Xu Yiran, President of Multi-Metaverse: Where is the future of the game industry in the era when everyone is hyping the metaverse

The 2021 Future Business Ecological Link Conference and the 6th Golden Top Award Ceremony (“FBEC2021”) will be held on December 10, 2021 at the Shenzhen Greater China Sheraton Hotel. The conference is organized by Guangdong Game Industry Association and Guangdong Province. Under the guidance of Virtual Reality Industry Technology Innovation Alliance, Shenzhen Science and Technology Association, Shenzhen Internet Culture Market Association, sponsored by Gyro Technology, with the theme of “Breaking the Wind and Keeping Upright Innovation”, focusing on cutting-edge Internet fields such as games, e-sports, XR, and Metaverse , To discuss hot topics in the industry. At the end of the year, we gather in Jinpeng City, and we are in the same boat with countless Internet practitioners to discuss the innovation and reform of the future business ecological link!

FBEC2021 “Next Decade · 2021 Global Game and Digital Cultural Creation Summit” invited Xu Yiran, President of Multi-Metaverse, to bring a wonderful sharing on the theme of “everyone is hyping the era of metaverse, where is the game industry going in the future”. Xu Yiran made some predictions about the future of the industry, believing that the multi-platform version of game products will become the same or even multi-platform release will become a trend, and further predictions have been made for MMO and game subscription system.

The following is the speech record:

 

Multi-Metaverse President Xu Yiran

Thank the organizing committee for being able to think of me, because since I sold the company, I have no chance to board the summit forums of various game kcals, because now I don’t represent any big company.

But this is actually better. I can speak more freely. I still adhere to the attitude of talking about dry goods and make bold predictions. Here I will predict the future development direction for everyone, and see if I can predict it correctly. The reason why I sold the company may be because it happened to be five years earlier than others, so I could see the trend of the next five years in advance.

Because I have been running around the world and witnessing how the global game industry develops, I may have a clearer view of the overall situation.

What is the current state of the game industry in the world? Let’s take a look at the status quo first. The first is all major game manufacturers. Because the development cost is extremely high, the development model of the game is changing. Overseas game companies are now learning the idea of ​​long-term operation from China, pursuing one-time investment and long-term collection of money. This is a general trend.

Another trend is that everyone is doing an open world. I don’t know why, it seems that there is no way to make games without an open world. In fact, this is not something particularly difficult to understand, because we all come here as MMOs. Spreading MMO side missions on the map is an open world, rich in gameplay, long-lasting, and easy to add new things to sell services.

Most of the current open world games are 3A masterpieces, and you can find the basic convergence of foreign 3A masterpieces. The original large-scale multiplayer cooperation is being changed to small-scale multiplayer cooperation. If you can do PVP, try to do PVP as much as possible. Most people do not do PVP and make cooperative PVE. What are the benefits of this? Because overseas players like PVE content, they are willing to pay for PVE content. Because of the cooperation model, it has led to more social fun. The same game content can be played many times in teams with different people, and the pressure to update and develop the content will be less. This is a problem caused by cost.

Tencent’s “League of Legends” and “Call of Duty” made mobile games with the same IP very successfully, because the performance of mobile phones is getting stronger and stronger, and mobile games are becoming more and more like terminal games. Everyone is making their own big IP into mobile games, especially overseas game manufacturers, the first time to find partners in China, because their mobile games are not as profitable as their PC and console games, so they now tend to Big IP is for Chinese companies. This is the status quo.

Next we look at the future. There are a lot of certain, certain, and certain things that are happening in the future. For example, game products have the same multi-platform version, and even multi-platform unified release. This is what “Yuan Shen” did. In the past, I didn’t quite believe that this could be done. There were mainly several problems. One is that the publishers are different, and different publishers have different rhythms, and users do not want to interact with each other.

