Of course, in Jester's opinion, it is unwise to spend money on the research and development of such top sandbox games in this era.

Because of the difficulty, secondly, because the development time will be long. Finally, and most importantly, it is difficult to recover the profits that the original investment should have brought. To be honest, even in "Haoxia", Jester was not optimistic about his sales. Moreover, if he did not look at his increase in console sales, he would just look at the sales of this game that has exceeded 10 million so far. Compared with the total investment in R&D and sales of this game of 300 million US dollars.

Then his reward ratio is really not surprising.

There are reasons why Jester has to do this game, but he is not optimistic about other game companies doing it. This time Yu Suzuki still did "Shenmu" as he did in history. This is actually a bit unwise in Jester's opinion.

Although Yu Suzuki has participated in the development of "The Legend of Heroes".

However, without seeing countless similar games, it is really difficult to master such a game.

Many people say that the larger the game, the better the production - because there is a lot of content that can be allowed, so you can make a lot of play points. For example, Super Balotelli's game that could be made with a few m in the past was endless fun. Now that such large games allow so much content, isn't it easier to develop?

Is it the least, I can't even get into the content of a super Balotelli?

In fact, such a simple analogy cannot be made.

You can't play a game that has one or two g capacity and requires five or even six CDs to play only a little bit like Super Balotelli's game content. If you dare to do this in such a game, you will definitely have to bear the anger of the players.

In a game of this scale, it is very difficult to make a lot of content and make sure that the content of the game is interesting. This is not only for current designers, but also for future designers. If the sandbox game is really so easy to make. As long as someone has money, Ubisoft will not criticize people as an industrial sandbox.

The most common sentence game designers ask when designing games is - ‘Is this fun?’

Yes, isn't it interesting to design something like this?

Maybe domestic designers later faced too much pressure from bosses or investors, and the problem they often faced was not this kind of "interesting doing this", but another kind of "doing this can make people spend more money".

Perhaps this is the reason why there is no fun game in China, because their focus is not on fun or fun.

Actually, is it fun to do this?

It is also when Jester tells others about the creativity of a game. This question that seems the simplest to develop a game is actually the most difficult question to answer.

Jester also knows that many people, many designers, and even some academics are trying to define what fun is. They want to give the game a specific concept and then apply this concept when developing the game, but in fact, the possibility of doing so is very slim.

In memory, Jester remembers that Mark LeBlank, a famous game designer in later generations, divided the fun in the game into 8 categories.

Pleasure, friendship, fantasy, exploration, narrative, expression, challenge and compliance.

Although this kind of classification of fun is a very interesting attempt. But Jester thinks that this classification is not helpful for actual combat, because problems are endless and various. For example, a certain idea or a certain mechanism of the game, or a wave ss battle, or anything, may be very interesting on paper, but once it is made into a game, it may not be the case. Sometimes it may be fun to make, but only you think so. The problem with fun is that, like humor, it completely relies on subjective judgment.

How could such things have a strict definition of academicism?

In fact, now that the development of games has reached this point, people are increasingly far away from the most primitive definition of games. Just like sports, sports have been developed for many years and are no longer just sports and fitness.

In Jester's view, the essence of the game is actually the simplest and most brainless at the most primitive time. For example, a child can take pictures and shoot a day. For example, you can watch ants for a day, such as pinballs and eating beans, but as the game industry develops for a long time, higher artistic, creative and even philosophical pursuits will appear. The target target of the game may not be a group with high tastes. People with picky tastes will gradually turn to other fields, such as philosophy, science, art, etc.

However, the times have progressed, and the same is true for games. Now you may still be able to play happily for a few hours if you go to play thoroughly. However, if you release such games now, the sales volume will definitely be far worse than before.

Before traveling through time, Jester once joined a QQ group in the domestic development industry. At that time, the group often discussed some issues in game design. People would think about how to make this action shocking feeling wonderful, how to design a copy level to dig holes, what rules to dig holes in the arena, how to dig holes for players in the game growth, which game character image is to be copied, and people often even have some boring ideas and just because he thinks this idea is very interesting.

The most typical example is that Guo Weiwei's Jian San always keeps pace with the times with wow.

However, what makes Jester strange is that almost no one will discuss how this game makes it fun and make players play it fun, that is, they can have fun.

This is a rare thing in the game development industry in Europe, America, and Japan that Jester knows.

Because the first question to be clear from the beginning of development of a game is, is it interesting to do this?

Even if many failed European and American games are boring and even ashamed to play, you can see that the designer is indeed working very hard to design the fun of the game.

Domestic developers rarely work in this direction. The corresponding one is to make a big fuss in numerical values, dig holes, and dope.

It feels like you may need to use your brain and work hard to finally get through the game. You breathe a sigh of relief and gain happiness.

Domestic games are like letting you turn on a cheater to play a single player game. It will be very enjoyable to sweep all the way at the beginning. After 5 minutes, you will be bored with the character (maybe you will have to renew it for 5 minutes to remain invincible). So you go to find the next krypton gold and then cycle.

