The epitome of a giant's turn.
Text丨Gao Honghao
Editor丨Huang Junjie
Tencent's game department once had a set of "winning formulas" that had been in operation for nearly 10 years - to transfer the widely popular gameplay on the computer to the mobile phone, with well-known IP, with good engineering capabilities to make a game above the level line, and then use WeChat, QQ and other channels to push to as many players as possible, and tens of millions of people opened the national game every day.
In recent years, however, the formula has not worked so well. After 2018's "Peace Elite" (chicken) and 2019's "Call of Duty: Mobile" (Call of Duty Mobile (overseas version), Tencent has also tried to invest heavily several times, but no more national games with the same number of users and income have been born. Other companies had no better luck. In the past four years, dozens or hundreds of two-dimensional large-scale games have been established in China, and there is no second "Genshin Impact" so far.
For Yao Yuan, head of Tencent's TiMi J3 studio, the turning point was very specific: in August 2023, he came to Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, with the new shooter "Operation Delta".
Inside and outside the venue, no one talked about mobile games, whether it was practitioners, players, or the media. During the pandemic, overseas mobile games grew sharply, and Chinese game manufacturers were looking forward to replicating their successful experience to the world. But with the end of the pandemic, overseas consumers have returned to a rich offline life.
"You think you have the largest player base in the world, but it still doesn't seem to be squeezing into the mainstream." Yao Yuan said.
He managed the studio for CrossFire Mobile and Call of Duty Mobile, two national games. "Operation Delta" is the project that has invested the most resources since the inception of J3, and the developers are several times more than the aforementioned games combined, but the expected global mobile game boom has not materialized.
Tencent's top brass is also skeptical that the old ways are still working. At the beginning of 2024, at the annual meeting of Tencent Interactive Entertainment Group (IEG), Ren Yuxin, COO of Tencent and president of IEG, talked about the 27 years of focus on developing traditional role-playing games (CRPGs) by Larian, a small Poland company, which swept the global game awards with Baldur's Gate 3 a few months ago. At the end, Ren Yuxin asked rhetorically, "Can Tencent's current self-research system support a team's ten-year persistence?" ”
Baldur's Gate 3 has been praised by players, but that won't have been Tencent's goal in the past. It took 6 years to develop and is extremely risky. Since the beginning of this year, Ren Yuxin has started to hold one-on-one meetings with project producers from various studios every month to directly inquire about the progress of game development and provide advice and support.
On the third day of his return from Cologne, Yao Yuan gathered all the members of the development team of Operation Delta. "Starting tomorrow, we're going to focus all our energy on the PC side first." He said in a video conference.
Some of the noisy work areas fell silent. "You can hear a pin drop on the ground." A person present said. For the past two years, they've spent most of their time on the game's mobile device, and it's almost finished. Now the shift in R&D focus means that the cost and difficulty have increased exponentially, making the future of the project and even the team uncertain.
The decision even aroused concerns among Tencent's top management, "Tencent has rarely done terminal games in the past ten years. "Is it really necessary to invest so much at this time?" At that time, Tencent was reducing costs and increasing efficiency throughout the company, and the transformation of projects that had been developed for several years was also risky. But Yao Yuan firmly believes that the original method will not work, and he has to take risks.
It used to be a good time to make a national-level mobile game in half a year
In 2014, China Mobile's TD-LTE network was fully rolled out, bringing 600 million subscribers into the 4G era. For the first time, it was possible to play complex games online anytime, anywhere.
Towards the end of the year, J3 Studios was tasked with developing a mobile version of Crossfire. "CrossFire" is a shooting terminal game developed by Korea Smile Gate Company and represented by Tencent, and it is also the shooting game with the most users in China at that time.
The core team of J3 is from Linlang Sky Studio, one of the first self-developed studios established by Tencent in 2003, focusing on shooting games, and made Tencent's first PC shooter game "Counter War" in 2012.