Now this problem has gradually become smaller, because you can post a PC game to make a big market promotion, and mobile games can be distributed and bought by yourself. All versions are unified, no need to find different operators. But the premise is that you can’t make this game with the mentality of making a mobile game. It must be used as a PC-side game to make a product, and at the same time bring a mobile game version. You should not do it the other way.

The second problem is that we always feel that mobile game users are more willing to spend money than PC and console players. But later I found out that this is not the case. As long as the payment model of mobile games is done well, the same model can still make money on PCs and hosts. So I am inclined to use a smarter charging model in the future to make cross-platform unified versions of games online.

Another prediction, I think MMO will resurge. For the Chinese, server-side technology is not that difficult, nor is it great to explore the big world. It should be feasible to make an MMO by taking out things from China a long time ago and distributing them on overseas platforms through a cross-platform approach.

There has not been a new 3A MMO in the Western world for about 20 years. The first reason is that foreigners are not very good at doing this category. Except for Blizzard, few companies have this experience. The second reason is that they dare not do it because the cost is too high. So in the Western world, a whole generation of people have not seen MMO, they have only seen open world and small-scale cooperative PVE games. So it’s not that everyone has no demand, nor that the MMO model is not working well, but because everyone has never seen it and no one does it.

Amazon recently launched “New World”, which has almost reached one million simultaneous online users. According to my observations in the game, about half of the users have played MMO before, saying that they have not seen a 3A MMO in 20 years, and finally there is a new game to play. The other half of the people said that the original open world could be made like this. When these players were born, “World of Warcraft” had already come out. When they grew up, they hadn’t seen any new MMO at all. They would find 50 people. The battle against 50 people is very interesting, so I think MMO will rebound in the western market, and there will be opportunities in overseas markets, and it is likely to be an opportunity for the Chinese.

The other is Play to Earn. Nowadays, there is a popular word in the Internet industry-“Break the circle”. I think the word Play to Earn can break the circle. Ordinary game players can understand it, and people who don’t play games can understand it. It’s better than cryptocurrency, NFT, These words of meta universe are easy to understand, so it is easy to break the circle. But how to design it is not easy. I think the most suitable game model for Play to Earn is MMO. You can go back and learn about it slowly. In my “Get” class, there is a lecture dedicated to the economic system of MmO. You can listen to it.

There are also several trends that will lead to the exquisiteness of indie games. The first is the development engine supported by AI, which can greatly reduce the production cost of high-quality content. Let’s take a look at the latest technologies, such as Epic’s MetaHuman and NVIDIA’s series of new technologies. In the future, AI may become something as easy to use and cheap as tap water, sunlight, and air. The cost of game development in the past ten years has been rising, but after the AI-assisted engine enters the game development process, I think the development cost will turn around and fall. This is my bold prediction.

Secondly, there are some very high-quality models, actions and original paintings on the crowdsourcing platform, which can be obtained at a very cheap price. Because these things are made by everyone in their spare time, many creators even require that as long as they write their names, they can use them for free. These two trends lead to the possibility of making premium games in the future not necessarily so expensive, so the quality of independent games is also a trend.

Another noteworthy phenomenon is: Microsoft’s recently launched game subscription service-Game Pass is very successful, a bit like Netflix’s subscription model. I think the subscription system is very good, because with the subscription system, you will not always dare to innovate in game genres like big manufacturers.

I often give an example. If in a game company, a planner says to make a new game and intends to sell it for $10, but the game process is only 2 hours. Would you invest in such a product? I guess the bosses of all game companies will definitely say NO, right? But in fact, it is possible that some people are willing to pay to play such games. Movies are a form of entertainment with no interaction at all. Everyone is still willing to pay $10 to enjoy 2 hours of movie content. Now you can play 2 hours of interactive game content for $10. As long as the quality of the game is very high, someone will pay for it. But no one does this kind of game, which is caused by the current business structure. If there is a subscription system, this kind of game has a chance to appear.

