Nan Duan

Epic vs. App Stores

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The ongoing fight between Epic and Apple / Google is one of the biggest tech stories of the year. The situation is very fluid, with a lot of developments since last week, and a ticking time bomb by end of August.

Not surprisingly, there’s been a lot of “takes”, most of which is candidly not too useful, and a small amount that have covered the situation from insightful angles. Instead of regurgitating these insights, I thought I’d just list a few here (most of these are usual suspects if you surf a lot of tech punditry):

The Chinese Android app stores example

I think it’s rather futile to debate the abstract merits of “open” vs “closed,” which at the ideological level is the heart of this fight. Tim Sweeney has been very consistent over the years – his public criticism of UWP is spiritually similar to his stance against Apple / Google, and I believe it’s stemming from not merely a business interest calculation (though he is often accused of such), but a genuine belief in “open.” 1

Instead, I think it’s more useful to discuss the Chinese Android app distribution landscape, as a real example of why Epic’s desired state (open up iOS to 3rd party stores and alternative payments) may not be good for consumers. (The linked Chinese post above is a great read on this, below is my brief summary of the same topic.)

When Google abruptly exited China in 2010 (and along with it, the Google Play store), there was a gold rush to fill in the vacuum left in the Android ecosystem. At a 30,000 ft level, a series of things happened:

  • In the beginning there was a flood of independent stores, with notable ones like Wandoujia (funded by ex-Google China head Kaifu Lee’s Innovation Works) and 91 Assistant.2
  • In a landmark deal at the time, Baidu acquired 91 Wireless (which owned the 91 store) for almost $1.9B in 2013.
  • As of 2013 Tencent also had an Android app store MyApp. After Tencent leveraged WeChat’s popularity to promote MyApp (“if you wanted the latest version of WeChat, go to MyApp”), MyApp gradually became one the most popular stores.
  • In 2014, prominent Chinese Android handset brands (with the exception of Xiaomi) formed a coalition called the “Mobile Hardware Alliance”. A major goal of this coalition was to exert influence in the distribution of games (which was recognized as the key cash-cow in app stores) in the Chinese Android ecosystem.

The current state of stores, at a high level, is this:

  • All the Chinese Android brands have their own stores, and because of the coalition, these stores have significant weight.
  • Tencent MyApp is the biggest non-OEM owned store.
  • The once prominent independent Android stores (without backing of OEM or a major social app like Tencent’s QQ/WeChat) are greatly declined in presence.
  • Collectively there are still dozens of stores.

How about the economics – let’s talk about that 50%?

  • There isn’t a unified rate – everything is negotiated. But indeed, if you are a game publisher not Tencent or Netease, the 50% store cut is the common term you will get.
  • Strictly speaking, this isn’t an “Apple-apple” comparison, as these Chinese Android stores call this “joint operations” of games where in theory they are providing more value-add (funneling more traffic etc.).
  • The prevailing rate for Tencent and Netease have been pushed down to 30%. (And of course Tencent keeps 100% in its own MyApp store.)

To summarize, the Chinese Android app store landscape is very much objectively a worse state than the Apple / Google monopoly Epic is complaining about:

  • Consumers have a confusing user-experience (overwhelming amount of store choices, fraud / security / malware concerns, inconsistent UX of the same app across different stores).
  • Developers are typically giving up a much higher share of revenue.
  • Developers have a lot more development costs / headaches (support dozens of app stores, SDKs, builds).

To be clear, it’s not a certainty that we will see a similar end-state if the Apple / Google “app distribution market” and “payment market” is opened up by regulation. (For one thing, the Hardware Alliance thing is clearly suspect to anti-trust scrutiny.) But it is clearly a possibility with strong factual support.

Problems that Apple should address

Having argued why “the grass isn’t greener” on the other side that Epic desires, let’s briefly talk about issues that Apple should tackle. This part is focused on gaming specifically.

For the 30% rate, I do believe (and clearly I’m biased with a vested interest here…) that this should be pushed lower with how the ecosystem has grown and evolved, even if purely arguing from an economies of scale perspective. Ultimately though, economics are a reflection of “who owns the customer”, so Valve’s model of volume-based tiers (starts at 30%, drops to 20% for sales above $50M) isn’t a bad reference. (This is also the common logic in retailer / wholesaler agreements.)

(Alternatively, Apple can continue to make confidential deals with the biggest partners, offering rev share discounts on a case-by-case basis.)

Apple also should update its strategy (and thus policies) regarding emerging services like cloud gaming. The rejection of Microsoft xCloud on iOS feels short-sighted, and untenable in the long-run if cloud gaming does take off. (It’s also a bit silly that at the same time thousands of HTML5 games are available directly within WeChat, which seems like a much bigger violation; arguably xCloud is offering much better games that would enrich the user-experience of iOS gamers.)

To end on a light-hearted note. Every time I write about Apple and mobile gaming, I will bring up my dream for an Apple-designed controller peripheral. I don’t think that will ever happen, but one can dream…

  1. Conversely, Apple, like Nintendo, like Disney, have been decades-long champions of the “closed” side of the debate. Just for transparency, at at the abstract level I lean closer to this camp, because I idolize seamless user experiences (which are typically easier to realize in a “closed” ecosystem). ↩
  2. As a sign of the times, a popular feature-set back then was a PC client that was a storefront and also a manager for the download and installation to the phone, similar to using iTunes to manage iPhone apps. ↩

The Last of Us Part II

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Some notes on the controversial blockbuster sequel.

***Spoilers warning*** I’ll be liberally discussing all aspects of the game, so please do not read further if you want to avoid spoilers.

First a quick note about my play experience – I got the disc a week after the launch date, by which time there was already a massive storm online. Despite my efforts, I did have some key story points spoilt, so going in I was somewhat prepared mentally.

I could only afford to play a couple of hours a day, a bit more on weekends, so it took me a good two weeks to get through. My final session was a 5-hour binge on a weekday night, ending at 3/4am (that day at work wasn’t very productive).

I started the game late, was armed with some knowledge of the drama, and had the play sessions paced out – I felt all these were positive factors that helped me enjoy the game. To me this game is a flawed modern masterpiece, that deserves to be remembered as one of the most ambitious narrative games of the decade.

Narrative structure & theme

TLOU2 follows a very rigorous structure, which I’d break down as follows:

TLOU2 acts

The structure showcases the game’s risk-taking ambitions. In my view there are 2 primary risks taken: 1) the story decision to kill off the predecessor’s protagonist, Joel, as the inciting incident; 2) in a surprise switch at the half-way point, forcing players to play as Joel’s killer, Abby – and revealing that this is a game with dual playable protagonists on the opposite ends of a revenge plot.

In retrospect, to me the game’s real theme is about how people deal with trauma, via a story of hate-driven vengeance. The game delivers a traumatic event to players (Joel’s death), then forces players to go through the stages of grief (both in the game as Ellie, and in real life with their own feelings towards Joel). The perspective change to Abby is an experience in forced empathy, which to me is a secondary theme.

The perspective shift is not new as a literary device – Game of Thrones clearly leveraged this to great effect with memorable characters like Jaime and Tyrion Lannister. But this feels like the most ambitious example in a video game I’ve played, and the effects were fascinating. In the climatic fight between Ellie and Abby, like so many players, I did not want to hit the attack button. But, just like the predecessor’s climatic surgery room scene (which you revisit so many times in this game), the game does not offer you a choice. Thankfully, the game ends the fight mercifully.

