gaming

Arknights

by

Arknights is a new mobile F2P game from Hypergryph, a studio founded in 2017 in Shanghai. There’s not a lot of info about this young studio, aside from “the founding team are from Google, Massive Black and Cygames.” I’d guess it’s about 50 people in headcount.

The reason I’m writing about this game / studio is I think it’s a good example of the new gen of Chinese developers’ capabilities. This is not a Tencent / Netease studio with massive headcount and brute-force production. The scope and production budget seem carefully managed, while still achieving a sharp impression of high quality and polish.

Game overview

So what is the game? Arknights is an original IP / anime-themed / character-based / tower defense game, with f2p gacha monetization & progression. This video covers the gameplay:

The game art and UI leaves a strong first impression:

Main menu, with the menu UI tilting to gyroscope movement (creating a pleasing effect). The UI is surprisingly clean (especially compared to most Chinese games) given how many features are actually on display
Character info screen
Character skin select (more of a placeholder for now, as most characters only have the base skin)

Chinese studios have developed a specialization in anime-based IP for a while now. To name a few brands that have struck it big in China and/or overseas: Honkai Impact 3, Azur Lane, Girls Frontline, Onmyoji. Given the ecosystem of talent, I’m not surprised that a new studio is able to execute on new IP creation here well.

Core gameplay summary

What I am pleasantly surprised by is the gameplay: this is a fairly thoughtful iteration on the tower defense genre. (Scroll up to the video to see it in action.)

To quickly summarize the gameplay ruleset:

  • Deck-building: players start each level with a deck of 12 characters, plus one optional additional character from a friend (or socially recommended)
  • Grid based, real-time combat, with goal of stopping enemy units from reaching assigned grids on the map. Energy charges up over time, and can be consumed to place units. There is a cap on number of units placed per map
  • Unit placement is based on class restrictions – generally, melee are placed in low ground (where ground enemies will pass through) while ranged are placed in high ground
  • Units can be recalled from the map. Recalled or killed units go through a revival timer, after which they can be placed again, at a higher energy cost
  • Level design elements:
    • map grids where enemies can be pushed off, or give special buffs and consumable abilities (an AOE stun)
    • Large amounts of special level rules, for example melee units only and no energy auto-generation
  • Unit classes that fulfill specialized roles, formed through the following building blocks:
    • Unit attributes: HP, attack damage (physical, magic, heal), attack range, , attack speed, attack effects (single target, AOE, slow), defense, magic resistance, number of units blocked, deploy cost, revive timer
    • Units have special abilities that charge up over time, with diverse effects ranging from basic attack steroids (attack speed buff, increased attack range, next attack hits 2 enemies etc.) to resource abilities (generate extra energy for players) and displacement abilities (pull / push enemies)
The 8 character classes, standard fare for RPGs but provides a good foundation for gameplay depth

This is not a particularly complex system but it has enough space for a lot of variety in characters, and the characters are certainly the heart and soul of the game. Players do need to invest broadly in many characters, as the classes each play specific roles and different levels will emphasize different classes.

The generic single level strategy is as follows: put down some Vanguards (melee, low cost, abilities related to energy generation) for early defense; with more energy, build up your core defense of Defenders (high HP / low attack, can block multiple units), Snipers (ranged physical) / Casters (ranged magic) and Medics (healers); recall your Vanguards to free up cap to put down situational units such as a Support that slows, or a high damage Guard to pick off a single threat. In line with the overall tower defense genre, this flow clearly has shadows of classic RTS games (build up economy, expand, adapt).

The specific level design will ask players to adapt their strategies, sometimes quite drastically: for example one of my favorite level types has no energy generation at all, which forces players to thoughtfully utilize Vanguards throughout these levels as a source of economy.

The common game loop is like this: try out a new level a couple of times to understand the level design and different unit placement strategies; if needed, make some tweaks to your deck to address the level’s specific challenges and/or invest in leveling up your characters, and repeat the level until you are able to perfectly complete it. This is where F2P business model tensions creep in (more on this later).

Macro systems

I don’t play gacha RPG games deeply, but the general systems here look similar enough.

Monetization – premium currency can be converted / funneled through various systems to advance the player’s progression. Most notably, it can be used on 1) gacha draw of characters; and 2) Recharging stamina, which is consumed when levels are played. There are also various real-money packages that can be purchased directly, which offer a bunch of progression resources (crafting mats) such as XP cards for leveling up characters.

Character progression – 4 major components:

  • “Potential” upgrade – duplicate gacha draws of the same character can be consumed to improve character attributes (e.g. reduced cost) up to 5 times
  • Character leveling – only through consuming XP cards (which can be farmed / purchased)
    • “Elite” conversion – at max level, consuming a bunch of mats to advance the character to the next stage (unlock new abilities and passives), resetting the level count. Characters have several Elite stages, which extends the leveling ceiling
  • Abilities leveling – consuming mats to level up the ability level
  • Relationship – accumulated through playing with the character (also using the character in the base building system – see below), grants bonus stats

Another significant macro-system is the base building system, which takes cues from the likes of XCOM and Fallout Shelter:

Base at a glance – certainly looks similar to XCOM
Zoomed-in view of one of the rooms in the base

The base building system primarily serve the following goals:

  • Another axis of progression, as the base is gradually expanded over time and requires mats / resources to do so
  • A reliable source of economy for players to produce mats, and also grow relationships with characters
  • A presentation of the characters
  • Light social interactions amongst players
  • A engagement habit-forming hook, as you need to check in regularly (at least once a day) to collect your outputs and manage your team

As characters are the central driver for player engagement, both in terms of IP / narrative (these are appealing characters that attract players) and progression (want to see these characters become more powerful). The daily engagement thus is fulfilling quests and replaying levels (once you’ve perfectly completed a level, it can be auto-played at 2x speed) for mats, and doing base management about once or twice a day.

