Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1327
Over the years, games may be the least “byte” business in ByteDance, and it may also be the new business that tests the company’s “entrepreneurial spirit” after the start-up period of Toutiao: To get out of the inertia of success, in the Explore areas of expertise.
Byte’s product decisions are highly dependent on data. Test data determines which functions go live, and algorithms determine which videos a user sees. Its founder Zhang Yiming has always emphasized restraining individual preferences in products: preferences, aesthetics, and values.
When it comes to gaming, there are so many questions that A/B testing can’t answer. From producers, master planners to various types of work at the executive level, a large number of decisions need to be made by people based on experience or even intuition, and many experiences cannot be precipitated into standardized documents. It needs to be like a craft, and the master will slowly grind it with new people. Personal aesthetics happens to be the “soul” of large-scale games.
After the launch in 2018, Chaoxi Guangnian, who was in charge of the development and distribution of large and medium-sized games, felt unprecedented patience: employees had no ROI (input-output ratio) pressure for the first two years, bimonthly meetings did not require clear progress, and even the deadlines in front of them. It is also a little looser than its peers.
This is a rare tolerance in bytes, and a necessary rhythm in the game industry. In more than two years, Douyin has grown from the first line of code to a super product used by 250 million people every day, bringing in tens of billions of yuan in advertising revenue a year. But to make a mobile game, it may take so long from project establishment to launch. No one can be sure whether a game will be successful and how much revenue it will generate before it goes live.
In the past four years, Zhao Xiguang has more than 3,000 people at one time, and has teams in five cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. At the beginning of Byte’s announcement to enter the game business, some industry insiders believed that the light of day and night would bring changes to the existing pattern of the Chinese game market, but four years later, the company that achieved this change was Mihayou.
With no first-line masterpieces and limited return on investment, Chaoxi Guangyear has rapidly shrunk with byte efficiency in the past three months.
From June to early September, Chaoxi Guangnian carried out the largest organizational adjustment and project abolition since the establishment of the department. Among the 4 self-developed studios, Shanghai 101 Studio was disbanded, and only more than 40 people were retained for the representative work “Moon of the Heart of Flowers and Mountains”, which was merged into the distribution department and continued to operate; the remaining two projects: the online “DC Heroes”. : Idle League and All-Star Fighting, which has been in development for more than 3 years, have been handed over to relevant partners as a whole. Both Beijing Oasis Studio and Hangzhou Jiangnan Studio have had their projects abolished, and some staff have been transferred to Pico, Mutong and a self-developed game project in Shenzhen.
Because of the success of Douyin and Toutiao, ByteDance was once rated as the Internet company that “knows the human nature of Chinese users best”. However, in the face of the game business that requires more “human” sensibility and judgment, and has strong content attributes, the advantages of Byte’s algorithm recommendation have lost their use. This is another manifestation of “humanity”, which consists of human experience, creativity, aesthetics and values. The best computer algorithms in the world cannot count it.
Byte makes games and comes with ambition
Zhang Yiming once understood “people like games” as “seeking a sense of control”. In 2016, in an interview with Caijing magazine, the entrepreneur known for his self-discipline believed that instead of gaining the “happiness of control” from the virtual game world, it is better to replace the object of control with himself, “such as Read books, read difficult books, think about difficult problems, and work hard on business pursuits.”
The game was not something Zhang Yiming would find interesting at that time. But Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, never let his likes and dislikes hinder his business choices, nor did it affect his company’s ability to make a product understand human nature to the extreme. Toutiao and Douyin have both found ways to make users secrete more dopamine and gain easy happiness.
ByteDance’s game exploration began at the end of 2017: Today’s headlines make HTML5 mini games, Douyin has established a game content center, and the commercialization department has integrated ultra-casual games. In 2018, ByteDance officially decided to establish a game division. A person familiar with the matter said that during that time, Zhang Yiming “understood the game industry very seriously and attentively” and started playing games.
The rational and pragmatic founder sees the game’s chances at this point for good reason. According to App Growing, a mobile advertising analysis platform, in the first half of 2018, nearly 40% of games will be advertised on Toutiao. Byte has surpassed Baidu to become the second most popular game advertising channel after Tencent. This is just the beginning. Douyin’s game advertising revenue has doubled that of Toutiao by May of that year.
Game content is a natural fit for short video platforms. Watermelon Video once became the most-played platform for short videos related to “Honor of Kings” in China. In November 2018, Tencent sued Xigua Video, applying for a ban on its live broadcast of the “Honor of Kings” game content.