I’m not going to go deeper on the narrative and theme – that would be a huge endeavor, and many people have already offered lots of great content. I’ll link here one video I particularly enjoyed.

Game loop & “level” pacing

The game’s narrative beats (the bullet points structure above) serve the long-term and mid-term motivations. At times this can feel ham-fisted: I felt Ellie’s 3 days in Seattle was a bit repetitive in its use of “go to point X to find the next clue about Abby’s whereabouts”. Anyhow, if we zoom in 1-2 levels further, we get to the layers of the “core loop” below:

  • Long-term goal, e.g. find Abby
    • Mid-term goal, e.g. go to Hospital
      • A series of “levels”, or set-pieces

My loose definition of a “level” here is a 5-20 minute section of gameplay made up of elements from the following:

  • Combat, stealth or non-stealth (sometimes forced non-stealth)
  • “Walk and talk”, the most basic way to deliver the story
  • Exploration, which is a lot of ambient storytelling (reading notes etc.)
  • Scavenging and crafting
  • Environment puzzles (some light platforming gameplay)
  • On-rails set pieces, e.g. car chases
  • Mini-games, like guitar simulator
  • Cut-scenes

From a player perspective, I wouldn’t say there’s any crazy systemic design innovations – these are the proven gameplay elements of Naughty Dog action adventures. The craft comes from the thoughtful sequencing & arrangement to create great pacing, and the insane polish (and the vast technical investments to deliver that polish).

What I thought the game did particularly well for pacing, was keeping players on their toes with surprises. Examples:

  • Have you grabbed by an enemy (either transitioning into combat or a cut-scene) as you go through a level transition (“squeeze through this space”, exit this door)
  • Give you a clear environment puzzle, then as you are moving towards the solution, have the floor collapse under you into a mini-boss fight
  • Give you a workbench (for equipment upgrades), as you start reviewing your upgrade choices, have enemies rush you and grab you from the bench

The game does these surprises very sparingly (like only once) – but they are very effective at making you second-guess yourself and stay alert. Is there going to be a jump-scare at that next workbench? (No.)

Also, they are done in a fair way – in the workbench example, these enemies didn’t spawn out of nowhere; they came out of a locked room in the apartment. So if you had planted some mines in front of that door before you engaged the workbench, you would have had the jump on them instead. This is the level of detail and polish that surpasses player expectations.

Transitions – in my view, any time where you go through a transition where you cannot backtrack (e.g. going through a door/gate and blocking it behind you, going down a sliding slope, jumping down a vertical), that’s usually a sign of a level transition, which serves pacing and possibly technical goals. There are also occasionally hard transitions after cut-scenes (teleporting you to a location), some of which I felt created dissonance (after having you struggle mightily for a few hours to get to a place, it seemed trivially easy how you got to another location).

There are some issues for me with the basic gameplay formula. Resource hoarding is a pretty big problem (at least at moderate difficulty). Thematically as a post-apocalyptic survival adventure, the game encourages players to engage in stealth through tight resource constraints. This is in conflict with utilizing the fun combat skills that players unlock. (The player could tweak the difficulty settings very granularly, for example increase the environmental resource amount to encourage more open combat.) To be clear, I actually agree with the game’s trade-off here: the combat is less fun, but thematically more immersive. But it’s one element why some players find this game un-fun to play.

Another problem created by the scavenging gameplay and ambient stortytelling is backtracking. That is, after clearing an area, combing back through it to open every last drawer, and trying to find every ambient story point / collectible. This is again in conflict with the desired pacing. And it also creates narrative dissonance – “I gotta hurry to rescue my friends… but after going through every drawer.” Even in levels/sequences where there was clear urgency, I couldn’t help but think – hey, maybe there’s some rare collectible here, I should take my time.

Lastly, the concessions in the buddy AI was at times immersion-breaking. As a Naughty Dog convention, there are many parts of the game where you have an AI companion. This serves important story goals (after all, without a buddy, it’s hard to have “walk and talk” sequences), and they can assist in puzzle and combat gameplay as well. But in stealth gameplay, they still land in uncanny valley too often – they can sneak around, and will look for positions of cover, but it feels like overall they are still treated as invisible to enemies. I’m not 100% sure of this – there was one occurrence where it felt like the companion was detected; but on the hand there’s probably a dozen occurrences where the companion should have been spotted, but was completely ignored (sometimes comically).

Problematic game length

This was the biggest issue I had with the game. If we take each bullet point in the 4-act structure above as a “chapter”, and each chapter roughly takes up 2-3 hours of game time, then we get to a 20+ hour game length. In my own experience, I got to the end of Act 2 cliffhanger after roughly 18 hours, and ended the game after about 32 hours. For a linear action adventure, it’s both an astonishing feat and an excessive over-indulgence.

I feel it’s the product of compromises – it was set that the game would have dual protagonists, and each protagonist’s arc demanded a experience that couldn’t be too compressed. But the end result is a journey that is both too long and still too rushed. There wasn’t space to flesh out the numerous side characters, and I’d loved to see more of the Seraphites’ story, for example.

I can’t help but think, what if this game was broken into 2 parts, and released episodically? This is most probably a terrible idea, with lots of risky questions – how will the episodes be priced, how far apart would the releases be? How many players would purchase the first episode but not the second? But to me it would seem to be a better match with the game’s ambitions, and could perhaps help position expectations better.

Alternatively – what if the “chapters” were unlocked at an announced schedule? Like an episode a week (more practically, maybe one chapter every couple of days)? There might be something here, if a narrative-focused game’s content release factored in the social media cycle – e.g. the weekly reddit discussion/reactions of the latest Westworld episode, and the community activity leading up to the next episode. Again, probably a terrible idea still…

Player expectations / toxic fandom

I feel we also have to talk about the massive community controversy since the game’s release. In hindsight, the marketing misdirection was probably too clever and came across toying with players’ emotions. And the overly-strict spoiler guidelines to reviewers was also a major lost opportunity to align player expectations. For example, I don’t think there would have been a significant downside for reviewers to discuss the dual protagonists setup – yes, it would have been less surprising in that moment, but the forced experience in empathy would still hold (and players would be less distracted wondering how long the Abby section would last).

I think I can empathize with much of the community angst, especially the most fervent fans who dived in on launch day and were shocked. That moment of shock, and initial grief, became a rallying call online, and took on a momentum of its own. In contrast, professional reviewers under embargo had to process that moment in isolation, and were obligated (professionally) to finish the game and reflect on the whole experience. This is perhaps one factor contributing to the gulf of opinion between professional reviewers and players.

However, this raw emotion of anger / denial is in no ways justification for the massive abuse (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and various other forms of prejudice / bigotry) hurled at the makers of the game. (Unfortunately, this is all too common these days – The Last Jedi and the 2016 Ghostbusters come to mind.) The sense of entitlement is out of whack. The industry, and the fans, need to reflect on this.

And I guess there’s some meta irony that a game about hatred (it’s futility and overcoming it) is the subject of so much futile hatred. It is after all, a video game, a work of fiction. Perhaps this was the 5D chess that Naughty Dog was playing all along. But at the end of day, as a developer, and as a player, I hope that we can see more games take risks like TLOU2, and I hope the controversy doesn’t discourage game-makers.