Just the year before, the studio had sent two teams to develop two mobile games, "Micro Gun" and "Micro Island", but the test data was low and it was cut before it could be launched. At that time, Tencent was better at making casual games on mobile phones, and it had not yet proven that it could do a good job of heavy mobile games with complex graphics and gameplay. As for the more complex 3D shooters, it's an adventure.
Yao Yuan was almost the only one in the studio who didn't turn down the task. He was just the project manager for the Counter War game at the time.
At the annual meeting of the department, Yao Yuan pulled the team that had been put together with great difficulty to a corner of the venue. More than 200 people at the scene drank happily, and more than 20 of them raised their glasses and yelled "come on", and the people present couldn't tell whether they were cheering themselves up or venting. Almost no one believes that you can make a hardcore shooter game on your mobile phone that is similar to the PC gaming experience. At this time, the success or failure of their careers at Tencent has also been tied to this "adventure".
The biggest challenge was how to make it easier to operate – the PC has a mouse and keyboard, the console has a controller, but the phone has only one screen, and the player's two thumbs can't flexibly walk, aim, and press the trigger.
In order to allow players to quickly get started with the game, Yao Yuan's first thought was to simplify the difficulty of the operation - for example, the two sides of the battle were fixed in two buildings, and the players could only move left and right and shoot at the opposite side; Or allow the player to move freely, and the gun will automatically fire if an enemy gets close. The map has also been revised, with some obstacles being changed to small ramps to reduce "jumping" operations; The height of the cover has been lowered, making it easier for players to spot opponents hiding behind them.
Half a year later, the game was launched, attracting 20 million players in one fell swoop, becoming the No. 1 shooting mobile game market. But in just half a month, players began to lose rapidly.
Yao Yuan asked the team to carefully observe the player's behavior - do they prefer to defend, hover, or charge at their destination? The team counted and analyzed a lot of the details of this behavior, and then adjusted the content, gameplay, and operational strategy based on the data. They also found that players were tired of the most dominant game charge model of the time, which was to spend money to win. Compared with the traditional commercial model, they put more emphasis on the fairness of the competition, and they believe that although they make less money in the short term, there are more players, which can bring more long-term revenue to the game. This wasn't an easy decision to make – it was the second quarter of 2015 when Tencent's game revenue fell for the first time.
The strategy worked, and players gradually returned to CrossFire Mobile. What's even more unexpected is that they quickly adapted to operating a shooter on their phone. When the game first launched, only 8%-10% of players were playing versus modes that required 3D operations; A year later, that number had risen to 50 percent. Since then, twin-stick operation has become truly popular and has become standard in mobile games.
After "CrossFire Mobile Game", twin-stick shooter mobile games were really popularized.
"Honor of Kings", which was launched at about the same time, also had a similar experience. The game's poor performance in the early days of its launch was due to Tencent's development team continuously adjusting the gameplay according to player behavior after the launch, creating a competitive environment that emphasizes fair competition, and gradually becoming the mobile game with the largest number of players and the highest revenue in the world.
The two games allowed Tencent to find the winning formula of the game in the mobile phone era. In the later "chicken" war, Tencent obtained the IP authorization of "PUBG", and defeated NetEase, Xiaomi and other opponents in only 3 months, and developed the popular shooter mobile game PUBG MOBILE. At this time, Tencent has topped the world's highest-grossing game company for six consecutive years.
After the Chinese New Year in 2016, Activision invited Tencent to produce the Call of Duty mobile game. This is the most popular shooter franchise in the world, generating billions of dollars in revenue for Activision every year.
At the bidding meeting, a team directly came up with a sample that was close to the PVE gameplay of the Call of Duty terminal game. J3 has made a sample of PVP gameplay that is not too mainstream overseas by revamping its own mobile game "CrossFire Mobile". Although the direction is a bit risky, the team believes that the picture quality, operation feel, and gameplay mechanics can better reflect their strength. "The accumulation of the past has played a key role." Yao Yuan said. Activision chose J3 in the end, and Yao Yuan became the producer of Call of Duty Mobile.