Since March 2018, the approval of game version numbers has been suspended, and the total revenue of the game market in the first half of the year increased by 5% compared with the same period. A person familiar with the matter said ByteDance was relatively optimistic, “thinking that it is only a temporary transitional adjustment period.” At the end of the year, the version number approval was resumed.
In mid-2018, ByteDance formed a team to be responsible for the agency and R&D of large and medium-sized games. Chaoxiguangnian is a “borrowed” name: it was originally a startup company doing efficiency applications. Its representative work is “Chaoxi Calendar”. It was acquired by Byte in 2017 and merged into its IM business. The company’s legal person is Xie Xin. So far, Qichacha’s introduction to Chaoxiguangnian has remained at “the main time management product”, but it already has a new vision: to serve 1 billion players around the world.
Zhang Yiming dares to use people he trusts to do new business across borders – even if he has no direct experience. Zhang Lidong, who was born in the newspaper advertising industry, is in charge of commercialization, and Chen Lin, the product manager of Toutiao, is in charge of education. At the beginning of 2019, Yan Shuo, the former head of the strategic investment department, also served as the head of Zhaoxi Guangnian. He took charge of the byte game business full-time a year later.
Many Bytes employees believe that Yan Shu, who joined in 2015, is a “special consulting company style” person, smart and rational, and “the etiquette on the scene when dealing with them is in place”. When meetings were dull, he would maintain the scene with a few one-liners—though “the jokes weren’t funny.”
A former employee commented that Yan Shu was “a typical old byte person”. He had listened to Professor Yan on how to design OKRs, and he said “positive and negative examples are very real”; he is simple and unassuming. Yan Shuo, a former byte person who has business dealings with Yan Shuo, also believes in “developing miracles”, “I feel that the previous successful experience can be replicated in various fields, and I feel that I am advanced, and I have established a threshold for various fields. It is disrespectful, and everything can be subverted, reconstructed, improved, and quantified.”
Yan Shu is not a gamer either. An employee of the distribution line of Chaoxiguangnian commented that Yan Shu’s “focus is relatively macro.” A R&D employee recalled that when he communicated with Yan Shu one-on-one, he had the feeling of “not getting online”: he talked about playing a very popular game at the time, but Yan Shu didn’t respond, “Looks like he has never heard of it” .
At the beginning of 2019, Yan Shurang the strategy department to design the project establishment system of each game studio. The strategy department of Chaoxiguangnian was named “Athena”, which means Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Most of the members are from investment consulting agencies and have no background in the game industry.
The business executives of Chaoxi Guangnian are all from the outside. This is the first difficulty for Byte to play games: it cannot recruit suitable managers.
Byte has an important game channel and has always been willing to give employees competitive salaries. However, Byte’s research and development capabilities in games have not been proven, and “outsiders” have no chance to become No. 1. For those game producers who already have masterpieces, they have a team that has worked together for many years and has a tacit understanding, the trust of the company’s leadership, and a good salary.
As evidenced by facts, a former Tencent senior strategist counted the flow of industry veterans: There are more than 50 middle-level managers at the level of assistant general manager of Tencent Games and above, only one of whom has worked in the past; NetEase does not have a career. The head of the department was dug up; Perfect World management “Eight King Kong” only dug up the eighth.
The two directors of Beijing Oasis Studio in the morning and evening have failed to make successful mobile game works. The first person in charge was Yu Jia, the former deputy general manager of Sina’s game division. As of Yu Jia’s departure, his representative work in Sina Games is only one elimination casual game “Cherry Maruko”. In June 2019, Wang Kuiwu, the former senior director of Perfect Diary, took over as the director. Wang Kuiwu was responsible for the research and development of various end-game products in Perfect World. A former mid-level employee of Oasis Studio, Wang Kuiwu, is very ambitious, “I want to do a big project in one breath.” As of now, Oasis Studio has not had any successful works that have been tested by the market.
According to information from Sanqi Mutual Entertainment’s reply to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s letter of concern on March 28, 2019, Chaoxi Guangnian acquired Mokun for 110 million yuan. Chaoxiguangnian established Shanghai 101 Studio on this basis. Yang Dongmai, CEO of Mokun, is in charge. When Sanqi Mutual Entertainment acquired Mokun in the early years, it spent nearly 1.4 billion yuan. In 2019, in reply to the letter of concern from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment stated that the sale of Mokun was to avoid the continued drag on the company’s performance by this subsidiary whose R&D and profitability did not meet expectations. But for the bytes that make games from scratch, Mokun is a rare team with various types of work among the acquired objects.
