Today, expectations of games are changing. As patience and attention fade away, and time is broken into pieces, the era of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) is a thing of the past.
The cost of misjudging the times is enormous. When Perfect World realizes all this, it is difficult for the big ship to turn around - not only does it mean that hundreds of millions of funds have been thrown in, but also that thousands of teams may be laid off, and it also means that all the love and expectations that once supported people have come to naught.
It's not just a perfect world, it's a tough time for every company that makes the wrong choice.
Text | Wang Xiao
Edit | Yi Fangxing
Operations | killer whale
The most unexpected thing
Unlike the long game development cycle, optimizations come quickly, efficiently, and even surprisingly.
Zheng Haiyang's mobile phone vibrated several times in succession, and his colleagues sent several messages, looking a little excited, saying that something big had happened in the company, "You will never think of it, guess." Zheng Haiyang didn't think about it, and jokingly replied: "The project has stopped? "It's the least likely thing he'll ever think will happen.
But unexpectedly, the most unexpected thing happened, and the "Perfect New World" project team he was in was really gone.
"Perfect New World" is a terminal game (client game) born based on the "Perfect World" IP upgrade. In 2005, Perfect World at that time, still known as Perfect Space, launched the "Perfect World" terminal game, which became an instant hit when it was launched, and Perfect Space became popular and became the first echelon game manufacturer in the terminal game era. And "Perfect New World" is pinning on the company's new explosive expectations.
▲ "Perfect New World". Picture / Screenshot
At that time, Zheng Haiyang was not worried at all, Perfect World was carried out according to the project system, and a game was an independent studio. The company is made up of studios, so as long as the project you work on is safe, you don't have to worry about being optimized. For Zheng Haiyang, "Perfect World's "Perfect New World" must be safe."
But the problem is that often people think it's safe, they just think so.
Li Qi has been working at Perfect World for more than six years, and he has a hunch a little earlier. In April this year, Perfect World released its financial report for the first quarter of 2024, and Li Qi was shocked when he opened it, and the financial report showed that the net profit loss was nearly 30 million. This is the first time he has seen a negative value in the company's financial report, and a voice immediately sounded in his heart, "It is estimated that there will be a big wave."
Sure enough, there was a wave of optimization at the end of last year, and after the Spring Festival came back, there was another wave. By the second quarter, it was optimized directly on a month-to-month basis, and the scale was getting bigger and bigger.
As for the employees who are waiting for the ruling, they can only pay attention everywhere and find clues. The most obvious change is that the elevator is no longer crowded. In the morning rush hour, the eight elevators in the company building will be lined up, and the door is crowded with people, in order to maintain order, a fence should be erected outside the elevator, and there is even a special person to command, "After squeezing the subway into the company, I didn't expect to squeeze the elevator." ”
In order to avoid the morning rush hour, Li Qi deliberately went to work an hour early. But since the beginning of this month, the number of people at the elevator door has been decreasing rapidly, especially in the past few days, "not crowded at all".
There is a classic scene in suspense movies, waking up the next day and finding that the people around him have suddenly disappeared. This scene also happened in real life, Li Qi always found that when he came to work the next day, a few workstations were empty, at first a few workstations were empty, and later, the scope became larger and larger, and the whole floor was empty.
Excluding the canteen, Perfect World has a total of three buildings, and now, the two buildings are almost empty, and only Block A still has employees. The company's remaining projects may be counted on one hand, and "it is difficult to be called a big factory".
The most vivid performance is in the cafeteria. Li Qi once had a meal, and saw several female colleagues just walking out of the restaurant on the third floor after dinner, one of the female colleagues was holding a cardboard box, stuffed with documents, materials and other office supplies, and a small pot of green plants overflowed from the gap in the box. The female colleague waved goodbye to her colleague and walked straight out of the company, "just like in a movie."
▲ Picture / Visual China
The atmosphere in the office seems to have become a little tense, and the people around me seem to be more prone to tantrums, and people will choke each other at the end of the three days. In the most intense time, female colleagues and department leaders quarreled in public, and female colleagues even pointed their fingers at the leader directly, "swearing". Li Qi went up to persuade him, it turned out that the female colleague was about to graduate from the company, and "there is no need to endure the anger I endured before."
Li Qi once asked his colleagues in the personnel department about the optimization of the quota in his department, and the personnel colleagues told him that his project team was fine and would not be optimized. And Li Qi's department performance is not bad, so he is relieved. But one morning, when Li Qi first arrived at the company, he found that the workstation near him was empty, and he asked his colleagues to learn that "it has also been optimized".