The challenges of the project were much greater than expected. The Call of Duty PC game was already huge enough to require 2,000-3,000 people to develop, but the development of the mobile version was largely done by J3 itself.
Halfway through the development of J3, the "chicken war" broke out. In the space of three months, the scale of mobile games was pulled to the level of game consoles at the time—the most advanced Unreal Engine 4 game engine at the time, a large map of 8,000 meters × 8,000 meters, and more than 30 people in the same game...... The threshold for making a shooting game has risen dramatically.
Compared to the new games, the graphics of Call of Duty Mobile are clearly a bit behind. If you continue to do it, you can make a difference, but "you can't get past that level in your heart." Yao Yuan said. When many team members learned about the project, they desperately wanted to join it. The team quickly demonstrated the feasibility and then reached a tacit agreement with Activision: redo.
In the end, it took them less than a year to complete the refactoring. In the process, J3 re-upgraded the game engine of Call of Duty Mobile, rewrote the underlying rendering scheme based on the Unity engine, re-established a series of tools and processes in the development process, and even established a mobile game graphics standard that exceeds the entire industry - closer to the graphics of the Call of Duty PC game.
In mid-2019, Activision upgraded its gun modification system to critical acclaim in the console game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. J3 looked back at the system in the mobile game, and the gap was obvious. Once again, they decided to redo the system. "Only by pulling the quality of every detail to the highest." Puck, the lead planner of Call of Duty Mobile, said.
Footage of TiMi J3's Call of Duty: Mobile game released in 2019.
Activision's 2019 PC game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare gameplay.
On September 30, 2019, Call of Duty: Mobile launched its first overseas version, with more than 100 million downloads in a week and more than 30 million people connecting every day. It also became the first game developed by a Chinese team to win the TGA Award (The Game Awards, known as the Oscars of the gaming industry).
This is the first time that a mobile game produced by Tencent has been successful in the European and American markets without the support of WeChat and QQ traffic.
The whole industry sprints
In 2019, a world map hung on the wall in the center of the J3 studio area, and the team planted a small flag in each country where Call of Duty: Mobile was beta launched. One flag after another, covering 139 markets in Europe, America, Asia, Oceania.
Just as the flags on the map were gradually planted in most of the way, the Genshin Impact development team of the Shanghai-based game company miHoYo also expanded to nearly 500 people, and began the final sprint. At the end of 2020, "Genshin Impact" became popular all over the world after its release, becoming the No. 1 game in the country in terms of revenue at the three ends, shaking the entire game industry.
Before Genshin Impact, it was rare for Chinese companies to invest hundreds of people in making a game, and no one used a game to cover mobile phones, PCs, and PlayStation consoles at the same time. The entire game industry is going to a frenzy, and they have come to a series of conclusions - two-dimensional, open-world is the next biggest outlet; And as long as you dare to think, you can win big with a big bet. In the second year, dozens of two-dimensional, open-world games in the industry were approved; Even companies that used to make browser games have introduced the Unreal game engine that is commonly used in PC blockbusters.
Excitement is also pervasive in every corner of Tencent, and everyone must call it 3A, and everyone thinks that they can do a great job. J3 is one of Tencent's best shooter teams, and the shooter category is the core battleground of the game industry, so "so when new opportunities arise, we should continue to pursue success." A J3 employee recalls the studio's mindset at the time.
At the end of 2020, J3 established three new projects. Codename: CF0, a quasi-two-dimensional action shooter based on the IP of CrossFire; Based on the "Counter War" IP, the content-driven open-world shooter "Counter War: Future"; Delta Action, a tactical survival shooter based on Delta Special Forces.
All three projects have been carefully thought out. They not only embody Tencent's invincible methodology in the past - with big IPs, grafted with popular PC gameplay (hero shooting, tactical shooting); There are also the hottest elements of the moment - two-dimensional, open-world, content-driven.
