Of course, in Jester's opinion, it is very unwise to spend money on the development of such a top-level sandbox game in this day and age.

Because of the difficulty, secondly, because the development time will be very long, and finally, and most importantly, it is difficult to recover the profit that the original investment should bring, to be honest, even if it was the original "Hero", Jester was not optimistic about his sales, and, if you don't look at his increase in console sales, just look at the sales of this game so far, which can exceed 10 million sales, compared to the total investment of 300 million US dollars in R&D and sales of this game.

Then his return ratio is really not very surprising.

Jester has a reason why he has to do this game, but he is not optimistic about other game companies to do it, and this time Yu Suzuki still made "Shenmue" as he did in history, which is actually a little unwise in Jester's opinion.

Although Yu Suzuki was involved in the development of "Heroes".

However, it is too difficult to master such a game without having seen countless similar games.

There are many people who say that the bigger the game, the better it is to make - because there is a lot of content that can be allowed, so that a lot of fun can be made, such as Super Balotelli's kind of game that can be done for a few M's is fun, and now that this kind of big game allows so much content, isn't it easier to develop?

Could it be, the worst of all, that you can't even make the content of a super Balotelli?

In reality, there is no such simple analogy.

You can't play a game with one or two gigabytes and five or even six discs that only have a little bit of Super Balotelli content, and if you dare to do that in a game like this, you're going to have to suffer the wrath of the players.

In a game of this scale, you need to make a lot of content and make sure that the content of the game is interesting. It's a very difficult thing, not only for the current designers, but even for the designers of the future, it's also a problem, if the sandbox game is really that easy to make, you only need someone to have money to talk. Then Ubisoft won't spray people in an industrial sandbox.

One of the most common questions game designers get when designing games is, 'Is this fun?' ’

yes, isn't it fun to design something like this?

Maybe later domestic designers face too much pressure from bosses or investors, and the problem they often have to face is not this kind of 'doing this is fun' problem, but another kind of 'doing this can make people spend more money'.

Maybe that's why they can't make fun games in China, because their focus is not on fun and fun.

Actually, isn't it fun?

It's also when Jester tells others about the idea of a game, the easiest question to ask for a game to be the most difficult to answer.

Jester also knows a lot of people. Many designers, and even some academics, are trying to define what is interesting, and want to give the game a specific concept, and then apply that concept when developing the game, but in reality, the possibility of doing so is very small.

In his memory, Jester remembered a famous game designer, Mark Brown. Le Blanct divides in-game fun into 8 categories.

Pleasure, camaraderie, fantasy, exploration, narrative, performance, challenge, and compliance.

Although this categorization of fun is an interesting attempt. But Jester didn't think this kind of categorization would be helpful in practice, because the problems kept coming. Everything, like an idea or a game mechanic, or a boss fight, or anything, can be a lot of fun on paper, but once it's made into a game, it probably won't be like that. Sometimes it can be a lot of fun to make. But only you feel that way. The problem with fun is that, like humor, it relies entirely on subjective judgment.

How can such a thing have a strict academic definition?

In fact, now that games have developed to this point, they are getting farther and farther away from the original definition of games, just like sports. After many years of development, sports have become more than just sports and fitness.

In Jester's view, the essence of games is actually the most simple and brainless at the most primitive time, for example, a naïve child can shoot pictures for a day, for example, he can watch ants for a noon, such as pinball, eat beans, but after a long time the development of the game industry, there will be higher artistic, creative and even philosophical pursuits. The target audience of the game may not be the one with high tastes. The discerning crowd will gradually turn their interests to other fields, such as literature, philosophy, science, art, etc.

However, times are progressing, and so are games, and now you may be able to play for hours if you go to play thoroughly, but if you release such a game now, then the sales will definitely be far worse than at the beginning.

Jester had joined a QQ group in the domestic development industry before crossing, and at that time, some game design issues were often discussed in the group, and everyone would think about how to make this action blow wonderful, how to design the dungeon level to dig pits, what rules in the arena can dig pits, how to dig holes for players when the game grows, which game is ready to copy the character image, and even some boring ideas often come up and then just because he thinks the idea is very interesting.

The most typical is Guo Weiwei's sword san, which always keeps pace with WOW.

However, to Jester's surprise, almost no one talks about how the game can be made fun to play, to be fun to play, that is, to have fun.

This is a very rare thing in the game development industry in Europe, the United States, including Japan, that Jester knows.

Because the first question to be clear from the beginning of a game's development is to make it fun?

Even if there are many failed games in Europe and the United States, they are boring and even embarrassing to play, but you can see that the designers are really working very hard to design the game fun.

And domestic developers rarely work in this direction. And the corresponding is to make a big fuss about the numbers, dig holes, and dope.

It's like you might have to use your brain and work hard to get through the game normally. You breathe a sigh of relief and get pleasure.

And domestic games are like letting you open a cheat to play a single-player game, sweeping all the way will be cool at first, and after 5 minutes you will be bored (maybe 5 minutes will require you to renew to remain invincible). So you go and find the next krypton. Then the cycle.