设计师的执念

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把最近读到、听到的一些东西串起来写篇感想。

最近在听的一档游戏播客，接连两期都是很赞的访谈。先听的一期是访谈Control的Game Director Mikael Kasurinen。Game Director，我想通常翻译为游戏总监，不过我认为游戏导演在这里更为贴切——Kasurinen在被问到职责时，大意说“我是捍卫游戏愿景的人”。

Control是去年相当出彩的游戏，我写过英文点评。Kasurinen整个访谈最令我回味的是，他提到在项目一开始，他就提出了游戏里一切物件皆可被玩家操纵的核心概念，这给技术团队带来了大量的挑战。我想，当时团队大概率是有反对声音或者质疑的，技术同事很可能会问，“真的需要所有场景物件都可被抓取吗？为什么不能是一部分定义好的物件？这个玩法到底是怎样的？”

的确，这里很容易被扣上“策划需求不明确”的帽子，尤其是这样一个似乎找不到参考玩法的主意（并且，也只是玩家若干技能中的一条）。对这样一个需求兴师动众，似乎性价比极低。然而Remedy的这个团队就是把它原原本本地做了出来，把连带的各种细节雕琢到了极致。

我不知道这个团队的氛围是怎样的：这个需求是导演以强大的意念强压出来的，还是团队从一开始就有共鸣去给自己挖这样一个坑。仅从结果看，他们显现出了我标题所谓的“设计师的执念”。

听的第二期节目是访谈Valve的设计师Robin Walker，他参与了VR游戏新标杆Half-Life: Alyx的设计。Walker有几段分享很有见地。

他提到了团队为了找到VR独有玩法的一个研究过程：他们早期做的一件事，就是把当年Half-Life 2的资源在VR场景里加载出来，然后邀请玩家试玩，他们去观察玩家的行为。他们注意到，玩家会走到敌人很近的地方，去全方位近距离观察角色模型——这是在非VR中玩家少有的猎奇行为。于是，团队就试图以此作为启发去打造一个体验，结果是一个玩家不得不近距离接触的boss。他说这个boss战，在很长的时间里面都是有严重问题的，他们也差点放弃了。似乎又是一处“执念”的例子。

他还有一个很实在的项目观点，那就是项目做到了前中期，其实这个阶段你开发的内容越多，离终点就越远。（开辟的战线越多，打磨的工作量就越大。）

Walker还说了这样一句：novel game design is a search problem. 新奇的玩法设计是一个搜索问题。也就是说，新鲜玩法是要通过大量尝试搜寻出来的。他说这是为什么Valve坚持开放的生态：有更多的modder和独立团队去创作，就有了更多的实验尝试，也就离穷举出下一个新鲜玩法更近了一步。（这的确是Valve的游戏创新理念——他们绝大多数的项目，都是把社区里的团队转正而来的。）

他这个讲法，也让我想到了另外一个观点。我前阵子终于读完了Stephen King那本讲写作的书On Writing。King认为，故事不是构造出来的，而是像考古挖化石那样慢慢挖掘出来的。也就是说，故事本身是客观存在的，创作者是在按照蛛丝马迹把这个故事搜寻出来。听起来有点玄学，但和Walker那个搜索玩法的描述不谋而合。

(Early) Thoughts on Valorant

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I’ve wanted to write this post for a few weeks now, but have not yet had time to extensively play the game. Finally I decided I should just jot my current thoughts down (or these thoughts will just be lost in time), noting that it is founded on a dangerously shallow understanding of the core game.

A quick disclaimer: I used to work at Riot Games, the developer behind Valorant, the game I’m about to discuss. My tenure at Riot overlapped quite a bit with this game’s development, but I was never affiliated with the project. My discussion below is based on public info.

Valorant is Riot Games’s new FPS currently in closed beta for PC platform, and its first new game IP since League of Legends a decade ago. There’s a lot riding on this game: in the short to mid term, this game will largely determine whether Riot is an multi-IP games studio,1 or “just” the League of Legends company (which to be clear is an extremely enviable position). It’s also a major test for Riot’s R&D process, as the game has been in development for over 6 years.

Savvy beta marketing

Marketing-wise, Valorant has had a great start. Its Twitch beta key strategy (keys randomly drop by watching Valorant streams, initially with designated partners, later with all channels) has overall been a resounding success.2 This is a mechanic that CS:GO players are familiar with, as CS:GO tournaments have often used in-game drops as rewards for watching streams. One criticism of such tactics is that they inflate Twitch engagement numbers; that certainly happened with Valorant, though I don’t think it’s Riot’s goal to hit specific viewership goals, but rather, to have optimal visibility / hype around the game’s beta launch – and that goal was more than fulfilled. (Possibly over done, even – for a while, Reddit was filled with complaints about not being able to get a key despite watching dozens of hours.)

Riot has also deployed its community engagement best practices to great effect. I’ve skimmed the subreddit over the past few weeks, and the community has generally been very appreciative of Rioter engagement. The “devs vs streamers” showmatch (where the devs won by a landslide) also earned the team a lot of street cred.

Gameplay

The core game (“5v5 character-based tactical shooter”) can be crudely described as 80% Counter-strike and 20% Overwatch. Counter-strike lends the main structure of the game: the 5v5 rounds-based format (with its economy macro play), the map objectives (bomb plant / defuse), and even the broad strokes of the weapons and gunplay feel. It even brought over the esoteric mechanic bunny hopping.3

The limited selection of grenades in CS is replaced with an expansive character system (the “20% Overwatch“), and character abilities are mostly about utility – detection, blocking vision / movement, mobility, and so on. Abilities are not free to use; instead, charges are purchased with hard-earned cash at the beginning of every round, which suggest their origins in CS-grenades. (Ultimate abilities are the exception: they are charged up by kills, deaths, planting / defusing, or collecting power-ups.) Damage-dealing abilities have been contentious within the community, partly due to Riot’s own marketing statements.

Based on very limited game time, I would say the core game works. It builds on the proven foundations of Counter-strike, and adds variety and depth with the characters system. It’s a very strong execution of a clear game thesis.

Bull & bear cases

This is where I make some wild speculations of the game’s future. This is done in earnest as a thought exercise, but take it for it is – subjective predictions and guesses. I’ve also intentionally pushed myself to plant some stakes in the ground, instead of hedging – so there’s a higher chance I look like an idiot in a few years time when I look back at this.

The game environment – cheating, toxicity, etc.

The seedy underbelly of a competitive online game. Riot has had a lot of experience manage this aspect in League of Legends, but it remains a challenge. In particular, anti-cheat is a never-ending war of attrition, and FPS games on PC seem to have the worst of it – PUBG, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, and of course CS:GO. Riot made a big promise – “a commitment to anti-cheat from day one”, and promptly walked into a big, ongoing, controversy with its anti-cheat software, Vanguard. (A quick search will turn up lots of articles discussing this.)

As an aside – the situation around Vanguard tells you a lot about the PC platform. Vanguard asks for very high level system privileges, and raises legitimate concerns about privacy / malware / digital surveillance – the fact it can do so, and needs to do so4, is a problem unique to PC gaming (I’d guess Android is close). There are cheaters on console and iOS, but the scale / prevalence does not compare – for example, see the recent story about console Call of Duty players turning off crossplay to avoid PC cheaters. (And the compatibility headaches it is running into, with all sorts of hardware / software configuration edge cases, is also unique to PC gaming.)

Anyways – some of the Vanguard controversy is founded in conspiracy-theory land – singling out Riot for its ownership by Tencent, and thus leaping straight to concerns over Chinese hacking. Unfortunately, it is a sign of the times, and the trajectory of worsening US-China relations. But I won’t delve into that here.

The bear case here is that the security drama severely hampers the game’s growth, or even sinks it. But I think that would be extremely unlikely.