"We also have the best team in the country, more than a decade of technology accumulation, and a love for shooting games." Yao Yuan recalled, "Every point was stepped on just right, and it sounded simply impeccable." ”
A sprint began.
Codename: CF0 is a two-dimensional shooter with a two-dimensional art style, with each character having different classes and skills.
Project producer Basil is the person J3 knows most about CrossFire's IP. In 2016, when Yao Yuan led the team to develop Call of Duty Mobile Game, he specifically told the then master planner of CrossFire Mobile to continue to improve Tencent's masterpiece in shooting mobile games.
Overwatch's concept designers joined J3 at this time, and they brought a new way of thinking: gameplay-driven may not be the only solution, and engaging players with story and characters may bring more different effects. This is a direction that Tencent has rarely tried in the past.
In order to revive this old IP, Basil decided to take a risk, and they read a lot of novels and wrote a grand world view for the game. Participants are asked to take an exam to answer the background of each hero, why the biochemical mutants in the plot mutate, and what the school emblem comes from.
J3's art skills accumulated in the past are mainly realistic style, and can create realistic light and shadow, object materials, and atmospheric fog effects. Now, they've rebuilt a stylized pipeline, but they haven't been able to make a reliable hair material for two months. It was finally made, and the team didn't want it to be too much like a two-dimensional thing. Conceptually, Codename: CF0's style should be somewhere somewhere between two-dimensional and Overwatch.
Footage of the 2015 CrossFire Mobile game produced by TiMi J3 Studio.
Early CG promotional footage of Codename: CF0 produced by TiMi J3 Studios.
The other two games also have huge ambitions.
Counter War: Future is an attempt to create an open-world shooter on mobile. To this end, Yao Yuan brought in CP, a producer with 20 years of experience, from Ubisoft's United Kingdom studio. He has participated in classic game series such as "Splinter Cell" and "The Division".
CP prepared the game according to the standards of international manufacturers, and even spent a whole year "finding the feeling" after the project was established. He repeatedly discussed with the team what the direction of the game was, and kept overturning and rebuilding; They also pre-developed some modules that may be used in the future. As an open-world shooter game, the planning team wrote hundreds of thousands of words of copy.
What Operation Delta wants to do is a "new generation" realistic shooter for the world. According to the idea of the main creative team, the game should have a rich gameplay, including a large battlefield mode, a tactical evacuation mode and a single-player story mode, and the overall quality, including the graphics and feel, must reach the top in the world.
They bought the IP of Delta Forces from the United States company NovaLogic. This is a military world shooter that came out in 1998, pioneered the gameplay of large-map multiplayer battles, and was also a smash hit in Chinese Internet cafes more than 20 years ago. Completely buying the rights, J3 can be revamped exactly as it sees fit.
The game starts out in a youthful style, with rich and crisp graphics. For the first time, J3 will also feature several hours of single-player story levels in a real-life shooter, a rarity in the entire Chinese gaming industry.
The team had no experience, so they bought the rights to Black Hawk Down and created the game's levels for each shot. Based on true events, this Redley · Scott-directed film is one of Hollywood's few acclaimed and acclaimed modern war movies in the past 30 years. To make the action more realistic, they assembled a film acting team in Vancouver and flew to Hollywood to find actors and veterans to do 3D model captures.
Compared with 2015, J3 made "CrossFire Mobile Game" in half a year, and the production cycle of the three major projects at this time has been longer, and each is expected to be about three years.
Footage of the Delta Forces game developed by NovaLogic in 1998.
Footage from Operation Delta from TiMi J3 Studios.
The formula for the industry as a whole is not so sharp
It is expected that all three J3 games will be tested on a large scale or officially released in 2023. But none of the games were completed on time.