This time is different from other optimizations, this time on a larger scale. Zhao Suyuan has worked in Perfect World for more than three years, and left in July last year, but he is still in the company's second-hand exchange group. Due to the system, Zhao Suyuan, the company's internal communication software, has not quit, and he can also view the posts of his colleagues in real time.
Beginning in March, he found that the second-hand group had become very active again, and his colleagues were reselling furniture such as sit-stand desks, but he was not impressed at that time, "I guess someone has graduated again."
But when he opened the internal communication software, he found that this time there was something different. Internal communication software has never been so active, and with a casual swipe, several new posts will pop up, and they all seem to be playing dumb riddles, some people use metaphors, "queue XX, it's finally me"; There are also people who are anxious and dare not say it clearly, "playing dumb riddles one by one, and they are anxious to death."
"It's the biggest optimization in the perfect way." He inquired about his colleagues who were still on the job, and the total number of people exceeded 1,000, and some R&D departments directly reduced the number of hundreds of people, and the original 150 people in the middle office are now only a few dozen people.
There was a foreshadowing
When a huge ship was rapidly sinking, the people standing on the giant ship looked back carefully and realized that everything had been foreshadowed.
In 2018, Zheng Haiyang came to Beijing from Shanghai to develop, and his main area is the level planning of combat games. It was not easy for him to find a satisfying job in Beijing, where most of the games were casual games. Last year, Zheng Haiyang resigned from his previous company and faced the pain of finding a job again.
I opened the recruitment software, and even turned several pages of casual games, and finally swiped the recruitment of the "Perfect New World" project.
The stability of the project is the main factor Zheng Haiyang considers when looking for a job, and the project he was in charge of when he first came to Beijing was halfway through, the company's capital chain was broken, the project was gone, the job was lost, and the social security payment was almost cut off from that time. When interviewing for the project of "Perfect New World", he chatted with the producer about this experience, and the producer asked him a ticket, "Even if I am fired, the project will not stop."
The project of "Perfect New World" is indeed stable. The company regularly rates the project, and allocates different levels of financial and personnel support according to the rating, and each time it is rated, Perfect New World is rated A.
For Perfect World, the terminal game "Perfect World" almost helped Perfect World rush into the NASDAQ, and for this flagship IP that has been repeatedly verified by the market, Chi Yufeng (founder of Perfect World) is obviously unwilling to give up. In 2019, "Perfect New World" was successfully established within the company, and in 2021, at the strategic conference, the project was officially unveiled. And now, it is still being researched, "it is estimated that there must be hundreds of millions".
Before the project was abruptly stopped, Zheng Haiyang had always felt that the project was stable, but in fact, he did not catch up with the "good times" that belonged to the perfect world.
Li Qi joined Perfect World very early. For Li Qi at that time, the R&D position of Perfect World was his most ideal offer. He remembers that when he was in high school, Shui Mu Nianhua released the song of the same name "Perfect World" of Perfect World, the lyrics were enthusiastic, and people were excited to listen to it.
When I first started working, Perfect World was still in the east of Datun Road, and every time I took the subway line 15 to work, when I arrived at the station, I could see the eye-catching bright red logo on the building through the subway window.
▲ Picture / Visual China
During that time, what Li Qi looked forward to most was having dinner with his classmates. Every time he had a dinner, Li Qi would secretly wait for his classmates to talk about the topic of work, and when the topic was thrown to Li Qi, he would pretend not to care about the perfect world, and secretly observe the reactions of his classmates every time he finished speaking. Sure enough, the students immediately cast envious glances and heard the sound of "wow", which was the moment he was most looking forward to in the whole party.
When he was still in school, Li Qi and his classmates would always imagine themselves as the protagonists of the game, chasing their dreams with enthusiasm and keeping their edges and corners. Many students choose to take the civil service exam after graduation and enter the system, in Li Qi's opinion at that time, choosing to embark on game research and development and enter the perfect world is the one who is most like the image of a dream-chasing teenager.
The bosses of Perfect World seem to like it very much, and every time they have an annual meeting, they "have a grand event", and they will specially invite colleagues from Chengdu and other branches to Beijing to hold the annual meeting together. Li Qi's most anticipated part is the lottery, and he has also won thousands of big red envelopes and an iPhone.
The annual meeting lottery is often more than once, sometimes, the bosses are drunk high, in a good mood, will draw another round, "according to the table, randomly call the table number", call the number of the table, everyone will send a mobile phone. During the epidemic, the annual meeting could not be held offline, but Perfect World held a live broadcast to draw a lottery for employees online.