I am more concerned about toxicity, and how it reduces the addressable audience. Here I’m more pessimistic. I don’t expect Riot to do much better than it did in League – which is to say, the game will have a male-dominant (like, ~90% male) community that is frequently toxic, and often prejudiced and hostile against female (and other minorities) gamers. This bleeds into my next point.

Audience

This is the biggest variable to Valorant’s future (and encapsulates many other variables, so this is not a MECE analysis). To start with my conclusion – if you were to ask me right now, I’d guess that Valorant stays safely within the confines of the existing PVP-shooter audience, and carves out a playerbase from various existing shooters; it will have a loyal following, but it will not challenge battle royale’s position as the leading PVP-shooter sub-genre globally.

The bull case for Valorant is where the game goes beyond converting its bulls-eye target of Counter-strike players, and attracts players of other adjacent PVP shooters – Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, Call of Duty, PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, Escape from Tarkov… Going even more broadly, it could also appeal to players of other types of real-time multiplayer PVP games, such as League of Legends itself – this poses a mild cannibalization risk (which I wouldn’t lose sleep over).

It’s hard to imagine the game converting a lot of non-PVP gamers. I would guess that Riot does not have much interest in targeting them (at least not for this game), in contrast to, say, Fortnite‘s efforts at building a digital lifestyle brand (and catering to a wide gamer demographic). A lot of this is rooted in the company culture, which for years was “HARDCORE GAMER”, but this has been relaxed/widened a bit in recent years. Still, Valorant‘s Game Overview section on its beta website is pretty telling about the intended audience:

Here’s what we think it takes for you to trust a game enough to invest: 128-tick servers, at least 30 frames per second on most min-spec computers (even dating back a decade), 60 to 144+ FPS on modern gaming rigs, a global spread of datacenters aimed at <35ms for players in major cities around the world, a netcode we’ve been obsessing over for years, and a commitment to anti-cheat from day one.

Shooting in VALORANT is precise, consequential, and highly-lethal – we want you to win on your skill and strategy alone.

This is a laser focus on CS players, and disgruntled players who’ve complained about the “shitty netcode” of just about every shooter with a PVP mode. (Maybe it’s just for the beta phase, where they are prioritizing veterans above all else.) I’d argue this language is alienating to players less familiar with PVP-shooter games, who don’t necessarily understand jargons such as “128-tick”, and thus this marketing actively reinforces the existing male-dominant audience stereotype.

The arguments for a bear case come in a few flavors. The first is where CS players churn and flow back to CS, because at the end of the day, Valorant is a different game. There’s some premature indication of this on reddit, where CS veterans would demand certain types of mechanics (that are present in CS). This is a delicate balancing act, and looking at Riot’s early days with League and Dota veterans, I’m not too worried that Riot would over-cater CS veterans. (But the League / Dota analogy would also suggest that loyal CS players will stick with CS, and even be antagonistic to this new game which poses a threat to their community – this would limit the efficacy or targeting CS players to begin with.)

The second bear case argument is where Valorant fails to capture players other than CS die-hards. This does not seem to be the case so far, but I would guess the ceiling here is not high. My negativity here is largely emotions-based: since Valorant’s inception 6 years ago, we’ve witnessed some dramatic new entrants to the PVP shooter space – Overwatch, PUBG, and Fortnite, to name just a few. These games all brought some genre-defining “fresh” factor. I couldn’t help but feel that Valorant in comparison feels too old-school, too familiar (“I know exactly what I’m getting into”). There’s a market premium for novel experiences – for example, that first chicken dinner was unlike any game experience I’ve ever had before – and Valorant judged by its cover is treading on familiar ground.

The last argument is about overserving player needs. I recently came across this excellent article on fy_iceworld – and vivid memories of playing CS1.5 in college in China came roaring back. I was the snob that begged classmates to play the “real game” (as in, play 5v5 bomb defusal mode), and we did very occasionally; most of the time though, we were “messing around” in fy_iceworld or playing 20-person PUGs (with max economy every round, of course). My point here being, if my cohort of CS players 15+ years ago is any indication (highly anecdotal, and a long time ago, for sure), the majority of players around me were playing CS “casually”. (Just like the vast majority of soccer enthusiasts around the world are not playing 11vs11 games on full-sized grass pitches with FIFA rules.) If Riot is too strict on the game modes offered, and don’t provide “casual” outlets in-game, it could cause these “bottom of the pyramid” players to churn, which could also pull away their social connections.

Esports

I don’t have much to say here, except that Valorant is clearly built as an esports title (in the proud tradition of CS), and it should have a vibrant esports scene that helps with maintaining the game’s player engagement. I also think that for spectators, shooters are much easier to understand and follow conceptually (vs MOBAs), and thus the bull case could be as big (or bigger) than League esports today. So I’m personally quite bullish here, and think that Valorant could enjoy disproportionately higher esports popularity relative to its active playerbase.

One bear case argument is societal attitudes towards video-game violence, and how much that impacts a shooter like Valorant when it comes to sponsorships or broadcast coverage. This may be an issue in North America.

Winning the Chinese market

I’m quite bearish here. Valorant will have a difficult road to launch in China (could be delayed by years), and even then its prospects are murky.

There is a strong bull case to be made. Firstly, Riot is owned by Tencent, which has market-leading publishing capabilities in China, and did a phenomenal job publishing League. Secondly, the PC PVP-shooter landscape is much less crowded (and more stagnant) than it is in North America – PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty franchise are all not officially available in the market. Based on one source (tracking PC cafe consumption), the market leader remains Tencent-published CrossFire (launched in China in 2008), followed by Tencent’s self-developed Assault Fire as a distant second (10x engagement gap), with Overwatch and CS:GO in 3rd and 4th place. One could argue that the market is ripe for a new entrant, and Riot + Tencent is a fearsome combo.

But the bear case is quite stacked as well. To begin with, there is the regulatory uncertainty – for years, the trend has been in one direction, and that is tightening. And US-China relations are at historic lows, which makes getting the license approval for a US-based IP that much harder. (There’s a reason the big names above are all absent.) There’s a low (but non-zero) possibility that Valorant never gets a license.

Second of all, the CrossFire audience may not be interested in Valorant, despite the superficial similarities. This links back to my earlier point about fy_iceworld and the audience motivations.

Thirdly, the initial Chinese player reaction has been mixed, which reflects some brand gaps and taste differences. On NGA (a popular forum for Chinese hardcore gamers), Valorant‘s gameplay has been labeled “缝合怪” (stitched-up monster), which is a common term to describe video games that mash-up mechanics from different games5; and the visuals were unfortunately derided by some as “browser-game quality” (not understanding or refusing to acknowledge that it’s a conscious art style choice). These comments partly stem from hostile rivalry between Riot’s supporters and supporters of Blizzard and Valve. Blizzard is clearly the biggest and most beloved studio brand, and their Chinese supporters seem a tad unhappy about Valorant possibly taking players from Overwatch; meanwhile Valve supporters are still holding a grudge from the League – Dota2 rivalry, which has always felt much more intense in China. However, I do think the art style is an acquired taste to many Chinese players.

And last but not least, there’s the question of mobile.6

Mobile

I’ll try to be concise here: my take is Valorant needs to have a mobile version, but it will be very challenging to get it right.

First, the most popular PVP-shooter globally, by a long margin, is a mobile game. PUBG Mobile announced 100M MAU last May. Its sibling game in China, Peacekeeper Elite (rebranded for regulatory reasons), was estimated to have had 197M MAU this March. So it’s plausible that the combined PUBG Mobile franchise currently has over 300M MAU – about the population of the US, or comparable to Twitter’s MAU.

