Concept map of "The Last Sentinel", source of the official X account of "The Last Sentinel"
On December 16, IGN announced its self-selected best game of 2023, and "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" won this honor. It is worth mentioning that at the TGA held not long ago, "Tears of the Kingdom", which was highly anticipated by many before the event, almost sat down in the audience and only won the Best Action-Adventure Game award throughout the night. Therefore, there were many awards. Players also regard IGN's selection as a "consolation prize" for "Tears of the Kingdom".
For this year’s TGA, Tencent unexpectedly became the reason why many people paid attention to this matter. From 2003 to 2023, Tencent, which has been making games for 20 years, seems to have been stolen by the upstart MiHoYo in recent years, but it is still old and hot. On the night of the
TGA event, "Baldur's Gate 3" and "Alan Alan Wake 2", which won a total of nine trophies, became the focus of the audience. Tencent has invested in the developers of the two works, Larian Studios and Remedy Entertainment, with shareholding ratios reaching 30% and 5.01% respectively.
Tencent, which does not have 3A games, has become the biggest winner of TGA.
For games, Tencent doesn’t just wave its checkbook and “buy, buy, buy” all the way. At the TGA site, Tencent announced its new game "The Last Sentinel". According to Photon Studio, which is responsible for the production of the project, this will be the studio's first AAA open world game.
"buys" 3A and builds 3A. Tencent is doing both.
Regarding Tencent and 3A, there have been different opinions for so many years. Some people think that Tencent will not do 3A, while others think that Tencent does not bother to do 3A. These statements do not seem to be accurate. For Tencent, whether to do 3A, how to do it, and when to do it are both a business strategy issue and a market supply and demand issue. Only by doing the right thing at the right time can you get close to the right result.
Now it turns out that the closest to domestic 3A is Tencent.
Do what you are good at and survive.
Turn the clock back to 20 years ago. Tencent was not the first batch of players in the domestic gaming industry. Lianzhong, which specializes in casual games, Shengqu, which owns "Legend", and Ninetowns, which represents "World of Warcraft", were all star companies that had already made their first pot of gold in the game industry and established a firm foothold. As a latecomer, Tencent must first think about how to survive in this industry.
In 2003, Tencent established a game department to officially enter the game industry. At that time, Tencent signed a cooperation agreement with South Korean game developer Imazic to be responsible for the agency operation of the 3D role-playing game "Triumph". As a result, 3D games had high requirements on computer performance and network bandwidth at that time, resulting in unsatisfactory player gaming experience. A large number of players were lost soon after the game was launched, and the project basically failed.
In that era when 2.5D was everywhere, "Triumph", which focused on 3D, was conceptually at the next-generation level. However, Huainan is full of oranges and Huaibei is full of oranges. After the failure of "Triumph", Tencent realized its shortcomings in representing large-scale client games. Then they turned around and started with lightweight casual games.
Relying on the user traffic brought by QQ, Tencent has established a firm foothold in the casual game market. In August 2003, "QQ Game" was officially launched. Half a year later, Ren Yuxin, currently the COO of Tencent, took the lead in establishing the interactive entertainment department and began to upgrade "QQ Game". By the end of 2004, the number of online users of "QQ Game", which had been online for one year, exceeded 1 million. After the success of
in the casual game market, Tencent once again entered the large-scale client game market, but the results of its self-developed "QQ Fantasy" and "QQ Three Kingdoms" were not ideal. These two projects can be said to be Tencent's second setback in games after "Triumph".
At that time, Tencent’s risk tolerance was far less than it is now. Due to the adjustment of IM business, the profit margin of Tencent's core wireless value-added business at that time began to shrink significantly, and the profit pressure of the game business increased accordingly. After two losses, they have little room for error.