The player is beaten by the value and eats viagra ~ to get a short-term pleasure ~ feeling. And when the effect of the medicine is too strong, I don't think it's fun, and I found that Krypton has gone into tens of thousands.

Of course, it is expected that only a very small number of domestic players will pay attention to the fun of a game, but will pursue the results of the game more profit-seeking. Even in some well-known game forums, players are not the focus of discussion on this aspect, and they prefer to quote scriptures in the forum as spiritual shareholders spray each other's games to get pleasure.

Yes, at the time of Jester Crossing, China had indeed become the second largest market for global games.

The first largest market for online games and the second largest market for mobile games, but the reality is that although the market is constantly expanding ~ expanding, in fact, the money has been made by so few companies, and the domestic game industry is very miserable. Employment is not optimistic, small game companies are closing down in minutes, and game companies that have gained a foothold are also in danger.

In the year that Jester crossed, many people said that the economy was sluggish, and the reality is that the winter of the Internet is coming, but according to the laws of economics, this time should stimulate the development of the entertainment game industry. But at that time, this did not seem to be the case in China, and it seemed that such a law no longer worked.

The wave of small and medium-sized game company closures has erupted like a tsunami. There are even high-level executives in the industry who say that 90 percent or even 99 percent of game companies, especially mobile game companies, will not survive this year.

Why is this so?

Because the giant effect is actually too scary, too scary.

The combined mobile game revenue of Tencent and NetEase in the third quarter of 15 years exceeded 8.84 billion, and the proportion of the two companies exceeded 60% of the market. The entire top 15 game manufacturers in China have almost won more than 90% of the mobile game market share, and the top 50 best-selling products have won nearly 80% of the AppStore game revenue.

In the game market, it is still krypton garbage games that are making money, and the games made by these small and medium-sized game companies are actually no different from Tencent NetEase.

Some people unrealistically fantasize that Tencent can stand up and shoulder the great cause of domestic games, but in fact. This kind of disorderly and brainless game environment is exactly what Tencent wants to see, and the last thing that wants to awaken domestic players is a game company like Tencent, because there are more awakened gamers, so who will play their games?

Jester once thought deeply about the investment ratio between game development and revenue at the beginning.

A free-to-play + kryptonite mobile game. Remove all kinds of advertising fees and make a final profit of one month, such as 300W, and operate for 6~12 months, almost with a net profit of more than 2000W.

For comparison, if you use the same cost to make an excellent and fun paid game without krypton, you can get $2 if you price $3. Then you have to sell 166W copies to earn the same as the above, and in fact, unless a $3 game has a highlight in a million, it is still difficult to stand out among hundreds of thousands of appstore games, and it is already good to sell tens of thousands of copies, let alone compete with those free games.

In this case, how do you get a company like Tencent to calm down and consider the fundamental question of whether it's fun to do this?

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

Even in the traditional game industry in Europe and the United States, there are more and more components of DLC and krypton, because businessmen are always profit-seeking.

Of course, there is no shortage of conscientious manufacturers like CDPR.

Before Jester remembers that there was a very heated discussion among developers in China, the argument was good-isnt-good-enough.

Good is not good enough.

In other words, you're just being good, and that's not enough for a game or a game company.

A game carefully developed by the developer but the sales are dismal, although everyone thinks that the game is very good, but no one will buy it, because now the game industry in Europe and the United States is extremely competitive, you just do this game well, there are always other companies whose games are better than you do and cheaper than your price.

In the future game market, if a game wants to survive from the wolves, it is not enough to do it well, because there are too many game companies that are doing well, and you need to do it well enough.

And the current game environment is not known to be many times better than the future.

Although the competition in the game industry is fierce today, and a large number of game companies close their doors every day, compared to the environment of the future, it is a paradise now.

At least the current players haven't found it to be picky, it's not enough for the game to be good, you have to do it to be good enough.

This is actually the game development model that Jester has been promoting in Mars Entertainment for so many years, that is, when a game is established, discuss whether the game is interesting or not, whether it is fun or not, always put it first, and all other external or internal conditions need to be compromised for this element.

And that's what they've always done.

Wouldn't a game be fun if it ditched all the external touches, such as the graphics, and only used pixels?

This is the internal small DEMO test that Mars Entertainment often does internally.

Therefore, Mars Entertainment has always been a high-quality game for so many years.

Although there are a few games that are not satisfactory, players can still see how much care the design team has put into the development of the game, they are not perfunctory to a game, perfunctory players, but they have made a mistake in judging the preferences of players, because the question of whether a game is interesting to do is a subjective question.

What the designer thinks is great, the player doesn't necessarily find great.

Jester's biggest concern for Hiroshi Suzuki's Shenmue is here, will it wash away the mistakes of the old Shenmue?

The original Shenmue was great, a textbook classic in the design of the entire game, and in every aspect, it was almost the ultimate in the industry at the time, but there was an exceptionally critical problem with this game.

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

Yu Suzuki is a very paranoid person, and Jester worries about that. (To be continued......)