A quick note on the game’s social systems. The game directly requests the player’s phone number to register, and doesn’t have any alternative logins (e.g. QQ / wechat openID login). This shows the dev / publisher’s intent to grow its own social graph, but at a notable cost. There are no group social features such as guilds; you can add friends, which gives you the benefit of borrowing your friends’ characters for levels, and also for some light co-op related to base management. As is standard with many gacha games, the game also recommends strangers (through recommending characters to borrow).

Gameplay issues

Briefly discussing the game’s issues:

  • The obvious tension between gameplay and F2P. Game levels have recommended character levels, which compels players to go through the progression grind. After a few days of play the game quickly becomes primarily about the progression grind as the content pace slows down dramatically
  • To make matters worse (and also common for many gacha games), game levels have low replay value. Once the puzzle of a level is figured out, there is very little outcome risk (since there’s low execution variation). The only question then is whether your character progression meets the level’s demands. And thanks to the internet optimal level strategies are only a few clicks away, further aggravating this issue
  • Weak social play. The game feels decidedly lonely and the acceptance rate on stranger invites feel lower than other gacha games
  • Base management quickly becomes a chore

Sekiro, after 80 hours

by

*** This post contains game spoilers ***

I’ve dumped most of my free time into Sekiro over the past month. Here are some thoughts. Apologies for the sprawling wall of text – “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Combat evolution

Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro represent 3 different iterations of the same foundational design principles of From Software. Each iteration after Dark Souls comes with significant additions but also subtractions. The end result is each product is based on a “proven” formula but also with enough differentiation to not just be a “bigger, badder” sequel.

Taking combat as an example, the higher level principles of SoulSekiroBorne combat in my opinion are the following:

  • The trifecta with regards to input – output:
    • Actions have consequence. The player is strongly encouraged to be thoughtful about every input, the wrong action at the wrong time will be severely punished, while right choices are highly rewarded
    • “Hesitation is defeat.” This Sekiro NPC quote perfectly sums up the real-time, split-second decision making required
    • Responsive, precise controls, in return for the strict requirements on player input (note the difference between responsive controls vs fast actions – this short video explains it visually)

With regards to enemies:

  • Enemies need to be respected and studied. Even the most basic enemy can have lethal combos or overwhelm you in numbers. On the other hand, even the most fearsome looking enemy has clearly exploitable weaknesses that are waiting for you to learn
  • Appearances can be deceiving; unexpected variations in animation timing create depth. The large, slow enemy that has a surprisingly quick slash. The extremely slow attack that punishes you for taking action too early. The suspense of different wind-up animations, some which have long pauses. This is also why each enemy must be studied and practice is required to develop muscle memory
  • Your instinct / fear works against you. The safest place when you face a huge menacing boss is often up front and personal. Instead of strafing and waiting for openings to whittle down your foe, you might find it better to go as aggressive as you can

Zooming in on the specific combat mechanics – Dark Souls at its core is the following:

  • Resources: HP, stamina
  • Defense: dodge roll / back step, block and parry
  • Offense: light and heavy basic attacks, kick, leap attack, backstab; large variety of weapons

(On paper this is not a particularly complex or exciting ruleset – for example, there are no special abilities and flashy combos. The generally slow animation timings may even make it look boring; but it provides enough space such that when you add in weapons variety the sum is a very rich system.)

Bloodborne‘s iteration:

  • Resources: Dark Souls + orange health (window to regain lost health by doing damage)
  • Defense: Dark Souls – block
  • Offense: Dark Souls + weapon transformation; smaller weapons catalog but much more unique weapons

These changes cohesively supported Bloodborne‘s design goals of offering faster-paced, higher risk combat with more offensive combo variety (in conjunction, character movement and animation times were also sped up).

Sekiro‘s iteration is a more significant deviation from the base formula, and all of these changes can be viewed in relation to how they serve the overarching design goal of simulating a deadly sword duel with a constant flurry of swords clashing:

  • Resources: Dark Souls – stamina, + posture
    • Removing a generic resource stamina (consumed both in offense and defense) with a defensive resource posture strongly encourages aggression
    • Posture is also a win condition in and of itself, and its slow recovery mechanic again adds urgency and aggression
  • Defense: Dark Souls + jump + mikiri counter; parry evolved into deflect
    • Deflection is a pivotal rhythm game that consumes most of the player’s attention, as how good you are at deflecting directly impacts how fast you are expending your own posture
    • The addition of jump (and double jump) as a regular button is significant, and necessary for thematic reasons as well
    • Deflect, jump and mikiri counter form a rock / paper / scissors mini-game in relation to enemies’ normal attack, sweeping attack and thrust attack
    • Dodge becomes extremely situational, as generally speaking a perfect deflect is strictly advantageous to dodging (both avoids damage, but you are “doing damage” to the enemy’s posture through perfect deflect)
  • Offense: single katana weapon, special attacks (combat arts), variety of prosthetic tools; grappling hook, ninjutsu skills (spells cast during backstabs), and some very specific situational attacks (lightning reversal)
    • While it looks like a lot due to the special systems added, they actually occupy very little design space (think of them as heavily situational or resource-gated supporting functions that unlock different gameplay patterns). On offense Sekiro has a tight design budget – there’s only one weapon and one basic attack button. In my view the bulk of the design budget – the amount of complexity that a player can handle in the combat system – went into the intricate defensive choices and posture / deflection as the critical interaction, while offense is largely “spam basic attacks at the right time”