▲ Picture / Visual China
But since then, the big ship of Perfect World seems to have slowed down.
The first to be canceled was certainly the annual meeting and strategy conference, but it was in the company's toilet that the sinking signal became particularly apparent. Zhao Suyuan found that the company's toilet paper suddenly became very thin, and when he went to the toilet, he could use it by stacking two layers, but now when he looked at it in his hand, it was even transparent, "it broke as soon as he used it." Originally, every time to catch up with the Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival and other festivals, the company will send a gift box to each employee, with moon cakes, zongzi and other gifts, but then I don't know when it started, suddenly gone, he felt that "the company may have no money".
Tough U-turn
Everything Perfect World does now seems to be paying for the mistakes of strategic decisions made in previous years.
Perfect World is almost deeply tied to MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing) games, and there are countless milestones in the field. MMORPG games create a new world for players, which has a complete set of independent worldviews and a complete and systematic architecture. Each player plays a role in the world created by the game, socializing with each other, building relationships, and fighting monsters to level up.
At that time, the most representative was World of Warcraft. Zheng Haiyang played almost day and night, "already addicted", in junior high school, as long as he was free, Zheng Haiyang would get into the Internet café, open the World of Warcraft, and brush up for a few hours, "just like going to work". Role-playing online games have gangs and clans, and every time the system is upgraded and a new monster is released, people from the same team will meet together to fight monsters and upgrade.
In 2007, Perfect World launched the similar game "Zhu Xian", which is an online game based on the novel of the same name, and Zhu Xian's IP has almost become the most successful IP of Perfect World.
▲ The game "Zhu Xian". Diagram / Network
For Richie, the most memorable moment for Perfect World came in 2012, when Perfect World won the Dota 2 franchise. Richie, a self-proclaimed veteran gamer, was still in college at the time, and almost all of his classmates played DOTA. When I was in college, I had a lot of free time, and as long as I didn't have classes, Li Qi would turn on the computer and play DOTA, and later, I simply skipped class to play.
As the organizer, Perfect World has also held DOTA2 offline tournaments and college leagues many times, and Li Qi remembers that he started looking forward to it at least half a month in advance every time.
But as the winds of the times have quietly turned, people's expectations of games are also changing.
After going to work, Richie's love for client-side online games such as World of Warcraft has significantly decreased. Every time I come home from work and want to play games to relax, the thought of doing daily work, fighting battlefields, and playing dungeons is extremely long. Especially for team dungeons with 25 players, you need to constantly fail and try again. It takes hours to play a game, and the thought of these things makes Richie tired. So the hand that was about to pick up the mouse was put down again, took out the mobile phone, and nested in the sofa to brush Tik Tok.
In the past, Li Qi felt that MMORPG games such as "World of Warcraft" had built a complete set of exquisite world systems, which were "epic", but now, Li Qi has no interest and energy to learn about another world. At the same time, human patience is shrinking dramatically.
But it seems that Perfect World is not too aware of this, which makes its strategic decisions clunky.
Perfect World's layout in mobile games is often criticized. As early as 2011, NetEase began to lay out two lines of independent research and development of mobile games and foreign investment at the same time. Three years later, Perfect World began to increase the number of mobile games, and only launched 2-5 games per year, which is slower than other companies.
In the era of PC games, with several popular games such as "Zhu Xian" and "Perfect World", Perfect World was once regarded as the leader, but Perfect World seems to have been immersed in that era.
Perfect World has not been able to get rid of its dependence on MMO games, and the MMO category accounts for 74% of all the games released by Perfect World. While Perfect has been increasing its MMO games, other game companies have already begun to transform. In 2019, competitors experimented with MOBA, SLG (turn-based strategy), competitive shooter, and more.
And the users of the game are changing. Zheng Haiyang has switched to the game industry since 2013, and in the first few years of work, the game industry was "like picking up money", no matter what game was launched, there were people to play, and the most popular thing at that time was "changing skin", copying a few foreign popular games, "take a set of code, change the skin, it's a new game", and you can launch a game in three or four months.
▲ Picture / Visual China
After the launch of the game in charge of Zheng Haiyang, he would go to the Internet to check the user's evaluation, and he found that the user was not easy to deceive, and he used to play a lively game, but later, "the evaluation became more and more professional". As a result, game companies can only get more and more volume, launch more high-quality games, and the R&D cycle and investment in games have increased linearly, and the cycle often starts in five years, and R&D investment has also increased in hundreds of millions.
Developing a game then becomes a gamble, with increasing chips that take a long time and money to invest. And those companies that lose their bets, after many years, can only be forced to pay.