In the China context, what this means is “all gamers are hardcore gamers”, if you define “hardcore” by genre played. To put this into a picture: Chinese moms are playing mobile battle royale with their children.

These Chinese moms will likely never play PC games, if they don’t already. A fraction of these kids will, but I’d bet majority of them will be mobile-only gamers. Clearly, Valorant is not a game made for them (and not every game needs to be made for the widest audience/platform); but I can’t help but feel Valorant cannot be a truly global game (which matters for its esports aspirations), without at least trying to accommodate such players somehow.

So should Valorant make a mobile version? The core game’s methodical play and precision aiming does not translate well to current mobile shooter control schemes (or console either). PUBG Mobile can get away with it, and retain the spirit of the original PC game, because the maps and the encounters are so open-ended – it’s only during close quarters combat where the gameplay feels like a parody at times. Perhaps CrossFire Mobile could be a reference here: the game superficially resembles its PC ancestor, but I’ve heard the engagement with the content is notably different from PC.

In closing…

As a meta comment: this post probably both took me the most time to write (10 hours over 3 nights, as I debated endlessly with myself), and left me least satisfied with the results. I hope you find it marginally useful. If I were to do it again, I would break it up into a couple posts, so I can have the energy and the space to mull over a specific point.

For the game discussed, I guess my overarching sentiment is moderate pessimism over product-market fit. Valorant is strong execution against a clear game thesis – I just don’t know how big that audience is, versus other possible opportunities.

  1. This doesn’t take into account Riot’s studio acquisitions – Radiant in 2016 and Hypixel in 2020, where there’s scant public info about their projects. ↩
  2. Side note – I was surprised that beta keys could only drop on Twitch – I would have thought Riot would have enabled other streaming properties, such as Youtube & Mixer, to also participate. I speculate this is due to a lack of infrastructure (APIs etc.) on these partners, rather than lack of interest on Riot’s part. ↩
  3. I don’t claim to be an expert on FPS games; I couldn’t understand why this mechanic is needed, aside from making CS players feel at home. It reminded me of creep-stacking and denying in Dota, and League of Legends choosing not to implement them. ↩
  4. This is one of the hotly debated points in the controversy. ↩
  5. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is another recent game that got this meme label. Not bad company to keep. ↩
  6. For folks who’ve read some other posts on this site – do I sound like a broken record about mobile yet? ↩

Platform alliances and fragmented user experiences

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As a bit of funny context, I’m writing this post amidst one of the biggest stock sell-offs in recent decades. US stock markets actually triggered their circuit-breakers after opening 7% down, and paused trading for 15 minutes. I thought I’d try to be a bit more constructive with my time (while sipping some scotch), instead of just fidgeting in front of my portfolio dashboard.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now has been a steady thread of gaming news in recent weeks. Despite (or rather, exactly due to) what feels like a more compelling end-user value proposition (stream the games you previously purchased), numerous publishers large and small (Activision Blizzard, Bethesda etc.) have pulled their content from this service. Publishers’ perspective is simple: they really don’t like it when a new service generates revenue off their content, without their permission or share of profits. (This The Verge article gives a good overview and analysis of the situation.)

One interesting development today – on one hand, another large publisher, 2K Games, pulled their content; on the other, Epic Games endorsing the platform with the full weight of their store.

The Epic decision is interesting partially because how transparent Tim Sweeney is with his intent. To quote him directly:

Epic is wholeheartedly supporting NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW service with Fortnite and with Epic Games Store titles that choose to participate (including exclusives), and we’ll be improving the integration over time.

It’s the most developer-friendly and publisher-friendly of the major streaming services, with zero tax on game revenue. Game companies who want to move the game industry towards a healthier state for everyone should be supporting this kind of service!

Cloud streaming services will also be key players in ending the iOS and Google Play payment monopolies and their 30% taxes. Apple has decreed that these services aren’t allowed to exist on iOS, and therefore aren’t allowed to compete, which is megalomaniacal and won’t stand.

Some quick observations. First of all, Sweeney caveats/acknowledges that this support still requires publishers’ participation. So the actual impact / enrollment still needs to be seen. (When I first saw the headline without reading Sweeney’s original tweet, I thought it was an unilateral move and wondered how that would work.) And if it does not result in a great majority of the store’s titles becoming streamable, it could mean a very fragmented (and confusing) end-user experience – for example, would Epic Game Store (EGS) add a platform tag on each title that shows which ones are compatible with GeForce Now?

Second, Sweeney discloses his motive is at least partially (if not primarily) about forming an alliance against iOS / Google Play. This makes theoretical sense, and is the sort of classic partnership that gets discussed in business strategy classes. The reason Epic is so eager to rally support against iOS / Google Play platform rules is simple – across the entire video-games vertical, mobile (due to its sheer scale) is generally the biggest opportunity for revenue growth, and the 30% platform fees are likely the biggest opportunity for profit (bottom-line) growth. This logic is the same whether Epic sees itself as a games developer or a publishing platform for 3rd parties.1

For this particular partnership, I’m a bit dubious whether it will meaningfully move the needle. I’m generally bearish on streamed gaming – I think it’s cool technology in search of a problem / audience, and if the strategy is to reach multi-billion gamers, I’d argue mobile-first (or mobile-only) remains the best path over the next 5 years.

Anyway, the other part I wanted to write about is the fragmented user experience in this age of multiple co-existing / overlapping games platforms. What do I mean? To use AAA games as an example – to date, publishers have all built their own launchers / platforms (Uplay, Origin, Rockstar Social Club) alongside distribution platforms such as Steam, GOG and EGS. Players are all familiar with the experience of launching a Ubisoft game on Steam / EGS, just for it to pull up Uplay and the game itself. Putting aside the obvious overlapping functionalities (duplicate social features, overlays, platform achievements, cloud saves), I’ve also seen cases of weird hand-offs – for example, the initial game download was handled by Epic, but during the first launch Uplay initiates a huge patch.

Also – alliances can be temporary, and every break-up is a chance for fragmentation. When Bungie exited its partnership with Activision on Destiny, and moved over to Steam, what did that mean for players’ friends-lists? (They stayed on Battle.net.) And how long will Bungie keep its PC migration service up? (Not that it matters that much, as inventory rapidly devalues with new expansions.)

There can also be player-caused fragmentation. Again using Ubisoft as an example – I bought The Division 2 on EGS, but purchased the Warlords expansion directly on Uplay. Would this cause any weird experiential issues on EGS? (I don’t know because I’ve not launched the game via EGS since, which I’m sure is exactly what Uplay prefers.)

Similarly, there are (and will be more) fragmented experiences when we talk about “cross-platform-play”. Experiential fragmentation is not going away (at least without a huge fight), because it’s not fundamentally a technical problem, but rather a business model / strategy problem – just as it is in the above case of GeForce Now. In theory, the combination of cross-play and free-to-play monetization is exactly opposite what large platform incumbents like Microsoft and Sony want: they want to have a monopoly on network effects, and they certainly don’t want out-of-network spending. In practice, there are complicating motivations,2 and some games like Fortnite have a big enough audience to force the issue, though as we have seen these games remain the exception.

From the end-users perspective – a lot of this is exactly an argument for a vertically integrated platform with monopoly market share, in exchange for an user experience guaranteed to be seamless. For PC, that sounds a lot like Steam, which I guess partially explains the player anger towards EGS. But Steam’s monopoly was always built on shaky grounds (the underlying attributes of the PC platform), and Steam’s margins were Epic’s opportunity.