It’s worth noting that Sekiro is a much more restrictive game in combat – players largely cannot opt-out of the posture / deflection system. Enemies, especially later ones, do not offer many vulnerabilities if you don’t engage in deflection / counter-attack, and there are several mini-boss fights that are primarily skill-checks on deflection. Additionally, the “no-charm” de-buff unlocked after the first play-through further emphasizes proper deflections, as blocking now costs chip damage – I suspect this was “the way the game is meant to be played” but it was found to be too difficult through play-testing, thus it was converted into an opt-in difficulty feature.

Tight scope management

As a game producer it’s hard not to think about scope when I play games. As far as I can tell, Sekiro exercised really tight scope management in a very thematically resonant way.

I’m of course, first of all thinking about the level design. Ashina Castle is an intricately designed location that serves as the hub of the game both geographically and thematically. The general play-through has the player reaching Ashina Castle, going to a connected location (e.g. Senpou Temple), and then coming back to Ashina Castle which has gone through a transformation due to plot triggers. In a full play-through the player would play the Ashina Castle “level” 3 full times, with different enemies each time. This is in contrast to most AAA games where an elaborate level is only experienced once and never revisited (much like an expensive set-piece in a Hollywood blockbuster).

It’s not limited to Ashina Castle – many locations, including boss-fight levels, are used twice, in what certainly feels like a nod to the game’s byline (Shadows Die Twice) and theme. Also, the game’s gating of the water-diving ability also encourages re-exploration of earlier areas.

Similarly, the game is very frugal in its roster of enemies. A quick and not scientific comparison of the list of enemies in Bloodborne vs Sekiro shows a 68:45 count (this doesn’t include bosses), which is a 34% decrease. There are some enemies that you fight throughout the whole game (and consistently give you a headache with their tight moveset), such as the Lone Shadow Ninja.

Some of this is thematic: in a game about sword-dueling in Sengoku-era Japan (even with some fantastical elements), there are tighter constraints around what makes a good enemy1. Some of this is gameplay driven – a single Lone Shadow Ninja can easily take you a good minute to defeat, and generally if you face more than a couple of enemies at once you will be overwhelmed, thus there’s a much higher emphasis on quality vs quantity.

Additionally, multiplayer was entirely removed. While Soulsborne multiplayer was optional (I’m not a PVP player in those games, since I never “git gud” enough), they are an important, integral part of the PVE design (covenants, co-op play etc.). For Sekiro, multiplayer doesn’t fit with the story (you are playing Sekiro, not a player-created character) nor the combat scope (all players use the same katana). Those are not unsolvable problems – but the single-player only decision must have been made very early in planning. The trade-offs of this decision are well discussed here, with the below benefits mentioned:

  • Bosses can be designed strictly for single player. It also means players must beat the game on their own (no summoning help)
  • Level design don’t have to take into account multiple players and the emergent interactions (especially in a PVP context). This is a substantial reduction in development scope
  • Players can pause the game at any time – beyond a general benefit to all players, this actually unlocks some interesting gameplay for a small segment of players, by enabling them to hotswap abilities in the middle of combat

A few blemishes

My biggest complaint with the game is around the camera system. At a glance, Sekiro shares the same camera system with other From Software games. This is a proven system that generally works well in supporting a controller-based 3rd-person action game.

A quick video comparison of Sekiro and Nioh (another samurai / shinobi themed game with some Souls-like elements) in two somewhat similar boss fights:

Sekiro’s camera is closer, and more fixed in position behind the player character; Nioh’s camera is more pulled back and more fixed to the world (the player character can move in a direction for a short distance before the camera starts to track). This can be summarized as an action camera vs a tactical camera.

Sekiro’s camera choice fits strongly with its gameplay – the sense of danger and feeling of intensity are superior. It does however have severe limitations, most notably in tight spaces where players often are fighting the camera:

This fight is the most flagrant case, where the tight arena and the extremely nimble enemy combine to make the camera behave erratically. (In this video the player does a great job of avoiding tight corners that causes the camera to break down and lose target lock, which is an even greater offense.)

The camera’s limitations also has a cost on boss design. In a couple of boss fights, the bosses have aerial movement that cause them to go out of camera and breaks target lock – these seem intentionally designed and force the player to frantically react to reposition the camera. I don’t find these to be rewarding skill-tests and cause more frustration than satisfaction. More generally, when you are in close proximity with the boss (especially those with a larger character model), it can be hard to read the enemy animation because it’s blocked or out of camera.

Aside from the camera, the game slightly suffers from bad early game difficulty tuning. It’s not that the early game enemies are hard; playing Normal Game+ it’s obvious how vulnerable / slow they are. It’s that in the first play-through the player character is severely deprived of HP and heals initially, which make mistakes in early sections overly punishing.

