect” Kjartan Pierre Emilsson chose the latter as the main route and the former as the secondary route. At CCP Games, Kjartan Pierre Emilsson is not only the chief designer of the company, but also served as the general manager of Asia from 2006 to 2010. The office was then in Shanghai.
The main tasks of the CCP Shanghai team at that time were three: 1. Provide operation support for the Chinese market for the end game of “Star Wars Eve”; 2. Provide some customer service for the English game server operated by CCP; Game products for the world.
In the five years in China, Kjartan Pierre Emilsson just witnessed the great change of Chinese games from agency overseas games to self-development, and also met Ma Xiaoyi, who is currently a senior vice president of Tencent Group. At that time, Ma Xiaoyi was the general manager of Guangtong’s online game business department, and the project he represented was his “Eve of Star Wars”.
After Ma Xiaoyi brought “Eve of Star Wars” to China, he left Guangtong, where he worked, and joined Tencent in 2007. The position is Vice President of Tencent Games, responsible for the development and operation of the online game market. Soon after entering Tencent, Ma Xiaoyi and Ren Yuxin teamed up to carry out drastic reforms in Tencent games. One of the key battles is to determine the strategy of playing while practicing, that is, agents and self-research go hand in hand.
Then, the outside world witnessed Tencent’s performance in the game, and invested in this fist game with Mainframe Industries in 2008, and obtained the “League of Legends” mainland China agency right. This investment was also hailed as “the best in history” by Ma Huateng.
14 years ago, Ma Xiaoyi was also an agent of Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, and now indirectly became one of Kjartan Pierre Emilsson ’s followers. The change in position between the two highlights the explosive growth of the Chinese game market.
Although Kjartan Pierre Emilsson is the world ’s top game producer, Mainframe Industries still has to choose the subdivision of cloud games cautiously in view of the various “waterloos” appearing after the solo top game producers leave the original platform Road. The most typical one is Hideo Kojima, who left Konami’s “Death Stranding” because it was too individualistic, which eventually polarized the word of mouth and did not achieve the expected commercial return.
So with Thor Gunnarsson ’s business sense, Kjartan Pierre Emilsson did not blindly reject the Chinese game market with krypton gold mobile games as the main business model. Chinese connections, etc.
The more realistic situation before the two is that China ’s 5G construction is faster than in Europe and the United States. The ultimate popularity of cloud gaming is inseparable from the 5G networkInfrastructure support, if you choose the model with X86 as the main body, it will mean a longer market return cycle and more uncertain factors, and choose the ARM development model, as long as the version number problem is solved, you can directly smooth the product Connect to the Chinese market.
As a result, it can be seen that Mainframe Industries members from CCP Games, Remedy, and Next Games all have varying degrees of online and mobile game development backgrounds, and their style is not biased towards the current console games in the European and American cloud games As the core development idea, in view of the achievements of SUPERCELL, who also has the background of the Nordic team, Mainframe Industries’ focus on online games is more in line with the taste of the Chinese market.
The tandem effect of fist games
The main body of the follow-up investment is not Tencent, but a fist game. The number of books paid for this shot of the fist game is estimated to be not high. According to the information published by Mainframe Industries, Andreessen Horowitz, as the lead investor, invested $ 8.1 million.
But the tandem value of a fist game is worth investigating.
Although the fist game has been wholly owned by Tencent, it maintains a high degree of autonomy within the Tencent system.
However, after more than ten years of contact and cooperation between the two sides, Fist Games has already gained a sufficient understanding of the Chinese market. With the growth of Tencent Games ’overseas business, Fist Games also recognizes what business can be brought back by the Chinese market Increment.
You can see a clear statement in Tencent’s 2019 Q4 financial report. Internal research and development, external cooperation and overseas business are listed as the “troika” driving the development of the game business. As the leader of the Chinese game market, Tencent is seeking greater linkage between the domestic and foreign markets.
The fist game at this intersection is one of the few European and American game companies that has penetrated the Chinese market. It is well understood that two fist games with different market operating mechanisms will not miss this opportunity for development.
At the critical moment when the “new infrastructure” with a huge investment of 34 trillion yuan was pressed, the fist game decisively shot and followed Mainframe Industries.
Thor Gunnarsson and Kjartan Pierre Emilsson are well aware of their situation: cloud games as an emerging game track, there is no native cloud game works in the world. At this stage, all existing games are transplanted. It requires that those who focus on the development of native cloud games either rely on customers constantly, such as game giants such as Blizzard and Microsoft waving cheques at the door to invite them to join, or they can only lobby some professional funds. To a certain extent, it is difficult to obtain in the short term Favored by game companies.
At the moment, Thor Gunnarsson and Kjartan Pierre Emilsson encountered the second situation, only a professional game company in the investment list.
However, given the fact that Fist Games owns wholly-owned shares of Tencent and the business lines are actively close to the Chinese market, Thor Gunnarsson will still save a lot of communication costs with Chinese companies in future business lobbying.
For fist games, Mainframe Industries ’native cloud gaming business can broaden its layout on the cloud gaming track, thereby further enriching its research and development capabilities.
At the moment when the business lines of fist games are actively close to the Chinese market and the Tencent system, Mainframe Industries can be used as an output case for the European and American game development teams for the Chinese cloud game market. After all, the big selling point of cloud games at this stage is to get rid of The hardware terminal is restrained, and at the same time, the visual expression is higher than the current highest level of mobile games to attract users.
In this respect, people such as Kjartan Pierre Emilsson who have mastered 3A masterpieces are an absolute guarantee, which is also a height that most domestic game development teams cannot reach.
Conclusion
Technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA mostly start from the perspective of building a cloud gaming platform, while game companies such as Blizzard, Ubisoft, and EA, which are good at research and development, mostly port games to the cloud, and there is no specific development. Cloud game plan released.
In contrast, domestic cloud games already have plans to develop native cloud games. Fist Games fully understands the Chinese game market through years of integration with Tencent ’s business, knowing that cloud games will land quickly with the help of 5G. Just when other game companies are still hesitating about cloud games, the fist game decisively shot before grabbing a crowd of European and American counterparts.
From the perspective of the shot form, this move of the fist game has a typical “Tencent style” style: For the circuits that are unfamiliar but related to their core business, first invest in it as a small shareholder Study, if the business of the invested team develops smoothly, then consider further expanding the investment, or even directly enter the track.