At the same time, NetEase abolished Pangu Studio in Hangzhou. Hu Tianlei, former director of Pangu Studio, and more than a dozen management team joined Chaoxi Guangnian to form Hangzhou Jiangnan Studio. Many industry insiders commented that Jiangnan Studio’s research and development capabilities are the best in the light of day and night. In 2020, Jiangnan Studio has set up 3 projects, and the producers of 2 of them have only served as game planners in the previous company and have not managed the complete project.
For middle-level and grass-roots employees, it is very tempting.
Like other business units, in 2019, Byte also set off a battle for people in the game field. A senior practitioner said that game planners and technicians with more than five years of work experience around him have been dug by Bytes. He also went to an interview. The interviewer “has been mentioning two things: money and traffic.” .
Even at that time, there were studios looking for a lot of people even before the project was established. The Oasis Studio Zhongtai is called the “people pool” internally because of the large number of people hoarding people. People hoard enough first, and then distribute them after the project is approved. According to a former Tencent game veteran, Tencent generally strictly controls the number of project team members to less than 20 or 30 people in the early stage of project development and when the quality of the game is still uncertain.
A former employee of Shanghai 101 Studio quit his job because he was optimistic about Byte’s platform strength. “Only big companies can make big DAU games.” A former employee of Oasis Studio ridiculed himself as an “old fritter” in the industry and did not believe that Byte Games could produce good works. The reason why he still chose to join is that the total salary package has nearly doubled compared to the past.
The wide-spreading and high-paying battle to grab people led Chaoxiguangnian to set up 5 R&D and distribution studios in 4 cities within half a year. By the end of 2020, the number of people in the morning and evening light years has reached 2,000. Many people came in with a non-compete agreement and wanted to take a nickname, which often caused headhunters and HR of other companies to not match the number.
These people gathered with enthusiasm – not necessarily the passion for games, but I believe that Chaoxi Guangnian will have “long-term patience” for making games, as Yan Shu and the heads of various studios have constantly emphasized, and they also believe that, Stay long enough at Byte, and time will reward them well enough.
The Group’s advantages in China and Taiwan, the burden of China and Taiwan in the morning and evening
When it started making games, ByteDance was already a company with a valuation of $75 billion, and its Douyin and Toutiao products were used by hundreds of millions of users every day. This company, which is famous for its algorithmic recommendation technology, tries to accelerate game development with its technological advantages.
Byte has used the “big and middle stage, small front desk” mode to quickly launch Douyin, watermelon video, volcano small video and other products. The live broadcast medium of Douyin has gradually formed a group-level large and medium-sized platform. Beginning in 2018, ByteDance emphasized the importance of Zhongtai, and three years later, the volcano engine, which was born out of the Zhongtai department, became a BU to sell byte technology and growth capabilities to the outside world.
Some of the underlying tools used in games are no different from other Internet products, and Bytes has obvious advantages in this regard. Hong Dingkun is responsible for the Byte Project middle platform under the game middle platform, and builds its own crash online log platform. Many small and medium game manufacturers do not have this ability and can only purchase third-party services. Based on Byte’s mature experience in making Internet products, the stress test before the game goes online is relatively complete.
But the premise of using this ability is: the game has to go online. Byte’s advantage in the middle and Taiwan has become empty in the game production process, but it is useless – all experience has to be accumulated from zero.
It takes time for the game’s technical middle-stage to run in with the business. A day and night plan to compare the game production “infrastructure” between NetEase and Byte, AI editor: NetEase’s editor commands are easy to use, and the edited AI can be visualized instantly and quickly tested in the game. The partial code thinking of bytes requires game planning to master the code language. “A function that can be completed in five minutes may take two or three hours to understand and configure”, and the probability of bugs is also higher.
Every link of a mature mobile game has to undergo long-term running-in of team members, and finally a mature tool chain and workflow are formed, which has become “the most precious accumulation of game companies”. “NetEase’s editor has experienced planning feedback for ten years and generations. Iteration.” He said, it can’t be copied directly in a short time.
The establishment of a game center also means that each project team cannot set up relevant functional departments by itself. An employee who participated in overseas games found that the localized middle-office responsible for translating and operating multilingual versions did not know much about games and could not accurately translate some common game terms. Another strategy game team that has been in production for a long time simply found outsourcing to complete the translation work.