’s repeated failures in large-scale client games have made Tencent more cautious in subsequent project development. On the one hand, they carefully study the segmented fields and choose to represent rare products in the segmented tracks. In 2007, Tencent reached a cooperation with SmileGate and Neople and won the agency operation rights of "Cross Fire" and "Dungeon Fighter".A year later, the maximum number of simultaneous online users for the two online games reached 2.2 million and 1.5 million respectively.
On the other hand, on the road of self-research, Tencent once again returned to its "old business" of casual games. The launch of "QQ Speed" and "QQ Dance" allowed them to find room for growth again. With the agency of two popular online games and a number of "QQ" series games such as "QQ Speed" and "QQ Dance", Tencent's game business has officially ranked among the top three in the country in terms of annual revenue.
In 2008, Tencent found the key to completely widen the gap with other domestic game manufacturers. After the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis, the global financial market fell into a trough. By chance, Tencent got acquainted with the North American game developer Riot Games and invested US$8 million in the latter. In 2011, Tencent further invested and completed controlling stake in Riot Games.
Through its bet on Riot Games, Tencent obtained the agency of "League of Legends". At that time, major manufacturers were mainly focusing on the RPG field, and MOBA was still an emerging new track. Tencent’s understanding of niche areas and insightful vision will give them a head start in the blue ocean of MOBA, which is valued at more than 100 billion.
In 2012, the national server of "League of Legends" became popular across the Internet as soon as it was launched. In 2013, the maximum number of simultaneous online users of "League of Legends" exceeded 5 million. In 2016, according to SuperData statistics, the annual revenue of "League of Legends" reached US$1.7 billion, ranking first in the global free game rankings.
From 2003 to 2008, Tencent, as a latecomer, overtook early entrants in the gaming industry. What it relies on is its keen sense of products and the massive number of users brought by the IM business. In this process, Tencent, whose operational capabilities are greater than its R&D capabilities, is acting more as a publisher than a developer.
development has never been Tencent’s strength
From 2013 to 2016, a large number of industry support policies for integrated circuits, information technology, cloud computing and other industries were successively proposed, and TMT-related industries maintained a double-digit growth rate. At the implementation level, my country had built a total of 2.127 million 4G base stations by the end of 2014, a year-on-year increase of 94.6%. By the end of 2015, a total of 3.206 million 4G base stations had been built, a year-on-year increase of 50.7%. Domestic annual smartphone shipments increased from 59% to 91%. Since then, the development focus of the game industry has gradually shifted from PC to mobile.
In August 2013, both QQ and WeChat had built-in game centers, and Tencent’s mobile game platform was officially launched. As in the PC era, Tencent also started from casual games in the field of mobile games. "Tiantian" games such as "Tiantian Cool Run" and "Tiantian Love Elimination" developed by Tianmei Studio Group were once popular all over the Internet.
In 2015, Tencent began to try to port MOBA to the mobile terminal. The two major studio groups of Photon and Tianmei were responsible for the specific advancement of the project. Later, they launched their respective products "Super God for All" and "Heroes".
"Heroes" is the predecessor of "Honor of Kings". On the basis of retaining the art design and underlying framework, "Heroes" chose to change its name after innovating the gameplay. In October 2015, "Honor of Kings" was officially launched on major game platforms. In just one month, the number of daily active users of "Honor of Kings" exceeded 5 million. Subsequently, due to the traffic tilt of the two major social tools WeChat and QQ, "Honor of Kings" gradually transformed into a national-level mobile game.
From the data point of view, "Honor of Kings" is Tencent's first self-developed hit with a long life cycle. Empowered by the times, the strong social attributes of "Honor of Kings" are highly compatible with the hundreds of millions of users of WeChat and QQ. The mechanism setting that can be played with zero krypton further lowers the experience threshold and increases the long-tail effect of the product. The fly in the ointment of
is that the success of "Honor of Kings" is essentially still based on Tencent's product operation capabilities and user resources. In terms of game research and development, Tencent has not shown epoch-making progress.