  1. By the way, if it’s not clear, I am not being critical of Epic’s motives. ↩
  2. Microsoft as the also-ran to Sony, has an incentive to open up and share the network. ↩

漫谈内容渠道与平台

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This is a backup of a wechat account post, dated Feb 5 2019.

这篇与游戏无关。

这些天，因为2019-nCoV疫情，想来中文网络媒体流量都是井喷的状态，也在微博、微信上都看到了不少的“强时效”内容（短暂存在散播，之后因各种原因被删除）。结合我自己公众号发布的粗浅体验，便有了以下感想。

微信公众号是个极度受限的内容平台

此平台对个人创作者的限制是非常大的，内容不能添加“外链”（常规的html链接）、个人公众号没有评论功能（2017年以后注册的），单这两条就已经和主流的国外内容平台形成了巨大的反差。

制造如此苛刻的条件，其一当然有个极大的环境因素，就是中国的内容审查，无须多言。其二，也反映了中国网络商战的丛林法则，即正面战场上腾讯、阿里、头条系的严酷流量之争，以及地下灰产的各种奇葩游击战。

（顺带吐槽一句，公众号平台的内容编辑器的交互体验。。。可能是我用不惯吧，不过真有种15年前web1.0时代产品的感觉。）

那为什么大量内容创作者还是会牺牲这么多，选择公众号平台呢？因为另一边读者的体验的确不错：app内阅读体验、社交分享都是极其便捷的，而围绕公众号订阅的内容推送、发现也是对读者与作者皆有价值的体验。简而言之：流量啊！

平台的权力

说回到这些天大量的内容举报、删除。首先要说：私有的商业平台对内容进行审查、乃至删除，不管出于何种动机，在商业与法律规则上绝对是平台的权力。

有趣的是，美国的平台（如Facebook，Twitter和Youtube）过往是躲在“希望提供绝对的言论自由的平台”的挡箭牌后，而不去履行一些其在社会价值层面应扮演的审查角色——比如，对散播各种谣言、阴谋论、对受众进行极端化洗脑的内容放任自流，乃至2016年大选被境外势力（俄罗斯）利用操纵了选情。因此，近年来美国各界对这些平台的压力是迫使其更多地承担内容审查的义务，以消除其平台内容对社会的负面影响（经济学原理中的负外部性）。

中国的情况当然是有点反过来的：平台都是有强大的自审压力的。前面也说了，逻辑上我也尊重平台的权力。不过，作为一个创作者，我也当然会想有保护自己声音的权力。这便回到了经典的内容创作者（媒体）的两难选择：依附平台，有流量、没控制；自建渠道，有控制、没流量。

过去15年的起承转合

以下思维有点发散、跳跃。

我在网上写博客已经至少15年了。最早是在水木BBS的博客（那时写的都是些没有营养的扯淡灌水）；经历了2005年初的接管事件后（巧了，今年正好15周年），曾经把内容东搬西搬到几家境内外的博客平台上。不过那些平台也各种不稳定，便萌发了自建博客的想法，一直持续至今。

15年前正是自建的黄金年代：开源的LAMP技术栈以及基于此栈的开源Wordpress，大幅拉低了入门门槛与运营成本；RSS的普及以及各类RSS聚合应用的兴起，努力引导着读者用户去定制自己的阅读列表。

其后的演变：一来是社交网络兴起带来对内容消费习惯的争夺，二来是海量媒体内容井喷后面临内容发现等问题（这也是为什么会有类似今日头条这样的智能推荐切入点），三来是PC到移动终端迁移引发阅读场景剧变。2013年Google Reader关闭，现也可视作RSS作为一种面向大众消费者的技术的墓志铭。

对于个人创作者，主观感受就是：还在自己的网站上写文章的人已经很少了，内容都在一些平台上（比如国内微信公众号、知乎专栏等等，国外硅谷科技圈似乎很多人都在Medium上写）；内容发现则几乎完全是在社交网络上。

有趣的是，科技圈似乎总是在经历一些轮回：国外近年来新兴的阅读习惯是订阅newsletter，即以邮件订阅的形式获得一些创作者新内容的直接推送。不得不说这有点搞笑：这不是RSS的推送体验，以更古老的email协议卷土重来吗？然而它的确颇为流行，比如我常看的Benedict Evans的周邮件，始于2013年，如今有超过13万邮箱订阅。这里还有一个付费的分支，即比如Stratechery、Above Avalon这样的内容创作者自建的付费会员推送。

说到newsletter订阅，也是有平台和自建之分的。其实古董的wordpress，原生就支持邮件订阅，但这种推送貌似很容易被邮箱平台的算法认定为垃圾邮件。故此邮件推送需要接一个mailchimp之类的管理服务。另外，如果希望对内容进行收费，也就需要整合一个支付系统。上面提到的Stratechery等，把自建渠道走到底，也算是走出来了，是其创作者的全职主业。而大多数创作者可能没有这样的时间与毅力——于是随着邮件订阅的流行，也就出现了比如substack这样的一站式平台：内容在上面发布，邮件订阅、推送，乃至付费，由其提供支持。

（中国大众用户的邮件使用习惯和国外差别很大，商业上来说，上面这些在国内会是另外的玩法。）

为什么要写作

该收尾了。自我一点，说说为什么要写作？先做一个自我定性：我是一个内向的人，但又有闷骚的虚荣心，因此写作是一个获得关注与赞美的方式，这是15年前早期动力。动力之二，是写作是对逻辑思维与沟通能力很好的锻炼，一个复杂的事情，如果不能用简单的文字描述出来，也就是还没有融会贯通。我是很功利的，思维与沟通是平时工作的核心技能，这是为什么断断续续这些年也坚持写了下来。

这是公众号上我写的第三篇。本来开号也主要是希望把中文写作重新练起来，另外从语言上把博客聚焦为英文内容，公众号为中文内容。不过这个平台体验的确不太友好，后面我可能还是以发布到博客上为主，公众号同步为辅。打个广告，我的博客是bayjinger.com:)

Valve的平台困境

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This is a backup of a wechat account post, originally posted Dec 5 2019.

（楔子：写这篇，起因是上周Steam Controller手柄停产的消息，在我看来也算是Valve此前的一套策略的一个完结，故作此文。）

2011年我在加州刚刚进入游戏行业的时候，同事们聊起Valve这家公司都是带着万分敬意的：

  • 它不只是一个创造过数款划时代游戏的顶级游戏工作室；

  • 它也是一个有着令人敬仰的独特企业文化的公司（我们都认真拜读过其员工手册，并将其与Netflix著名的culture deck相提并论），小而美的数百人公司规模，在行业里四两拨千斤；

  • 另外在当时，其数字平台Steam已经初步确立了其PC游戏数字渠道霸主的地位，这也是一个令人艳羡的公司战略转型，之后的走势更是主导着欧美PC游戏行业的潮流（譬如近年来独立游戏的井喷，与其密不可分）；

  • 延伸一点，既运作一个大型软件平台，又直接掌控了平台上最有价值的应用（Dota2和CS），这与微软当年左手Windows、右手Office两大利润中心如出一辙（不愧为从微软出来的创始人）。

在过去的近十年里，Valve这种奇特的小公司、轻资产、平台化的模式表面看起来依然靓丽，活跃用户数不断创新高，其它的指标（营收、平台游戏发行量等）画图大概也都是向右上方迈进。不过，我倒是觉得Steam陷入围城已久，种种破局的尝试也基本都宣告失败，未来十年的走势不容乐观。