Codename: CF0 had the worst possible outcome after two rounds of small-scale testing: no one scolded them, and they didn't even bother to discuss it. "I think it's okay to play, but I'm just not interested." More direct players will say, "As soon as you talk about Heroes + Demolition, I know what you're up to." ”
The once invincible approach has become fed up by players. 2013's CrossFire Mobile was successful because it inherited the gameplay and graphics of the game of the same name on PC, and implemented dual-stick operation, allowing players to play familiar PC games on their phones. Later, "Call of Duty Mobile" replicated this method overseas, and it was successful again.
"The same thing is done too much, and the players get tired. They don't think you've done something great, or even think you're plagiarizing. Yao Yuan said. During that time, many of the world's most well-known games that were released from PC to mobile failed to act.
Today, the PC gaming platform Steam has 30 million Chinese players online every day; And consoles such as Switch and PS5 are no longer rare. Gamers are accustomed to playing big-budget games on their PCs and consoles, and are no longer excited about having these gameplay features copied to their phones.
CP, the producer of Counterwar: Future, has already witnessed such a drastic cycle shift at Ubisoft.
Around 2000, Ubisoft had several successful franchises with very different styles, but the vast majority of games after 2010 were open-world playstyles. Some game series that once attracted much attention, such as the stealth game "Splinter Cell", have not been updated for a long time because there is no way to make it an open world.
The cost of overseas triple-A large-scale games can easily start at hundreds of millions of dollars. When the cost is high, the risk of failure is great, and when the risk is large, the company will become more and more afraid to innovate, and either it can only continue to make a fuss about the sequel, or it can only reduce production. According to the CEO of a medium-sized overseas game studio, the company's capital chain was in a state of collapse within three months before almost every product was successfully established.
The traditional triple-A production path has fallen into trouble. Poland game company CD Projekt RED's "Cyberpunk: 2077" and Bethesda Softworks' "Starfield", which took 8 years to develop, collapsed after their release; DICE's large-scale modern warfare multiplayer game Battlefield 2042 received a lot of negative reviews during its open beta.
On the contrary, most of the games that have performed better in the market in recent years are not the most expensive projects, such as "Death Stranding" developed by Kojima Studios, "It Takes Two" produced by Hazelight Studios, and "Alan Wake 2" by Remedy.
Counter War: Future has also gone awry with its open-world positioning. After doing this for a while, the team realized that this path seemed to be going nowhere. In the process, the game's planning team was completely changed twice, and the art team was completely changed, and the project was constantly postponed. They fell into self-doubt: do players really need an open-world shooter? CP believes that the source of the fun of a game like Genshin Impact is the story it tells, the interaction of the characters, and the world, but shooters will always be combat-centric. Doing open world and shooting, the end result is likely to be unpleasing to both ends.
Yao Yuan later reviewed with the team of "Counter War: Future" and believed that he had wrongly attributed the success of "Genshin Impact". "Genshin Impact's success is not because of the open world, it's just a form of bearing, the fundamental reason is that the quality of this game, the shaping of characters and the story are ahead of its time."
Tencent Linlang Tianshang Studio (the predecessor of TiMi J3) launched in 2012 "Counter War" terminal game screen.
TiMi J3 production of "Counter War: Future" demonstration screen.
In 2023, Yao Yuan met a world-renowned game producer overseas. In front of this banner figure in the global game industry, Yao Yuan threw out a lot of confusion that he had accumulated in the past period of time.
He asked the other party if the game was made entirely according to the market or the preferences of the users. "Definitely not." The other party did not hesitate, "You must do something that no one else has done." ”
"When you make games, do you think more about gameplay-driven or content-driven?" "It doesn't make a difference to me, I just want to do a complete personal expression, it may have gameplay and content."
The meeting provided proof to Yao Yuan's feeling that the way the team categorized and guided the production of games according to market logic for a long time was outdated, whether it was PC vs mobile, content vs gameplay driven, domestic vs overseas, they may not be that important. What the team should really focus on is the irrational and artistic part of the game design, making a product that is really fun and not completely marketable.