Some project team employees feel that Zhongtai does not provide convenience, but instead becomes a burden: they cannot decide whether to use Zhongtai services according to the actual situation, but “can’t refuse Zhongtai, you have to use it.” “You don’t have to, it also counts your money,” said a former employee of Shanghai 101 Studio.
In addition to the middle stage of the business department, the four self-developed studios of Chaoxi Guangnian each have their own middle stage, and the cost needs to be borne by each project group. A middle-level executive of Guangnian Studio in the past morning and evening said that the proportion of his studio’s share to Zhongtai reached more than half. That is to say, if the monthly R&D cost of a project is 10 million yuan, an additional mid-stage cost of more than 5 million yuan will be allocated, which is much higher than the industry average.
“It’s not a market economy.” The aforementioned person said. He also observed that some project team members were “not very friendly” to colleagues in the middle and Taiwan, which was also related to small frictions at work. “I think they are not familiar with the business, but there is nothing to do.”
Before there was Tencent, and then there was “Yuan Shen”
At the December 2020 Bytes Plenary Session, Zhang Yiming commented on the game business: “Although there has not been much breakthrough, there has been some progress… One game published by an agency has achieved a daily income of over one million US dollars… At the same time, we also Several other games have been released, and the metrics are not very good at the moment.”
“Be patient,” he said finally.
The work with “daily income over one million dollars” is “Ragnarok RO: The Birth of a New Generation”, with a turnover of more than 2 billion in 2021. The game was developed by Junmeng Network under the authorization of Gravity of South Korea, and Zhaoxiguangnian is only the agent publisher.
Several “metrics are not very good” proxy works include “Art of War: Infinite Evolution” and “Endgame”. “End Battlefield” was launched by NetEase in 2017. It belongs to the first batch of “chicken-eating” (the same gameplay as “PUBG”) mobile games. In 2018, the number of global users reached 200 million. The mobile game PUBG Mobile gradually became quiet after its launch, and will be suspended in December 2021. In 2022, many agency works such as “Dart Man” and “Sonic at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics” will also be discontinued one after another.
The publishing department of the morning and evening light years was named “Hermes” (Greek god Hermes), and insiders used to call the employees of this department “people of Hermes”. In terms of agency business, the main competitors of Chaoxi Guangnian are: Tencent, NetEase, Perfect World, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, Bilibili, etc. The agency distribution of games is strongly dependent on the previous accumulation of companies in the industry. It can be said that the competitive advantage of the day and night is not great.
Fang Yuan (pseudonym), a former employee of the strategy department of Chaoxi Guangnian, said that the team focuses on large projects with high turnover, “but the team that connects with manufacturers knows that the first and second may be Tencent’s.” Every time I visit a manufacturer, the other party is very enthusiastic, but instead of talking about specific cooperation, they will say “we will talk about it later”. Many of the target manufacturers have signed exclusive agreements with Tencent, but they do not want to offend ByteDance, which controls Douyin, a high-traffic channel.
For the top-ranked games in the market, Tencent will naturally compete with Bytes in agency distribution. Almost all of the projects that Guangnian has been exposed to in the morning and evening in 2020 have been visited by Tencent’s business team.
Fang Yuan compared the differences between the two companies in the issuance negotiations: the head of Tencent’s business has a budget of tens of millions of yuan for a single project, and he will give a letter of intent for investment on the spot when he encounters a project with good conditions. The agency products of Guangnian in the morning and evening all require strict decision-making. Yan Shu has extreme data thinking, and he will ask “how to calculate ROI” when the game is launched and released. When he does not have enough game investment experience, he pays more attention to data for certainty. Many people from the strategic department of Guangnian in the past day and night described Yan Sheng as a conservative investment style in the early stage, and the decision-making cycle may be extended to several months.
A former Byte employee feels that Chaoxi Guangnian is a rare business unit of Byte that “doesn’t have the spirit of the group”: in other business areas, even if Byte is a latecomer, it has the ability to “subvert the industry or become the first.” pursuit”. And because of his business contacts in the morning and evening, most of the employees of Guangnian have long accepted the agency game and cannot compete with Tencent. “Byte is not worthy to compete with Tencent in the game sector.” A former employee of the strategy department (Athena) of Chaoxi Guangnian said bluntly. His department leaders are also clear that “it’s not hard enough to find a good product”.
Zhao Xiguangnian yearns for S-class products, such as “Glory of the King” and “Tianya Mingyue Knife”, but what he can actually access cannot reach this level, “It is impossible for a really good manufacturer to give a product with little experience, (even) it may be A temporary distribution team.” Fang Yuan said.