对Windows强依赖

我不看好Steam的最大原因，就是因为其对Windows平台的强依赖。而Windows平台的影响力的式微，用A16Z的Ben Evans 2015年的一张经典的图可以概括（推荐拜读其原文”Microsoft, capitulation and the end of Windows Everywhere“）：

（这里的点当然不是说Windows/PC业务崩盘了，而是在巨大的移动端增长面前，Windows平台已经退居次席，不再是整个生态的中心，也就与未来创新、新增长点大体无关了。在可预见的未来，Windows还会存在，缓慢衰老——这里可参考上上一代行业霸主IBM，大型机业务每年还在卖几十亿美元。）

过去十年里，Valve并非没有去积极尝试”去Windows化”。2013年的SteamOS（基于linux的操作系统），15年的Steam Machine（基于SteamOS的硬件），以及配套的Steam Controller手柄，概念上来说是已经垂直整合了整个终端体验，而且处处彰显着Valve借力打力、四两拨千斤的经典思维。

只是，在严峻现实面前，这套操作步步皆输。拥抱linux固然自由了，但作为面向大众终端消费者的操作系统，linux本身就是海市蜃楼（已经快20年了，linux消费终端爆发的春天似乎总是就在眼前）；SteamOS得不到开发者重视，做不起来也就毫不意外了。（前两天看到某外国开发者吐槽，没记错的话大概是这样说的：”linux版本是我们游戏0.5%的销量，却占用了我们50%的客服资源。”）

而Steam Machine所期望的轻资产模式（让有意愿的硬件商来制造），也是很难走得通的。20年前微软进军主机市场，也曾寄希望于有外部厂商能负责硬件，但无人问津（商业模式上这是不成立的亏本买卖），微软只好自己砸钱。

至于Steam手柄，这本身倒是一个大胆的想法（怎样用一个手柄取代键盘、鼠标，以便于在沙发上对着电视玩游戏？），但也可以说是蛮典型的以公司痛点为出发点（而非消费者痛点）的产品——玩家并没有在电视上玩文明6的刚需，而是Valve抓耳挠腮在想怎样把自己的平台拓展到客厅里。

PC渠道的红海残局

回到Steam的主战场，本来似乎波澜不惊的残局（各大发行商的自有平台都只做得马马虎虎，Steam的大哥地位看起来很稳），但突然杀出了个Epic Games这样的程咬金。

Epic的路子迈得很大很野，而且似乎很清晰地就是在模仿Valve当年的策略，以一个现象级游戏堡垒之夜的用户量和利润为依托，强势拓展平台业务：

  • 打分成价格战、花重金签独代来吸引开发者，这其中还自然利用了其UE4引擎的垂直整合；

  • 坚持每周免费送一款游戏去拉玩家；

  • 最野的一步是在安卓端，借堡垒之夜安装包自建渠道，无视Google Play。

面对Epic的搅局，以及一个没有什么大增长点的红海市场背景，Steam的市场份额与利润几乎必然下降（平台分成下调恐怕只是时间的问题）；如果应对不当，得罪了开发者或玩家，甚至可能让出龙头地位。

破局思路？

那么Valve面对这样的局面，有哪些宏观策略选择呢？

若继续坚持平台为核心的策略方向，那还是要回到”怎样在windows之外有存在感”这道题的解法，而在微软、索尼、任天堂、苹果和谷歌的主机/手机生态里面似乎都看不到什么明显的空间。（Steam的iOS app，存在很久了，基础的社交、购买体验实在是乏善可陈；而且稍微大胆一点的想法，比如通过app来云游戏玩自己steam上的游戏，也极易触及苹果平台规则的禁区。）哦，或许欧美安卓生态上，随着Epic对Google Play商城的公然挑战，会有更多的文章可做（会引来更多的效仿者），但Steam并不像Epic那样有个安卓爆款游戏/应用作为天然的流量切入点。

如此这般，平台策略里好像也只剩下垂直整合、开辟新硬件平台这条路了。而VR，看起来是Valve的一个重点布局，毕竟连当年发家的Half-Life IP都拿出来为VR站台了。只是，VR概念热闹了这么多年，能看到的杀手级游戏好像也就是Beat Saber（开发团队刚刚被Facebook Oculus收购）；对于硬核游戏，单单是输入方式上就还有很多基础科研要做。

抛开平台策略不谈，其实作为一个玩家当然是希望看到Valve能继续推出好的游戏。回归游戏研发的本位，Valve是有巨额的IP财富的，但近年来的AAA开发的团队规模又已经上了一个量级。在玩家膨胀的预期面前，Valve的中小团队能否对经典IP交出满意答卷，恐怕并不乐观（卡牌游戏Artifact的雪崩就是实例）。

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands (2017)

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I’ve been holed up at home due to the 2019-nCoV coronavirus outbreak. The news and social media coverage got really depressing really fast. This got me itching to play a laid-back, single player, third-person-shooter with modern military weapons.

Turns out, there’s not many games that fit all of the above. Max Payne 3 was the first game I turned to, even though I had already played it years ago. I quickly remembered my previous annoyance at Rockstar’s heavy-handed narrative style in that game. I could go back and play Max Payne 2, which is probably my all-time favorite third-person-shooter… But the graphics do look a tad dated now. So ultimately I ended up buying Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands during the Steam sale for $30.

(Loosely summarizing the game’s setting: you play as a covert operative in a fictional version of Bolivia that has been overrun by a powerful local cartel. Your goal is to bring down the cartel one territory – from a huge open-world map – at a time.)

I had quite a lot of hesitations going in. The game had fairly mixed reviews (69 on Metacritic for PC), many of which seem focused on the repetitive missions and formulaic Ubisoft open-world. I thought I was okay with these faults – the “job to be done” for me was to chill and mindlessly shoot up some bad guys. I was a lot more concerned with some criticisms around stealth gameplay – to be clear, I didn’t want much stealth gameplay (see my “job to be done”), and I didn’t want to be frustratingly replaying some missions because of stealth requirements.

Thankfully, this game is primarily an open-world shoot-em-up, and stealth is mostly optional.1 Yes, if you crank up the difficulty setting and go for realism, you shouldn’t expect to be able to outgun whole armies (with air support) by your 4-man squad. But at regular difficulty you can certainly approach most areas “weapons free”, especially if you are riding in on an attack chopper with mini-guns blazing. (Doing so has been quite cathartic, in my current state of mind.)

Indeed, the attack chopper approach makes most early to mid-game level content feel broken thematically. The session loop becomes “scour the map for a nearby attack chopper, get it, and then blaze through missions”. To balance against this, some later areas are designed with SAM missiles to enforce a no-fly zone.

Quick commentary on vehicles: like any proper open-world, there’s plenty of variety across land, sea and air, but by far choppers offer the most utility – they are the easiest to control, seem just as fast as the planes I’ve seen, and offer insane firepower. From a design perspective this seems quite unbalanced. As a random idea, setting an ammo limit (at higher difficulties) could be a good way to bring them in-line for players who want more realism, without sacrificing the laid-back gameplay at lower difficulties.