At the end of the year, Yao Yuan and Basil reached a consensus to overturn the original two-dimensional + content-driven direction of "Codename: CF0" and return to the realistic style that the team is best at. The team no longer talks about whether the game is content-driven or gameplay-driven, as long as it can finally build a self-consistent world where all interactions are logical.
The open world of Counter War: Future has also been transformed into a number of disconnected mini-worlds, which act like separate levels, in order to ensure that the game prioritizes gameplay, while constantly providing players with a fresh experience to counter the "boredom" of repetitive competition.
Operation Delta went relatively well, but it ran into another conundrum. Although the first mobile version of the game has achieved good results in several closed beta tests, players at home and abroad generally expect it to be a PC and console game. The team also gradually realized that only multi-terminal development could truly achieve the quality and experience they envisioned. J3 finally decided to develop a game across devices, which is the first time that Tencent Games has developed a game like this.
At the end of August 2023, Yao Yuan officially announced that the focus of the project will shift to PC development. On the second day, the core task of the Delta Team team became to improve the quality of the game; In a short period of time, the person in charge of each link submitted more than 4,000 requirements, and the core members quickly decided what to do and how to do it next, accompanied by team recruitment and production tool process construction to support the needs of cross-end production. For the project team, it is necessary to improve the scene details and light and shadow effects on the PC side to achieve an immersive visual experience, and also take into account the compatibility of various mobile game models, which are all new topics.
Once, Yao Yuan comforted the team and said, "It's not that hard to make PC games." "Operation Delta" PM Kelly directly countered: "There are already 1,770 pipelines alone, you can say which project has so many!" Pipelines are a set of tools and processes that are needed in all aspects of game development, and most of Tencent's game production pipelines have not exceeded three digits before.
"Operation Delta" is likely to be the fastest product that Tencent can play on mobile phones, consoles and computers at the same time. On the first day of sailing, a team of only 30 people chose a barbecue house in Nanshan for team building. Seven years ago, it was here that they launched the CrossFire Mobile Game project to explore the transformation of mobile games for Tencent.
New formula
In 2020, Yao Yuan shared and concluded within Tencent Games that a mobile game product with a near-full score needs to have three characteristics: IP, industrialized development capabilities, and GaaS (continuous operation) capabilities. The Chinese gaming industry once widely believed that these capabilities could be used to replicate the miracle of Chinese mobile games on a global scale.
Now, Yao Yuan's repeated words inside J3 have become "potential energy" and "tonality" (vibe) – abstract and difficult to measure.
He thinks that the lack of response to Codename CF:0 is due to the fact that it is too similar to other games on the market and lacks its own "tonality". "Operation Delta" can't just be a mobile version, because this "potential energy" is insufficient, and it must be on mobile phones, PCs, and consoles together in order to make global players pay attention to this work. All the criteria point to the fact that "every game you make should be unique." ”
"If a product is born and is still positioned for the mass market, then it has already lost." Yao Yuan said. "Glory of Kings" and "Peace Elite" are products of the times, and they were born at the time when mobile phones were replaced and there were "big productions" for the first time on mobile phones. He feels that unless there is new hardware and a new form of game in the future, it will be difficult to see such a universal opportunity.
It's not easy to find a tone for a game. The video game industry has been in the industry for 70 years, and the gameplay, modes, and styles have been exhausted. This is a problem faced by all mass entertainment, and the film industry is equally difficult to find "uniqueness", with more and more sequels and fewer and fewer original works. "If you can find it, you can live, and if you can't find it, you have to be someone else's stepping stone." CP said.
Everyone feels that the road of the past is not working, but the transformation still has to be done step by step and slowly tried.
Operation Delta is one of Tencent's most staffed game projects to date. But when it was established, there were only 30 people, and the goal was relatively simple, using the IP of "Delta Force" to make a "tactical shooter" game - players need to cooperate tactically, get supplies, and successfully evacuate.