The player was sucked by the numerical value and got a short-term sense of speed. When the medicine was too effective, it felt that there was no fun. He also found that krypton had tens of thousands of thousands of dollars in.

Of course, it is expected that only a very small number of domestic players will pay attention to the fun of a game. Instead, they pursue the results of the game more and more profit-seeking. Even in some very famous game forums, the focus of players' discussions is not on this aspect. They would rather quote the classics in the forum when spiritual shareholders criticize each other's games to get pleasure.

Yes, when Jester traveled through time, China had indeed become the second largest market for global games.

The largest market for online games and the second largest market for mobile games, but the reality is that although the market is constantly expanding, the money is actually made by so few companies. The domestic game industry is very tragic, employment is not optimistic, small game companies go bankrupt every minute, and game companies that have gained a foothold are also in danger day and night.

In the year when Jester traveled, many people said that the economy was in a downturn, and the reality was indeed the case. The cold winter of the Internet was coming, but according to the laws of economics, it should stimulate the development of the entertainment and game industry at this time. However, it seemed that this was not the case in China at that time. It seemed that such a law could no longer work.

The bankruptcy of small and medium-sized game companies broke out like a tsunami, and some industry executives even said that 90% or even 99% of game companies. Especially mobile game companies cannot survive this year.

Why is this happening?

Because the giant effect is actually too terrible and terrible.

The sum of mobile game revenues of Tencent and NetEase in the third quarter of 2015 exceeded 88.4 billion, and the proportion of the two companies exceeded 60% of the market. The top 15 game manufacturers in China almost won more than 90% of the mobile game market share, and the top 50 best-selling products won nearly 80% of the re-game revenue.

The money-making game in the game market is still krypton gold junk games, and the games made by these small and medium-sized game companies are actually no different from Tencent and NetEase.

Some people are unrealistic fantasizing that Tencent can stand up and shoulder the cause of domestic games, but in fact, this disordered and brainless gaming environment is exactly what Tencent wants to watch. The least they want to awaken domestic players is game companies like Tencent, because there are more awakened game players. So who will play their games?

Jester once thought deeply about a problem of game research and development and revenue investment.

A free krypton gold mobile game, which removes various advertising fees and takes the final profit of a month, such as 300,000 yuan. It can be sold for 6 to 12 months, and can have a net profit of more than 2,000 yuan.

Compare it to make a paid game with the same cost, such as an excellent and fun, without krypton gold. You can get 2 dollars for a price of $3. Then you have to sell 166,000 shares to make the same profit as above. In fact, a $3 game is still difficult to stand out in games of hundreds of thousands of yuan. It is good to sell tens of thousands of yuan, let alone compete with those free games.

In this case, how do you let companies like Tencent calm down and consider the most essential question?

In fact, the global mobile game market is moving further and further on such a trend.

Even in the traditional European and American gaming industry, DLC and krypton gold are becoming more and more important, because merchants are always profit-seeking.

Of course, there are also many conscientious manufacturers like CDPR.

Jester remembered before that there was a very fierce discussion among domestic developers, and the argument was good-isnt-good-enough.

Excellent is not excellent enough.

In other words, it is far from enough for a game or a game company to achieve excellence.

A game carefully developed by developers has poor sales. Although everyone thinks that this game is very good, no one will buy it, because the competition in the European and American game industries is extremely fierce now. Your game is just doing well. There are always other companies that make games better than you and cheaper than you.

In the future game market, it is far from enough to survive a game that is good at survival, because there are too many game companies that do well, and what you need is good enough.

And the current gaming environment is no longer many times better than in the future.

Although the competition in the game industry is very fierce now, and a large number of game companies are closing down every day, compared with the future environment, it is now a paradise.

At least the players are not picky yet. It is not enough to be excellent in the game. What you need to do is excellent enough.

This is actually the game development model that Jester has been promoting on Mars Entertainment for so many years. It is to discuss whether this game is fun or not when it is launched. It is always the first priority when it is put into consideration. All other external or internal conditions need to be concessions for this element.

They have always done this.

If a game abandons all external modifications, such as the screen and only uses pixels to present it, will it be fun?

This is the internal small-scale internal test that Mars Entertainment often does.

Therefore, Mars Entertainment has always had high-quality games for so many years.

Although there are several games that are not satisfactory, players can still see the design team's attentiveness in game development. They are not perfunctory about a game or a player, but they have made mistakes in their judgment of players' preferences, because if a game does this interesting, this question is a subjective problem.

What designers think is great, players may not necessarily think is great.

The question that Jester was most worried about Yu Suzuki’s "Shenmu" was here, will it take away the mistakes of the old "Shenmu"?

The original version of "Shenmu" is great. It can be regarded as a classic textbook in the entire game design. In any aspect, it almost reached the extreme in the industry at that time, but this game has an extremely critical issue.

Everything is good, but it's not fun to play.

Yu Suzuki is a very paranoid person, and Jester is worried about this. (To be continued)
Chapter completed!