Another commentary I have is around what makes the formulaic open-world core game loop sticky. It’s all about the layering of activities and rewards. A typical mini-loop looks something like this:

  • Look at world map – pick an objective
  • Seek a mode of transportation, often involving acquiring the transportation by force which becomes a player-created mini-quest
  • Travel to objective destination – en route, get offered many optional distractions, from emergent world events (GRW doesn’t offer this, but RDR2 and The Division for example both do this a ton), to optional side-quests / rewards
    • Get sidetracked by optional distractions, after which the loop is reset or continue to original objective

    • Arrive at objective destination, get offered again nearby distractions (some may be trivial, like a collectible reward)

    Finish objective and restart loop (the whole loop might have been anywhere from 5-20 minutes)
  • This short loop is quite sticky, even on repetitive play into the hundreds of hours, as it offers both nice natural branching activities (as well as a player-driven overarching goal), and lots of rewards big and small. All of this is layered on top of the most basic loop – the satisfying gunplay of every single enemy encounter (the audio-visual feedback of a headshot or bullet-spray).
  • After so many open-world games, the above seems common sense, but there are still serious offenders that break the flow – Far Cry 5 immediately comes to mind with its heavily intrusive story-quests, which when triggered will literally snatch you from whatever you were doing (like, flying a chopper) and declare you have just been captured. (That was enough for me to churn from that game.)

    • My last commentary is regarding loot. As a modern military shooter, guns and gear naturally bring a deep loot system, and this game goes as deep as any. There are both standard guns with lots of modification options (which all need to be unlocked), as well as special unmodifiable guns (effectively, legendaries). These loot (there seem to be hundreds of guns) can be acquired via missions, achievements and/or micro-transaction crates. At first glance it looks impressive and desirable, with lots of “chase” items; but after 20 hours or so I think the “chase” items feel largely cosmetic and diminishing returns hit hard (after all, do you really need 20 assault rifles that largely play the same?).

    1. So far I’ve only encountered one mandatory stealth – no kills – mission, which involves a cameo from Sam Fisher. ↩

    Annual parties in China

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    With Chinese New Year right around the corner, the annual ritual of burning a full month on corporate annual parties has thankfully come to a close. Here I’m jotting down some observations about the practice.

    First off, to state the obvious – Chinese New Year (CNY), which usually lands somewhere in January/February is a big deal. The whole country shuts down for about a week, as literally hundreds of millions of people scramble to get back home for family gatherings. For corporate life, right before CNY annual bonuses have usually just been decided; there are a lot of year-end business summaries, presentations and discussions.

    And then there are the annual parties, which occur at every level of the org. Tencent, for example, has a corporate annual party (tickets are raffled) usually held at a sports stadium, where key executives take part in some performances. Then the business units will have their own respective parties, trickling down to the departments / teams.

    There are 3 typical components of any party:

    • The performances, usually singing / dancing acts, and often modestly budgeted mini-films. Usually each sub-department provides one act
    • Prize raffles, which occur throughout the night, with each prize’s sponsor (a “boss”, partner team etc.) clearly identified. A current-gen max-spec iPhone is a typical good prize, while grand prizes can go quite a bit higher. If a “boss” (say, a director level manager) happens to win a prize, there can be a loud chant of “double”, which means the “boss” is supposed to re-draw the raffle and double the reward out of their own pocket
    • Drinking and toasting. For mid-level managers and above, this feels like the main function of the night: an elaborate and potentially stressful ritual of toasting and hazing, accompanied by private conversations. These conversations are often powerful bonding moments where important business alignments are forged / reinforced. It’s one huge networking and alliance-building session facilitated by a lot of alcohol

    The reason I said at the beginning that a full month is consumed by these annual parties at various levels is because of the invitation format. All these parties can have guests external to the org, and it is important to pay respect (and who you send to the party shows your level of respect to the host). If your work depends on a web of relationships with other departments at the company, you may be expected to attend a whole host of parties to oil these relationships. Which ones you go (and skip) reflect your priorities.

    At the ground level, these parties are rare moments for the team to vent and let off some steam. At the studio/team level party (usually the smallest and most intimate party you attend), many people get very, very drunk. Subordinates team up and get their team leads drunk. Disciplines which feel they have been under the whip of another discipline (say, game design barking orders at engineering and art, as is the norm in Chinese studios) extract revenge. The next day often is still a work-day in theory.

    Thoughts about 2019

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    An unfashionably late (as usual) post about 2019 and the big games industry themes that I found interesting. Similar to last year’s post this will be focused on the China perspective.

    Further global footprints

    A continuation of the past several years – 2019 saw Chinese devs & publishers continue to expand globally. Representative titles such as PUBG Mobile continued to gain ground, ending the year as one of the year’s biggest games in terms of revenue and active players. (Note that the game’s revenue is going to be meaningfully higher than popular estimates, as the game is integrated with various non-Apple/Google 3rd party payment channels that are significant – or even the majority in terms of payments market share – in Southeast Asia and other emerging markets.)

    Similarly, Garena’s Free Fire was also raking it in – primarily from Southeast Asia and South America – reporting over $1B in lifetime revenue since its 2017 launch. (Garena is based in Singapore, though Free Fire‘s dev team is based in Shanghai if I’m not mistaken.)

    To sum it up – real-time competitive PVP mobile games (by Chinese developers) PUBG Mobile, Free Fire and Mobile Legends are now household names across the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and South America.

    It wasn’t just about emerging markets – Call of Duty Mobile blew open the gates to the prestigious North American market. While it has a lot to work to do to lift monetization, it is likely changing the perspectives of the gamers who have the most platform choice (and who have been the most snobbish towards mobile gaming).

    IP partnerships

    Staying with Call of Duty a bit more: I’m very confident we are going to see a lot more of these types of East-West IP partnerships, purely out of necessity. Simply put, I’m not aware of any western studio that have the proven capabilities today to execute in-house against the development and publishing of a mobile game similar in technical complexity to PUBG Mobile or Call of Duty Mobile. Epic and Fortnite is the closest example I could think of – but even there, their mobile optimization and global footprint pales compared to the above.

    In a way, these partnerships, or talks of such partnerships, are nothing new – for example, over the past few years, Blizzard have certainly talked several times with Netease, Tencent et al about mobile projects around all of their various IPs. (Personally I’d love to see a Starcraft game on mobile.)

    But what is likely new is the seriousness of these conversations now – the Chinese devs have a lot more proven successes to point to, and the western IP holders are a lot more educated about the proven market demand. So expect to see a lot more of these, and possibly a lot sooner than you’d guess.

    Chinese design innovations

    What I personally found most interesting last year though, was the startling success of Chinese devs when it came to their biggest deficit traditionally – game design innovation. It was truly a break-out year.

    Consider the following list of titles:

    • Auto-Chess
    • Archero (I wrote about it here)
    • AFK Arena
    • Punishing: Gray Raven

    Each of these games were hugely successful in 2019 in some way. Auto-Chess spawned a esports genre after itself (and certainly disrupted the landscape of adjacent CCGs). Archero caught lightning-in-a-bottle with its surprisingly elegant (and highly addictive) core combat. Arknights and Punishing: Gray Raven both represent best-in-class games in their respective genres today (tower defense and 3rd-person action), on top of stylishly creative original anime-IP (interestingly, both were apocalyptic sci-fi in theme). And mobile developers couldn’t seem to stop talking about AFK Arena, a brilliant iteration from Lilith Games on a genre they themselves largely created half a decade ago.

    Also – almost all of these games on the list come from relatively unknown developers (the exception being Lilith). This certainly feels like the silver lining in the deep winter that Chinese devs have inhabited the past 2 years (venture funding has been nonexistent since 2017, and the game license issue has froze up the domestic market). I look forward to the many pleasant surprises that the surviving studios will bring to market – whether it’s aspiring blockbusters from known studios such as Genshin Impact (by miHoYo), or the next wave of indie hits.