My other gripe is some optional mini-bosses (Headless and Shichimen Warriors) which require a consumable item (Divine Confetti) to effectively fight (they are almost immune to physical damage). It’s an unnecessary annoyance especially as this item is very rare until late in the first play-through.

Closing thoughts

Overall Sekiro is an excellent game. It’s a coin-toss between Sekiro and Bloodborne for which is my favorite From Software game. It’s the work of a studio that has been honing their craft over a decade in a sub-genre they created. And putting my game producer hat on, that’s a serious competitive advantage – not just in terms of know-how of the design space and sensibly managing scope, but also likely mature tools, workflows and pipelines, which collectively make developers’ lives a bit easier and the quality better.

Zooming out, that is the state of the industry we work in – in every genre you could probably name a studio that has been successfully tackling it for over 10 years. So for the upstarts and new entrants you really have to think about not only what you bring to the table (to players), but also how you are bridging the development learning curve versus the incumbents.

  1. Sekiro isn’t afraid to throw in a good joke here – one of the toughest regular enemies is a dual-wielding white monkey. It’s harder than some mini-bosses ↩

Let’s talk 996 / crunch and GaaS

by

This is going to be a difficult topic to write about, and one outside my usual product strategy focus. However, it is an incredibly important topic, and one that I have some frontline exposure to, thus I do want to exercise my mental muscles to put together some coherent points.

A brief recap

  • 996 refers to the often unspoken, but in some cases explicitly spelt-out work hours at many tech companies in China (9am-9pm, 6 days a week). There has been an ongoing debate in China the past few years, and recently Jack Ma and Richard Liu, founders of local tech giants Alibaba and JD, both voiced strong support of the model (Liu claimed even though he can’t work as hard as he used to, he still works 8-11-6 hours). Also, I don’t think it’s a pure coincidence that the rise in discussion of this topic is happening while the Chinese tech sector is widely predicated to face its most challenging years (and thus widespread hiring freezes or downsizing across the big names).
  • As I’ve commented before, the gaming vertical is viewed as much more strategic / integral to Chinese tech giants (it’s a core part of many Chinese tech conglomerates’ business model – gaming is seen as an obvious way to monetize traffic you’ve aggregated on your consumer-facing web properties, similar to how advertising is often the de-facto model in Silicon Valley). So the 996 conversation in China almost wholesale applies directly to the Chinese gaming industry.
  • In the west, gaming is a much more insular / isolated industry (in relation to the broader tech sector), with its own history of excessive work-hours and its own label to the issue – crunch. Crunch has always existed, thanks to the combination of scope and polish arms-race, ever-high player expectations, and fixed deadlines tied to major seasonal launch windows (and quarterly earnings pressure for the publicly listed games publishers). However, in recent years, the dramatic growth of Games-as-a-Service (GaaS) threatens to further exacerbate crunch, as GaaS fundamentally means a never-ending live development & release cycle (until the project hits end of lifecycle and is no longer financially viable), which puts sharp focus on the inability of studios to meet players’ insatiable demands for content. Fortnite and Apex Legends, two of the biggest names in GaaS currently, thus both had articles discussing the content / crunch tension.

  • Underlying GaaS economics

    • It’s worth doing some dissecting of GaaS economics. Firstly, GaaS similar to many general internet services, exhibit strong winner takes all tendencies:

    • Games, in particular those in a GaaS model, have sharp network effects (the more players you have, generally the better the experience for everyone, and conversely beneath a player-base threshold the game is unplayable)
    • Games, somewhat unique to other forms of leisure (especially physical sports, which PVP games share many other attributes with), have a much higher threshold for extended time engagement. This leads to intense competition for players’ time and significant effects of crowding out alternatives. (Competitive PVP games are often intentionally designed with extremely high skill-ceilings, which reward skill acquired through a mix of natural talent and lots of practice, which creates the need for high time investment)

    This means that in the realm of GaaS, game studios more than ever are in an arms-race – the profits windfall, if you make it to the top 1%, are a step-function compared to if you are “just average”. (To illustrate: Honor of Kings was estimated to have made over $1B in Feb – the Chinese New Year month – alone.)

    To make matters worse – the means of production in gaming, the technology, hardware and tools are constantly evolving, and there is an ongoing variable cost in adopting and adapting your development to stay current; in mobile, there is also a Herculean effort required in device compatibility that is directly proportional to the addressable install-base your game can run on, which is a critical element to unlocking network effects.

    Furthermore – as the biggest games have gone mainstream culturally (current representatives: Fortnite being the prime example in the west; PUBG Mobile in a swath of emerging markets such as India and the Middle East; and Honor of Kings in China), the content requirements are ever more diverse. When you are servicing a player-base of tens of millions (or hundreds of millions in mobile), you can’t just develop for the niche hardcore audience that your initial game thesis was founded on. You have to cater to a broad array of needs, for instance social networking, expression of individuality, vanity / showing off, and the pursuit of collecting content. You also have to work constantly to keep your game fresh, with novel product + marketing ideas such as an in-game concert or tie-ins with big brands outside of gaming.

    Globalization and the China angle

    To further complicate things, whatever fragile consensus or common language (or action, such as unionizing) studios and employees in the west can reach with regards to crunch, is almost immediately thrown out the window if we add in the Chinese studios.