When visiting game makers a few times, the other party asked very directly: “Why did the income of the works you represent in the past not be satisfactory?” They could only answer: “It was just an attempt to run through the team.”
For game manufacturers, the biggest attraction of ByteDance is Douyin, the largest game purchase platform in China. But Guangnian’s business team can’t control Douyin’s resources, and the only condition they can offer is: after cooperation, the traffic will be settled at the internal price. A person familiar with the matter pointed out that the internal price is similar to the external price of regular customers.
The agency operation is not very smooth, and the self-developed game has caught up with the great changes in the industry.
In September 2020, “Yuan Shen” was launched. One practitioner believes that this makes all mobile games obsolete: “Genshin Impact is far too high a degree of engineering completion, far beyond what other companies in China can do.”
Before that, no company in China had done a game like Mihayou: it took 4 years, organized more than 400 R&D personnel, and spent 700 million yuan to invest in a game and make it. ——This is an investment in a major overseas console production game or a Hollywood movie.
Even harder than shelling out money is effectively managing a large team for such a complex product that requires creativity. After the explosion of “Genshin Impact”, it is even more difficult to make a recognized good game, and the market’s requirements for art quality and plot performance have reached an unprecedented height.
Figure: Genshin Impact Game Screen
Liu Wei, the founder of Mihayou, is a two-dimensional enthusiast and developed a game engine while he was studying. After graduation, Liu Wei and two students from Jiaotong University founded Mihayou, making two-dimensional style games all the way, and finally accumulated the financial capital and experience capital for the development of “Yuan Shen”.
A company cannot calculate ROI based on love, but users fully perceive the enthusiasm of the “Genshin Impact” team. According to data analysis firm Sensor Tower, Genshin Impact also generated nearly $400 million in global revenue in the first two months of its launch — and that’s not even counting the money spent by domestic Android users. This momentum has not diminished. Two years later, the monthly revenue of “Genshin Impact” in the global market is still close to 200 million US dollars. It may be the most profitable Chinese game other than “Honor of Kings”.
“Yuan Shen” subtly affects the mentality of the employees of Chaoxi Guangnian: on the other hand, when looking at his own “Code Name: Arrival”, a sense of gap is inevitable in the heart.
“Codename: Arrival” (now named “Planet: Reboot”) is one of the most important projects currently under research by Guangnian Chaoxiguangnian, and is positioned as a shooting online game with the theme of the end of the world. An employee of the project said that the sci-fi and mecha elements of “Codename: Arrival” in the R&D and testing phase were relatively pure, but later they were incorporated into various systems such as firearms, guilds, and manors, which are beneficial to making money, emphasizing equipment upgrades. A former employee commented that the kryptonite dots designed in “Codename: Arrival” give people a “tight feeling of suffocation”. ——This is the mainstream of the industry: gameplay is more important than content, revenue is more than gameplay.
There are also former employees who believe that “Codename: Arrival” is not excellent in terms of content: the sci-fi setting is shallow and vague, “until you leave, you don’t know whether the planet in the game is the earth or not.” The former employee had worked on a sci-fi game at another company, and the company’s game worldview “would describe the state of society and human thought like a novel.” In the morning and evening, due to the imperfect settings in the early stage, during the development period, the employees were still discussing the basic details of the game settings: how exactly did the characters “teleport” from one point to another? Some people propose to take a helicopter, and some people throw out academic papers, suggesting that the design be “quantum decomposition”.
Mihayou is not the only competitor “turned out”. A number of Shanghai game studios, such as Lilith, Yingjiao and Folding Paper, are also in the subdivisions that were considered too small by Tencent and NetEase, and have made achievements that can compete with big manufacturers: Yingjiao’s masterpiece “Tomorrow’s Ark” is launched in 2019. In the first month, the turnover was 593 million, making it the only non-Tencent and NetEase product in the top ten best-selling list at that time.
According to the 2020 mobile game revenue list released by Sensor Tower, Lilith’s “Awakening of Nations” released that year ranked third in mobile game revenue, second only to “Peace Elite” and “Honor of Kings”. In 2021, the popularity of these companies will lead to an overall increase in the salary level of game talents in Shanghai and Hangzhou. The salary offered by Mihayou’s core positions is not inferior to that of several big Internet companies, and the trend of the talent market has become “there is rice to choose rice”.
It is even more difficult to dig the best talents without a profitable day and night.