Back to Tianmei and Photon, in the "horse race" of mobile MOBA, Photon failed to beat Tianmei. But in another contest two years later, Photon managed to win back a victory.
In 2017, the tactical competitive online game "PUBG" developed by Korean game developer Krafton was launched. Through the dual fermentation of live broadcast and Internet cafes, "PUBG" quickly became a domestic phenomenon-level online game.After
"PUBG" became popular, Tencent quickly followed up, investing in Krafton twice in 2017 and 2018 and becoming the latter's second largest shareholder. After obtaining the authorization to produce "PUBG" mobile products, the internal competition between Tianmei and Photon started again. The two major studios launched "Army Attack" and "Exciting Battlefield" on the eve of the Spring Festival in 2018. With a higher degree of restoration of "PUBG", "Exciting Battlefield" is superior. After
, "Stimulating Battlefield" was officially launched in public beta under the name "Peace Elite". After realizing monetization, "Peace Elite" became another growth curve of Tencent's game sector.
This time Tencent is targeting the truly global market. After being "finalized", "PUBGMobile" was successively launched on overseas platforms such as Google and Apple, and quickly became popular in Southeast Asia, South America and other countries and regions. This success is like getting into a supercar as a newcomer who just got his driver's license. The success of "PUBGMobile" has accelerated Tencent's overseas "buy, buy, buy" rhythm. At the same time, a global distribution network has been formed, and more and more game IPs have begun to be included in the bag.
During this period, Tencent began to use the sacks of entertainment IP it bought to export its industrialized capabilities in mobile games. A large number of well-known IP mobile games flowed to the market during this period, such as "FIFA Football World" and "Naruto" mobile games. "Dragon" mobile game and so on. New products are introduced so fast that many game media content creators have to spend most of their energy on the creation of business promotion manuscripts for a long time.
From a positive perspective, this at least reflects Tencent’s progress in mobile game production capabilities. The bad news is that users won't necessarily pay for it.
Starting in 2021, the domestic game industry will gradually shift from the incremental era to the stock era, and a large number of highly homogeneous products will no longer gain the favor of users. To use a popular joke nowadays, the time has come to chew fine chaff.
In terms of overseas markets, emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, South America, and the Middle East have difficulty replicating the success of "PUBG Mobile" and "Call of Duty Mobile" in bulk due to various factors such as geopolitical and economic environments.
Old markets such as Europe and the United States are not very interested in mobile games. Most local players who have been influenced by console game culture prioritize mobile games after console and stand-alone games. Otherwise, when Blizzard announced the launch of the "Diablo" mobile game at E3, there wouldn't have been such loud boos from the audience. Under the internal and external difficulties of
, the ability of game manufacturers to use content to drive products has become increasingly critical. This is a shortcoming that Tencent has been involved in gaming for many years, and it is also something Tencent hopes to make up for through overseas investment.
In early November this year, the League of Legends IP derivative "Nunu Song: League of Legends Side Story" was officially launched on Steam. This is a single-player adventure game based on the League of Legends worldview. It is developed by TequilaWorks, an overseas studio invested by Tencent, and published by Riot Forge, a publisher of Riot Games. As of today, "Nunu's Song: League of Legends Side Story" has a favorable rating of 97% on Steam.
The most appropriate definition of a so-called AAA game is "investing a lot of money, resources and time in game development." Looking back on the past 20 years, there was no time when Tencent could make such a highly uncertain choice. Objectively speaking, when it comes to games, the times never belong to Tencent. Tencent is just a cautious and lucky person in the times. In terms of size, Tencent can be called a major game manufacturer; but in terms of quality in terms of game development, Tencent is not enough to be called a "powerful game manufacturer."
In the past twenty years, Tencent has just done what it should do step by step, and then waited for the best result to happen. The good news is that the good result called 3A is getting closer and closer to Tencent.
(This article was first published on Titanium Media APP, author｜Wu Yixiao, editor｜Li Chengcheng)