    Zooming out back to the tech sector at large briefly – it is obviously with a heavy dose of self-interest that in the past 18 months prominent voices in the Silicon Valley VC community have made statements such as this or the following:

    “996” is the demanding work schedule many Chinese founders have organically adopted: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. To us, 996 captures the intensity, drive, and speed of Chinese internet companies, many of which are moving faster than their American counterparts.

    The raw capitalist greed on display aside, there is quite a lot of factual basis to these statements. This is the by-product of a globalized economy and the comparative advantage of nations – many of the same factors that led manufacturing jobs (across many industries) to move to China (and then to Southeast Asia) are at play here. What’s relatively new to the gaming industry, but the impact of which will almost certainly be more measurably felt in the near future, is the head-on competition from Chinese studios for a slice of the global gaming market share.

    The outputs of Chinese studios have historically been limited to emerging markets (Southeast Asia, for example) or “down-market” segments such as browser-based games. But we’ve clearly witnessed a turning point the past 12 months, with the likes of PUGB Mobile, Ring of Elysium on Steam (another Battle Royale, that got a decent 8.5 review by IGN) and Arena of Valor on the Nintendo Switch. The results are mixed, and there’s no shortage of “noob mistakes”, but it’s surely a sign of things to come. And whatever gaps there exist today between these hungry new entrants and the blue blood western studios, we could see them evaporate surprisingly quickly thanks to the “intensity, drive and speed of Chinese internet companies.”

    When you are between a rock and a hard place

    It feels like so far I’ve been very long-winded at painting a grim picture for employees from the perspective of crunch. So are there any hope at all with this confluence of industry trends?

    First off, for the individual talents / employees – you have to follow your own life compass. Don’t let others or “the company” make the decision for you. In the big picture, and in the long run, your health and your family are generally more important than your passion and your work (and just to be clear, the games industry, perhaps more than most other industries, leeches off of your passion) – if you agree with this statement you should keep this in mind when you are making the short-term decisions at work. But aside from that point, I don’t think there are absolute rules. As a 25 year-old I worked the occasional 100-hour week as a management consultant, and while those days look comical in the rear-view mirror, I don’t regret doing them – I learnt some stuff and it was a memorable life experience. But I’d certainly have extreme reservations about doing anything similar these days.

    Secondly, for studios, I don’t think there are any silver bullets, but the following might be able to move the needle:

    • This is incredibly challenging to do, but having an honest conversation with players about scope, polish and the grueling realities of game development could help partially reset unrealistic player expectations. Make players demand for a better work/life balance on behalf of employees. For poor analogies, see “responsibly grown coffee beans” or “carbon neutral products” – basically anything where the cost of rising to a higher standard (offseting a negative externality) is passed on to the consumer in a feel-good way
    • Don’t compete in red oceans; go for blue ocean opportunities. Stop participating in the scope and polish arms-race. For example, work on something like Minecraft when the rest of the industry is working on something like Call of Duty; or invest in a distinctive lower-fidelity art style that is cheaper to make given your pipeline and tools. Obviously, easier said than done
    • As a more specific instance of the above – work on a low scope project. Supercell is the best example in my opinion of doing this repeatedly with great success, despite my critique of their challenges. Hearthstone is another famous example
    • Collaborate with Chinese studios. For one thing, from an economics perspective, think of it as similar to industry consolidation, which helps with reducing competition (and thus reducing the arms-race). But more fundamentally, there are deeply complementary assets that western and Chinese studios could cross-leverage. This is why I still think Diablo Immortal was/is absolutely a right initiative for Blizzard – Netease to pursue

    (…And with that, I’d like to wrap up this post, which has in its own way grown way out of scope. This has been one of the more difficult posts to write, and the longest time/energy I spent on one in years. I hope it sparks some thoughts.)

    “Two Billion Gamers”

    by

    I’ve been meaning to write a post about cloud gaming for a while now – there’s a rather long draft sitting in my editor from several months ago (hope I can dust it off and ship it), back when Google generated some headlines with the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey streaming beta.

    Anyhow – the topic picked up again the past couple of weeks, this time with Microsoft Xbox making some bold proclamations.

    I for one, wholeheartedly welcome the “two billion gamers” concept, that apparently Microsoft has been talking about for at least a year now. This is an audacious vision and easy to rally around. (Tooting my own horns a bit – 3 years ago I wrote about the path to a billion MAU game… coincidentally also in a post about Microsoft.)

    The problem for me, with Microsoft’s stated strategy, is there are certainly competing paths to this vision, and Microsoft’s version is (of course) based on what’s feasible for Microsoft. However as an independent observer I do feel other paths are more likely to realize this goal.

    What do I mean by this – consider Microsoft’s industry position in the various gaming platforms:

    • PC – clearly Microsoft still is a dominant platform holder in the PC segment with the Windows platform. However the entire Wintel ecosystem is structurally challenged, and have been eclipsed/leapfrogged by mobile in most areas of personal computing. That puts a serious cloud over the future prospects of PC gaming, which remains one of the core niche cases for PC hardware
    • Console – Xbox unfortunately is an also-ran this gen
    • Mobile – Microsoft has tried in earnest, but failed, to establish its own mobile OS. Android and iOS have won, in various ways. Mobile has also turned out to be the majority growth driver of the entire gaming industry and its rapid ascension has toppled the old world order (see the rise of Chinese developers that I’ve frequently written about on this blog)