From buying a team to hiring an expert, a generous remedy
“In the first few years of the game, our annual OKR goal was not revenue, not profit, not DAU, but the increase in talent density.” In July 2021, Yan Shu said in a speech on the seventh anniversary of Mutong’s establishment .
This year, Chaoxi Guangnian acquired Mutong for over US$4 billion to increase the density of talents. Mu Tong’s masterpiece “Endless Showdown” is known as the “Southeast Asian National MOBA”. According to Sensor Tower’s statistics in 2021, among Chinese mobile games going overseas to Southeast Asia, “Endless Showdown” has always ranked first in downloads and revenue five years after its launch.
Many industry insiders believe that the acquisition premium is high. One veteran practitioner sees a fair price of up to $3 billion. Mu Tong was scrambled by Byte, Tencent, NetEase and other companies, and finally won by Byte. At that time, there was a saying in the game war investment circle: If the Mutong business meets the betting standards, Byte will actually pay more than $5 billion in cash and options.
At the same time as the acquisition of Mutong, a MOBA project of Shanghai 101 Studio was axed. According to people familiar with the matter, this game has been developed for five or six years, and “it is still the Korean style of painting six years ago.” Part of the reason for the game’s delay in launching is that former 101 studio head Yang Dongmai insisted that the product needed to be polished, the person familiar with the matter said. Another project of the studio, “All-Star Fight” authorized by SNK such as “The King of Fighters”, has also gone from the Mokun era to the byte era.
Byte’s idea of making games has changed from “hoarding people” to build a team by itself to a mature team that directly buys its own head products.
At the beginning of 2021, 101 Studio completed a major adjustment: Yang Dongmai stepped down as the head of the studio, the original Wushuang team was “upgraded” to Wushuang Studio, and then “One Piece: Blood Route” was launched to become the self-built studio of Chaoxi Guangnian, and the data is the best. domestic self-developed products. The commercial department is merged into the business department, and no longer has the authority to independently connect with IP cooperation.
At the beginning of 2021, 101 Studio welcomed a new head, Liu Jun (Fisher), who had worked at Ubisoft Shanghai for more than ten years. Ubisoft Shanghai was once the largest game studio in China, and participated in the development of a number of large-scale games in the “Splinter Cell” and “Ghost Recon” series. Liu Jun was the first to test and then served as a producer. The first reaction of a person in the game industry after learning of this personnel arrangement was surprise. In his opinion, no matter how strong the original management ability is, the experience of managing single-player games is difficult to replicate on mobile game projects.
After Liu Jun joined the team, he put the project management experience of foreign companies in developing stand-alone games into the team, and paid more attention to the inspection of human efficiency. He set up a project management center (PMO) in Zhongtai and implemented the “work hours” system. The studio began to look like a factory, according to multiple former employees. When everyone has to fill in the work on Jira, a management software commonly used in the game industry, planners often have unquantifiable time such as meetings and discussions, communication progress, etc., and they have to convert the numbers.
“The game industry rarely evaluates this way, and we are not purely manual labor, and a lot of (work output) can’t be measured in terms of time,” said a former employee.
R&D has also been transformed into agile development, and planners at the team leader and above are required to take agile project management course training. Even at the busiest version node of the project, they will be taken to the class. Management “is very persistent in breaking down each job into two-week units to make a nice-looking report.” Agile development is a commonly used software development method, which splits a large task into multiple consecutive developments. However, for some projects, the new version is promoted on a monthly basis, and it is difficult for the workflow to be integrated in the short time required by Liu Jun, and it can only be forcibly divided into multiple two weeks to meet the requirements of the superior.
What bothers employees the most is repetitive work orders. To make a relatively large new feature, it takes two months from program development to testing, and the project management personnel will divide it into four parts of work, “pretend to be completed once every two weeks”, and each time it has to involve more than a dozen The work order for the type of work is opened again, and multiple work orders are piled up, so that the upstream work type does not know which one to transfer to the downstream, nor which one to take for final acceptance.
Liu Jun has only one week to switch all projects to Jira for project management. At this time, Jira has not been able to do secondary development according to the needs of the project team. A former employee of 101 Studio said that their R&D staff still use Excel for circulation, not Jira. In order to cope with the superiors, the project managers have fully covered the work of the work order, and a lot of energy is used to convert the records of the project team in Excel into Jira work orders, and maintain two kinds of tables at the same time. .