Before the rapid expansion of the development team, they relied more on the perception and experience of the core members in the field of terminal game shooting to make judgments, and almost did not make democratic decisions, and relied as little as possible on data to make decisions. They needed to be as efficient as possible – the first demo was done in just over a month, and the game was in mass production in four months.
As they go, the team has greater ambitions, and the game style has changed from young, relaxed, and futuristic to a modern realistic modern battlefield. Producer Shadow studied the basic principles of graphics and optics. "How the shadows will appear when different lights shine on people." They try to recreate the real world 1:1.
In the past Tencent shooting mobile games, a scout turned on the thermal imager and the artist designed a button on the interface and clicked to automatically adjust the screen. Now, in pursuit of realism, they make a model of a weapon with thermal imaging and then display a thermal image on a small screen on the weapon. "You can't put a single smoke and a monster out of thin air." Said a person involved in the project.
When the goal shifts from a mobile game to an all-platform game, players may be playing on a large 70-inch screen, and all the rough details become glaring. At first, they thought that the number of AI NPCs (non-player-controlled characters) in the game was enough for a dozen, but gradually increased to hundreds, and finally to thousands. The inspection animations of weapons have also increased from a dozen at the beginning to hundreds of original actions, and they have even added details of the inspection animations with extremely harsh trigger conditions, which may only be noticed by a few people.
As a result of the R&D strategy, the team has further increased its investment in the single-player story levels of Black Hawk Down, which are more popular gameplay on PC and consoles.
Operation Delta Black Hawk Down Unreal Engine 5 Effects Showcase.
Over the past three years, Operation Delta has been released in 24 editions, with 15 external tests alone. This is unprecedented in Tencent Games, and each test is not only time-consuming, but also may be demoralized by poor response. But they have to do it so that they can receive feedback from players and increase the success rate of big projects.
All three J3 projects have been in development for a long time, and were once questioned by Tencent's top management, "This is not like J3's execution in the past." Yao Yuan explained internally that in the previous era, the slow pace of development may not have been able to catch up with the needs and changes of the market, but now, it is a must.
The bigger adjustment is the distribution of salaries. Tencent games usually share revenue according to the project, so the development team is more willing to go to mature projects with more money and a high success rate than to take risks. Yao Yuan revised the studio's performance incentive method - no longer fully based on project revenue sharing. This breaks with the pattern that Tencent Games has had for many years, with the aim of encouraging employees to actively participate in new projects instead of indulging in old projects that make money.
This is also the inspiration that Hidetaka Miyazaki gave him. Hidetaka Miyazaki's team has made 7 games since 2011, from three Dark Souls to Elden Ring, turning the "Souls-based" game mode that tests players' skills from a niche to a mainstream. The team worked on one game at a time and immediately moved on to the next, applying the experience and lessons learned to the next generation, and the team was able to grow exponentially.
For a long time in the past, Tencent relied more on Internet thinking and user thinking to make games, that is, after launching a product, it quickly went to the market to verify what users liked, and finally used data to guide production, and under such a model, the creative will has always been ignored. However, as the game market matures, the method of simply catering to users is no longer effective, "As a product that integrates technology, art, and business, games need to have self-expression, design confidence, and more importantly, the impulse of creators." Yao Yuan said.
Last year, J3 applied to the company to use "Rainbow Sky" as the label for the Delta Action project. "Linlang Tianshang" was one of the first self-developed studios established by Tencent in 2003, and was later broken up and integrated into the TiMi studio group. At present, almost all the core members of "Operation Delta" are from the dazzling sky of the year. For them, "it's like a fresh start." Yao Yuan said.
Yao Xiaoguang (president of TiMi Studio Group) and Ren Yuxin quickly agreed. "They even feel that they don't need to add Tencent or TiMi in front of their names." A Tencent Games source said, "It's an encouragement to do it freely, even if you may be a 'rebel'."
Title image source: "Imitation Game"