    Given this set of circumstances, it is logical for Microsoft to attempt to change the basis of competition – namely, to bet all-in on cloud gaming as a disrupter to established platform advantages, and go to a Post Platform world. To be clear, it faces obvious challenges:

    • At least so far, the stringent network requirements (especially latency for good feel) means cloud gaming remains a mature markets play, and thus dramatically limits the addressable audience. (For the two billion gamers vision to be achievable – markets like China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines must be unlocked, and at a rough glance cloud gaming faces severe hurdles in those markets)
    • It is not yet clear how other platform holders (i.e. Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google) will react. Will they allow 3rd party devs to utilize Microsoft’s solutions on their platforms, and to what extent? For example, if a game is streamed onto iOS, can it thus bypass the App Store 30% revenue cut? Thus it’s unclear what exactly the value proposition is being offered to game developers (some will no doubt try)

    And this now leads to the competing paths part I alluded to earlier. In the emerging markets I mentioned above – China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand etc. – there is already a single platform with the clear runway to two billion gamers: mobile. Thus it seems more probable that Supercell or Tencent can ride the mobile gaming evolution to serving two billion gamers faster than Microsoft or Google can with a cloud gaming solution.

    This is a much belabored point – but North America truly is a mobile laggard and that biases the industry on its mobile perspective. So much so that when one of the biggest western publishers, Activision Blizzard, talk about “mobile is a top priority”, it inevitably invites players to complain and mock the company for being out of touch with its player-base. (Some of that criticism is deserved, but not all.) Still, I give Blizzard plenty of kudos for sticking to the mobile priority vision, and I suspect they will bear some surprisingly good fruit in the not too distant future.

    One last random tidbit that’s worth mentioning in this free-flow post: Vivo announced a fairly affordable ($450) high-end gaming phone, iQOO, last week. It sports a top of the line Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, but what’s more interesting to me are the gaming specific hardware features – the two bumper buttons (when you hold the phone in landscape mode) is a significant gameplay upgrade for games such as PUBG Mobile. I’ve long clamored for a mobile controller peripherals push by the platform holders such as Apple – building it directly into the device is also a great path. I expect more Chinese phones to add such features – and these Chinese brands just so happens are generally doing well in all the aforementioned emerging markets. (Sadly, I expect Apple to be quite a laggard here as well.)

    This example is to say – the mobile gaming ecosystem continues to rapidly evolve, and there are signs of further movement upmarket. (Speaking of which – the foldable phones by Huawei and Samsung, while unlikely to be more than proof-of-concept demos this year, speaks to interesting mobile hardware leaps in the next few years.) So if “two billion gamers” is the only metric to pursue – my money would be on mobile to hit it first.

    Supercell’s challenge

    by

    Supercell’s CEO Ilkka Paananen published an open letter / annual outlook that had some fantastic and honest discussions of his company and its products. I don’t know if gamers would care too much, but as a fellow game developer, I loved it, and had some points to comment.

    Before I dive in, a meta recap of Supercell – thanks to Finnish financial reporting rules, it has had to file annual reports and thus its performance has been in the public’s view. I cobbled together the below graph using a bunch of news reports over the past years:

    The narrative is pretty straightforward: after truly explosive business growth during 2012-2015, Supercell has gone into a period of decline. At the same time, the company has steadily added headcount, showing it is confident in its long-term future. (By all accounts it is still a very light-asset company, having less than 300 full-time employees. Just for comparison – Blizzard pulled in $2B in revenue in 2017 as well, and its headcount is easily 10x Supercell’s.)

    Back to the letter: the thing that struck me was in discussing the business operations, how much focus was related to China:

    One of the really big steps we took in 2018 was that we decided to start building a game studio in our Shanghai, China office. In the early days of Supercell, I thought that we would always be a single studio company – just to keep things simple. But I changed my mind when I got to know the Chinese games industry better. I admire how the best developers in China think about social game play and also how much new quality content they bring their players every month. There is definitely a lot us Western developers can learn. Our goal with this new studio is exactly the same as with our studio in Helsinki: create games for the global market, games that are played for years and remembered forever. We feel like this is a unique opportunity to bring together the best of two different worlds.

    And then later:

    One of our goals this year is to get better at creating more content for our players. This is a more interesting challenge to us than you might think. On one hand, we like our small team sizes because we believe that is one of the reasons we’ve been able to produce innovative games with fun core gameplay. On the other hand, there is only so much content a small group of people can do, no matter how talented they are or how hard they work. Anyway, we’ve concluded that this is something that we need to get better at. How do we keep the small team sizes that are so important for innovation, while getting much better at serving you, our players, with more content?

    We have now made the first few steps to improve this. One, we’ve partnered with some talented external studios who will be helping us to build more and better content. Two, we have invested more into tools & technology that will help us create content more efficiently. And three, we have slightly grown the size of the live teams (but only the live game teams) to be able to serve all of you better. What all of this means for a game like Brawl Stars, for example, is more brawlers, more skins and more environments being added more frequently.

    China wasn’t mentioned in the two paragraphs above, but IMO was an essential driver of the underlying business challenge facing Supercell. When Mr. Paananen wrote “I admire how the best developers in China think about social game play and also how much new quality content they bring their players every month,” I do believe this was not just paying lip service to his Chinese competitors, but an actual admission.