In game development, there are many problems that cannot be solved by tools and systems. When managers are required to lead various types of work to cooperate in an efficient and orderly manner, decision makers are always absent. Although the studio attaches great importance to project management, no one has clearly defined the boundaries of powers and responsibilities between project management and the project team, and no one has clearly defined what kind of cooperative relationship they should have. A former employee of Studio 101 felt that the project management of her group “doesn’t want to do anything”, so she urged the progress of the group members, “as if I were leading the team”. A school recruiting project manager has his difficulties: “It is said that bytes do not talk about title, but I feel fearful when communicating with high-ranking people, and it is difficult to push them.”
R&D and distribution are more often disputed, and each feels it is the other’s problem. One of the two teams is in Shanghai and the other is in Shenzhen. There are many inconclusive questions in the communication group: Is the product quality good? Who is the reason for the lack of new users? How to solve the high purchase price? “A person with a higher perspective is needed to coordinate, but it feels like there is no such person.” said a former employee of the project team who had worked with the distribution department.
The organizational structure of large companies naturally makes the interests of various types of work inconsistent. The market and user growth on the distribution side have their own superiors, and the performance cannot be independent of the performance of the project. “You have nothing to do with them,” said the former employee. To solve this problem, we can only rely on the decision-making level of the business department and even the group to personally drive the reform.
In the Beijing Oasis Studio, the absence of managers is embodied in the “no decision” of various decisions. The project art of the studio’s internal code name P4 was originally a realistic style. Later, a former NetEase art expert was recruited, and the style of painting turned into a two-dimensional style of “sakura scattered” style.
A former P4 employee recalled that he was “sealed in the office” every day and held meetings from morning to night. “Everyone speaks very academically and always asks ‘why do this, is it right to do it'”, one thing Often two or three weeks of discussions have no results. In October 2021, the P4 project was cut. The employee is not surprised, and is very sure that this has nothing to do with the tentative release of the 2021 version number, “the completion is far from being submitted for review.” The theme and category of P4 and Hangzhou Studio’s “Codename: Arrival” are highly similar, and the project being cut off is like a costly A/B test that finally came out.
In the first half of 2021, the number of people leaving Oasis Studio increased. A former engineer said: “Two years of game development is a hurdle, and people with discernment have already judged whether the project can succeed. If it can’t continue to improve after two years, it will enter garbage time.” He also mentioned that “byte efficiency is not good.” Said,” the technicians were urged to progress very hard: the project managers developed robots, which were automatically announced to the project team every day, how many bugs each program accumulated, and how long it stopped on the bug.
Morning and evening light years began to get used to “sunset”
In the summer of 2021, Chaoxiguangnian convened hundreds of school recruiters to hold a “dream camp”. A participant specially emphasized that the hotel with private rooms “has a lot of very large conference rooms, and it is good to live in”, he sincerely sighed. In addition to training, they can also get together to play arcade games and dress up as various two-dimensional characters. For these young people, the biggest attraction is not “games”, but “bytes”.
Another school recruiter in the Beijing area in the morning and evening captured several key pieces of information during an interview: the Beijing studio is self-organized, and the project is a self-developed serious game. “It sounds very core.” She judged that this must be good chance. Her fondest memories are of minigames in the fall of 2021—a customary form of training in the gaming industry—where new employees teamed up on their own to make a small game demo in a few weeks. She happily finished the first game in her life, and when she was about to officially join the job, she was suddenly told that the project had been cut.
In the light of dawn and dusk, the end of the project has an elegant name: “sunset”.
Byte self-developed games have begun to seriously calculate ROI. From June to August 2022, Chaoxi Guangnian carried out the largest abolition of its self-research project since its establishment. On June 16, the employees of Shanghai Studio 101 felt like they were going through a remarkably normal workday, unaware of what was going to happen next to them.
A planner was discussing the upcoming launch plan with his colleagues, only to find that his colleagues were discussing a rumor: the project may be over. Immediately afterwards, the headhunters who knew each other began to post on the Moments, saying “Do you want Studio 101?”. He didn’t believe it, thinking “it should just be layoffs”. Half an hour later, he was pulled into an online meeting, and the team leader told him directly: the studio is gone. An artist worked as usual until the evening, and sent the finished special effects files to the group, but no one replied. At that time, the studio was still working from home, and when the teams announced the cancellation of the studio, they missed him.
The planner once believed that his “DC Heroes: Idle League” would become the benchmark for 101 Studios. This card game is licensed from Warner Bros. Superman, Batman and other superheroes. At the end of 2021, when the game was tested in the Southeast Asian market, the data was not good, but the team quickly adjusted the more commercialized gameplay. It will be officially launched in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan markets in April 2022, and all data are up to the standard.