In 2021, Perfect World's net profit only achieved 30% of the expected target; In 2022, there will be news of thousands of layoffs. In 2023, Perfect World's declining performance will still not stop. According to the financial report, Perfect World's annual revenue was 7.79 billion yuan, and its net profit fell by more than 60%.
And now, it seems that this road can no longer go on, and the car has to be reversed, and the once highly anticipated "Perfect New World" and "One Punch Man" have been stopped, and the staff has been optimized.
After the trial
When judgment comes again and again, those who are waiting to be laid off are gradually becoming numb from worry and fear.
It's like it's become an assembly line. After Zheng Haiyang received his colleague's WeChat, he immediately ended his leave and rushed back to the company to handle his resignation. It was a busy afternoon, and the whole group sat at the workstation waiting for the financial department to call their names, chatting one by one, and after chatting with the personnel, finance, and producers, they could take the money out of the company and leave.
Unlike the sad face of the imagination, the whole group seems to be "relaxed". The faces of colleagues were full of self-deprecating laughter, "I wasn't worried, but I didn't expect it to be my turn", colleagues got together to joke with each other, and Zheng Haiyang even felt a sense of excitement like waiting in line for a physical examination in elementary school.
▲ Picture / Visual China
When chatting with the producer, as soon as Zheng Haiyang entered the producer's office, he looked at the producer and smiled, with some helplessness and absurdity: Originally, even if the package ticket was opened, the project would not stop, but the result was gone.
For some, optimization can also be a relief. N+1's "Resignation Gift Package" is distributed normally. Some of the people in the same group have worked for three or four years or even almost ten years, "they will get a lot of money and can take a good vacation."
After Zheng Haiyang left his job, he gave himself a long vacation, played for two months, slept until he woke up naturally every day, and asked friends to play together. But the joy of the holidays was quickly diluted by the anxiety of finding a job again. Zheng Haiyang has a friend who plans to start a business and develop a casual game, he goes to attract investment, and then invites Zheng Haiyang to work with him. But two months have passed, the investment has not been pulled, "it is estimated that it has also been pulled down", Zheng Haiyang can only find another job.
It's just that in today's gaming industry, it seems to be harder to find a job. Last year, I could see a few categories other than casual games, but this year it seems to be all casual games. Zheng Haiyang tentatively sent a few resumes, but they all fell into the sea. He began to wonder if he should go back to the south.
And those who managed to avoid this wave are still anxious.
This is not the first time that Perfect World has laid off employees. At first, Li Qi also searched on the Internet: what type of employees are most likely to be recruited and how to avoid them when the company optimizes. There is a saying on the Internet that those with strong ability are safer, but a colleague of Li Qi has worked for more than five years and is also very capable, but he is also gone; It is said on the Internet that newcomers have a protection period, but there is a colleague who has just graduated and left before the probationary period has expired. Li Qi took the standards on the Internet and compared them with reality, and found that almost none of them matched.
Richie began to realize that it might not have anything to do with the employees themselves.
But after analyzing and analyzing, it seems that the reason can be found, for example, the person in the back row of Li Qi, he never seemed to work overtime before, and he refused the tasks arranged by the leader several times; People at nearby workstations are at odds with the leader. The more he thought about it, the more chaotic it became, and the layoff rules became a thread that he couldn't grasp or touch, but he always strangled people's necks and couldn't breathe.
In this internal friction, the love for games is also rapidly being consumed.
Last year, there was a senior who took Li Qi, who was very capable, but he also graduated. On the night of the senior's graduation, Li Qi didn't sleep all night, thinking of the experience of working with the senior, he cried a few times, and went to work the next day, "relying on coffee to continue his life".
After the colleagues with whom the relationship is good leave, everyone will have a meal together to say goodbye. For a while, Li Qi had a weekly farewell dinner. Li Qi gradually changed from fear and reluctance to a little numb, "It's just work, and everyone is just colleagues."
The survivors began to find a way to stay. Li Qi can always see that several colleagues began to frequently go in and out of the leader's office, trying to get as much work as possible. After graduating from a colleague in the same department, Li Qi, who thought he was safe, fell into fear, he pushed back, and last week, the leader arranged a task for him, but he refused because he was too busy to do so. Richie feared that he would be laid off because of the incident.
On the same day, Li Qi changed his resume and prepared it, and began to take the opportunity to renovate the recruitment software, and even considered the civil service examination, and a series of questions squeezed into his mind:
What should I do if my social security is broken, what should I do about my future career direction, and whether I should return to my hometown or stay in Beijing......
He didn't have an answer.
(Names have been changed)