    Chinese developers work crazy hard (“996”), are not afraid to throw bodies at problems (some of the biggest mobile games in China often have dev + live teams of 300-500 people), and the industry has spawned a sophisticated production eco-system. What’s most noticeable is the clear production quality upgrade that I’ve talked about in the past, which is funded by a maturing value chain of outsourcing shops and specialized vendors. This enables Chinese games to afford to engage players with a seemingly endless stream of content at free or low price-points – gameplay modes, cosmetic items, quality upgrades to legacy content etc.

    In the face of this, Supercell’s games, despite often having superior & innovative gameplay, just look like demos; and the aggressive monetization of power ironically becomes a particular point of frustration for Chinese players. I say ironic – as Chinese players have no qualms monetizing for power, it is the transparent design, limited by content shallowness, that players complain about.

    Thus, Mr. Paananen’s comments about trying to strategically tackle content production, while maintaining the company’s small size (and the benefits that comes with being small). In my view this is not a nice-to-have initiative – if Supercell wants its games to succeed in China, which it seems to, this is a strategic imperative. Otherwise, Supercell games will be confined to a niche audience in China (and the business outlook limited), as it cannot retain the mass audience due to losing the content war to its Chinese market peers. If Supercell can achieve a breakthrough here – it will be the kind of boost it needs to reclaim growth.

    2018 year in review

    by

    This post is unfashionably late by a week, but anyhow, here are a few major themes for 2018 in my view.

    Chinese apps conquer the world

    Hard to resist the hyperbole, but 2018 saw some incredible progress for Chinese apps’ global ambitions. To be sure, the biggest successes were predictably from emerging markets (very notably, India), but apps like Tik Tok, PUBG Mobile, and Knives Out have taken formidable positions (and sizable revenue) in developed markets such as US and Japan.

    To pontificate on this, I believe the following factors play a role in this outcome and ongoing trend:

    • Relative lack of investment from American competitors in these emerging markets, due to perceived lack of infrastructure and low consumer spend. There’s also the question of business model fit, where Silicon Valley’s dependence on ads performs poorly in emerging markets
    • Chinese devs’ openness to hustle as needed and over-invest (willing to be inefficient but highly effective). The Chinese playbook is to try everything and see what sticks – but do it in lightning speed, which requires a high upfront investment1. This is also against a backdrop of a tightening home market (and for games, a regulatory freeze that signaled the arrival of winter), where “going overseas” is more than ever a strategic imperative for more and more businesses
    • A potential mindset advantage – unlike American companies which (stereo-typically) prefer a “one-size fits all” approach to global opportunities (and which often really means, built for the North American market, and hoping it is compatible with other markets), Chinese devs have seen how this did not work (for US products) in China. 2 They also likely more deeply understand the value of empowering the local team to make big decisions3

    The beginning of the end, of the PC (x86) platform

    Another hyperbole, it may seem (or a massive understatement, depending on which sectors/markets you look at), but consider the following that happened in 2018:

    • Intel’s significant ongoing woes with its 10nm manufacturing processes, in contrast with TSMC’s 7nm process that has already seen mass commercialization (e.g. Apple’s A12 Bionic chip)
    • Windows on ARM is now a thing, and Mac on ARM is on the horizon too with project Marzipan

    Both of these are symptoms of the gravitational pull of the mobile ecosystem. Specifically for the PC gaming sector, I’d say these are alarming long-term signals –

    • There is a non-trivial likelihood that x86 stops being a consumer computing platform, wholly replaced by ARM in a convergence form factor like the Surface
    • x86 gaming may survive as a standalone high-end market, but will face hostile underlying hardware economics (not unlike, say, DSLRs)
    • PC gaming could possibly survive the demise of the x86 platform, but it likely will be a massive blow to legacy content: many games from the past few decades may become unplayable (cloud gaming could be a solution there, but cloud gaming has its own critical dependencies)

    At this point we have to pause and say, what are we even talking about when we say “PC gaming”? It’s not up for much debate that the underlying Wintel platform has been disrupted, but if keyboard+mouse lives on as an input paradigm, is that all that’s needed for “PC games” to live on?

    It of course is not as simple as that – the migration away from x86 will be painful at the execution level for developers and end-users. Add to this mix tremors in the distribution (Discord and Epic becoming publishing platforms, and initiating a race to the bottom in rev-share), and the next few years look quite turbulent and interesting.

    Predictable mobile clones, and unpredictable market adoption

    For the last theme, I want to go back to the world of Chinese mobile games. 2018 was a year that continued themes I wrote about previously, where every genre conceivable had an earnest mobile clone effort. The thesis is simple: Chinese players prefer the mobile platform, so every game globally that has a fresh idea on PC/console was ripe to be taken to mobile.

    What was dramatically unpredictable, was just how strong the appetite was. Going back a year, even with the benefit of having played Netease’s first stabs at mobile battle royale, I would have said this genre has severe adoption constraints on mobile, mostly centered around the input. Oh how wrong I was. Also the sheer audacity of Tencent’s playbook – to launch 2 competing licensed PUBG mobile games simultaneously – surely invited many a raised eye-brow. Now all of that feels like ancient history – more players globally play the battle royale genre on mobile than on all other platforms combined, and it’s probably not even close.

    But if this were just about PUBG Mobile, which I feel I have talked about ad nauseam, it wouldn’t be a theme. There is more – Identity V, and LifeAfter (both by Netease) took concepts from relatively niche games Dead by Daylight and Rust, and successfully launched them to a wide Chinese mobile audience. The market performance of these games, despite clear technical drawbacks (in particular for LifeAfter), shows a huge appetite for “fresh gameplay”.