The security comes from the internal contrast, they are the ones with the best momentum in the whole studio. In the first two bimonthly meetings in 2022, he saw that the other two projects did not perform well: the retained data of “Moon of Flowers and Mountains” dropped significantly, and more than a dozen versions of “All-Star Fight” had not yet been launched. “They’re not very good, we’ll be fine,” he thought darkly.
Another employee of the “DC Heroes: Idle League” project team saw the change earlier. At the end of 2021, the game will be launched in Southeast Asia, and the project team only regards it as product debugging. After all, it is believed internally that “there are few cards in Southeast Asia that can make money, let alone support the team.”
In early 2022, the project was slashed to its R&D budget. In March, some members heard the news of possible layoffs in the project. He speculated that the decision might be based on data from Southeast Asia, but “no one has explicitly told that that performance will affect the project’s decision to stay.” For the first time, the management of Chaoxiguangnian clearly communicated to the project team the requirement of “going online as soon as possible and making money as soon as possible”.
In order to prove that the product can be profitable as soon as possible, the “DC Heroes: Idle Alliance” project team drastically changed the numerical structure to make money quickly: all the equipment and experience that were not intended to be sold in large quantities were sold; Cheaper to increase sales. The aforementioned employee said helplessly: “Before, I thought Byte was not so anxious. But then we got the information that we must make a profit quickly, otherwise we will cut it.”
In April of this year, “DC Heroes: Idle League” was launched in more overseas regions, and the revenue reached the standard, and the IP licensor Warner also expressed its approval. By the time the studio disbanded in June, “not only did we feel it was abrupt, Warners should feel it too”.
On the day when 101 Studio was disbanded, an employee with four or five years of work experience received five or six headhunting calls and felt an anxious atmosphere of “if you don’t submit your resume, you will be preempted by others”. Employees with two or three years of work experience began to look at opportunities and quickly found that their resumes were difficult to pass because more senior people were competing with them for the same position. Some school recruiters have the right to play games at home during the summer vacation. They don’t yet understand what the job market will be like after this “graduation”.
Liu Jun has never come forward – his LinkedIn page recently added a new resume: the head of the Pico game development studio.
Other studios are also “sunset”. The Hangzhou studio, codenamed “L”, has been in development for more than a year, and was disbanded within two months of its launch. At the same time, the P5 project of Beijing Oasis Studio was disbanded. A former employee pointed out that the game, which has been in development for more than three years, “revenue expectations are very disproportionate to costs.”
From July 2021 to April 2022, the version number will be suspended again. The self-research project “Crystal Nucleus” of Chaoxi Guangnian received the edition number in July. However, some signed products on the distribution side could not be launched until the contract was terminated. Subsequent signing plans have also been put on hold and postponed.
The cost of buying games is getting higher and higher, but the efficiency is decreasing. According to the statistics of DataEye, a digital content marketing service platform, the revenue earned by Sanqi Interactive Entertainment for every 1 yuan of Internet traffic fees paid will drop from 2.39 yuan in 2018 to 1.85 yuan in 2021. In the first half of 2022, Douyin added 6.65 million sets of game creatives, 95% of which were used for less than 10 days and were replaced because they could not attract users.
The trend of game promotion and release of returning content is becoming more and more obvious. Zhao Xiguangnian has made related attempts: In April 2021, “One Piece: Hot Blood Route” used the Douyin “game publisher” plan to rely on content creators for publicity, not on purchases. According to Qimai data, the game ranked in the top three on the iOS game free list in the first week of its launch. A person familiar with the matter said that the project has obtained top resources “far beyond the game (profitability) ceiling” in Douyin, which is more than when promoting “囧 Mom”. This means that the game returns are under enormous pressure. It is even more unknown whether projects without the blessing of well-known IPs can reuse this method. And game companies with excellent content are more and more inclined to develop their own games and advertise on Douyin, Station B, and TapTap, the game community.
For many years, the biggest expense of most Chinese game companies was not game production. They combine popular gameplay and popular IP, quickly launch the game, test player feedback, and then select the best performers for further refined operations. Most of the money is spent on advertising and channel operations, not the content itself. Business itself is a numbers game, everything can be calculated.
ByteDance did not catch up with the good time when the Internet company made games, but gamers waited for a better time.
This article is reprinted from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1327
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