The subscription system means that the user pays a fixed monthly payment, and a lot of games can be played casually. In this way, some very creative products may appear in the subscription list. Microsoft may be willing to pay to support such products, because as far as the platform is concerned, the more different products, the better. As a subscription-based fee model company, it does not pursue the same game for you to play for a lifetime, but has a variety of games for players to stay on the platform and maintain a subscription status. Therefore, the subscription system will bring the prosperity of game creativity.

Finally, I will talk about PUGC, which is what I am doing now. UGC is not enough, we must add a P, that is, professional. Only professional people can make truly excellent entertainment products. In addition to the AI ​​technology advancement, subscription system and other trends mentioned before, it is possible to support creators to make the games they want at a relatively low cost, and there is no need to rely on large companies and platforms. This is also a trend.

Another trend worthy of attention in the Chinese game industry is going overseas, but how should we go overseas?

The quality of mobile games is a major trend. If the quality of mobile games is improved to the level of PC and console games and then released overseas, there is a high probability that very good results can be achieved in the market. China has the older the better the game development team and the accumulation of good game design experience. We only need to learn some methods of going overseas and the means of making mobile games to gain a good market share.

Nowadays, large domestic factories have successively deployed in Europe, America, Japan, Canada, and the United States. However, for small factories, I suggest that you do not get together to hire foreign employees such as Japan, Europe and the United States. I recommend that you consider talents from Eastern Europe. I suggest that you go to Eastern Europe after the epidemic is over. Observation, a small cost can recruit 3A developers for more than five years. Don’t always stare at the first-tier countries. There are many cheap masters in the second-tier countries, including companies that buy them very cheaply.

The road to the game going to sea must use rolling investment to be successful. Even small companies have to do this. Only if they have an overwhelming advantage on a small-scale battlefield, they can win. Don’t be on a track that big companies have already occupied. Everyone must find a good track. First, the track must be large enough; second, even if there are competitors on this track, the competitors will leave you with a lot of space.

Cross-platform boutique online games are an important category going overseas, but this is aimed at wealthy teams. It’s good if you don’t have any money to go overseas for independent games, but you need to use cultural elements familiar to overseas players for content design; secondly, you must be maverick in art, which looks different from others at first glance.

Finally, let me talk about the meta universe. I also wrote an article about Metaverse before, and I suggest you to read it. The meta universe is not a game, nor is a game a meta universe. What is the relationship between the two? I think that the value of games to the metaverse is greater than the value of metaverse to games.

What value does the game contribute to Metaverse?

There is no game, and there is no concept of meta-universe. The game has paved many development paths for Metaverse, including how to build the virtual world, how to behave, how to design the currency operation mechanism in the virtual world, how to do large-scale multiplayer real-time interactive technology, and so on. The game also provided Metaverse with the first batch of initial seed users, provided Metaverse with a large number of valuable IPs in the virtual world, and provided Metaverse with rich UGC soil.

What value does Metaverse bring to the game?

First, Metaverse provides virtual goods in games and pushes up their real-world value, and provides channels for direct realization without the need to redeem through third-party platforms.

Second, Metaverse helped the game fire UGC. Adding more UGC functional modules to the game, this kind of open design, has the opportunity to capture more users, this is what the real meta-universe pushes us to do that is valuable to the game itself.

Third, Metaverse has promoted the advancement of human-machine interface technology. Before, we paid more attention to vision and hearing, but seldom paid attention to the human-machine interface technology of other senses such as touch and smell. Meta Universe has helped us fund and accelerate all-sensory human-machine interface technologies such as VR and AR. With these technologies, we can make entertainment products more fun. The core value we provide to the world is to make good things for fun. These technologies can help us realize this value, and we should use them.

Fourth, Metaverse has the opportunity to help the game find more users. To put it bluntly, it means breaking the circle. For example, everyone eats together offline, everyone was playing on their mobile phones before. With the meta-universe, in such a realistic scene, we may wear VR/AR glasses to achieve more game interaction, which can help us to bring new users to break the circle to a large extent.

The above is my sharing, thank you all.