    The other side of this coin also bears a mention: Chinese game devs, in particular the large in-house studios of Tencent and Netease, now have well-rehearsed processes to quickly assemble and deploy large-sized teams (100s of devs) against opportunities deemed strategic. This means that any game that does not have a mobile strategy, regardless of how irrelevant the original devs believe mobile to be for them, will quickly (3-6 months) have a mobile clone if they stumble across success. (In this regard, single-player AAA games, especially those strongly narrative driven, remain relatively safe from clones.

    This is why, despite western gamers’ loud protests, Blizzard et al must march towards mobile – it’s not just about profit-seeking; in many ways it’s about long-term business viability.

    1. One gaming example is King of Glory‘s Battle Royale mode, which if I were to guess took 100 devs a few months of work; it did not gain market traction, but I don’t doubt that the studio would make the same bet again. ↩
    2. Example: PUBG Mobile has not only different store-fronts for North America vs Japan, but also different content. ↩
    3. For more on this point, Kai-Fu Lee expands on it at length in his book AI Superpowers. ↩

    Dug up an old framework

    by

    The following was an application of a framework (“8 sources of competitive advantage”) I learnt from my favorite class in business school. I wrote this as a personal exercise one month after I joined Riot Games, back in August 2011. It was intended as a quick review of Riot’s company strategy.

    Reading it today, I definitely get a “I was wet behind the ears back then” vibe; but the framework itself I regard as a classic, and intend to reference in an upcoming post – hence posting this.

    Executive Summary

    Riot’s current strategy can be summarized as:

    • Free to play, gaming-as-a-service business model aligns product development with revenue generation
      • Traditional competitors such as EA are not well-aligned on this, and shrink-wrapped software sales model is outdated
    • Direct distribution to own the customer and capture value
    • Constantly pushing for bigger market presence and economies of scale
      • Tencent relationship helps greatly in this regard, as China is one of the biggest online gaming markets
    • Vertical integration – we develop the game as well as the online platform

    Major challenges I see:

    • The free-to-play model can be replicated. Many competitors are already catching on
    • There is nothing inherently unique about what we are doing (the other bullet points above). Valve has built Steam into a major distribution platform in North America; many companies have bigger market presence / scale. It seems we have been successful so far simply because we were the first to try the free-to-play biz model on a hardcore game, and we leveraged an existing community-created game franchise (the DotA map on Warcraft3)

    Sources of Competitive Advantage In-depth

    Brand

    I recently read The Curse of the Mogul, and I tend to agree with the author that in the media industry context, brand is usually overhyped especially when the products are “discrete” titles (hit-driven business). To the extent that Riot can build successful game franchises (such as Call of Duty or Warcraft), brand can have an effect on initial traction with consumers; overall however it is hard to see consumers developing loyalty to the company as opposed to the specific game. And relative to some of the major incumbents, especially Blizzard and Valve, Riot definitely does not enjoy an advantage in brand.

    That being said, Riot has gone out of its way to accommodate players and listen to the community. We take pride in our community our interaction, and believe we show a human face which makes our brand distinctive. I’m not sure how this will change as we continue to grow – it is easy for a company of 20 people to be very personal with its customers, but hard for a 500 person company.

    IP

    One type of IP that has value, which I’ve already mentioned above, is the creation of successful content franchises such as Call of Duty. Such content enjoys copyright protection and has demonstrated to have value in terms of driving consumer purchases. The most successful franchises such as Super Mario Brothers have enduring economic value and can generate decades of cash flow.

    Another type of IP that has economic value is proprietary technology, such as a 3d engine. Some studios such as Valve generate revenue by licensing their engines. To my knowledge Riot has primarily focused on leveraging off-the-shelf technology (with some proprietary development on top of open-source software), so I don’t think the company has any advantage in this regard. And in a broader sense there seems to be enough choices for developers (I need to research this further), so it is unlikely any company can develop a significant competitive advantage by owning such IP.

    Another form of IP may be creative talent – i.e. the ability to come up with ideas for games that have commercial appeal. However human assets can be bought, so I don’t think this can be a competitive advantage for any one company over an extended period of time.

    Market presence / distribution

    In The Curse of the Mogul the author argued that EA came to prominence by building up a superior distribution channel. However, with the advent of online distribution, the barriers to entry in distribution have been significantly lowered for all players. Riot Games itself has now completely bypassed the traditional physical distribution channels (although the product was at one time available as shrink-wrapped software at GameStop).

    Overall, there is still competitive advantage to be gained through controlling a strong distribution, usually in the form of an online service with a large user base. Valve has demonstrated the value of its Steam service, and has repositioned the company’s entire business model (from originally a developer to now a distributor). However barriers to entry are continuously eroding with cloud services providers (e.g. Amazon) making it easier and easier to launch web services. Riot’s own success proves that it does not take too much time / resources to build up a highly demanded, directly distributed service.

    Economies of scale

    Economies of scale do play an important role in web services. Google enjoys a major cost advantage due to the large scale of its infrastructure. In online game services, Blizzard gains both engineering experience (IP) and a cost advantage due to the scale of World of Warcraft. However, the rise of web services providers like Amazon may again be reducing the relative economies of scale of any particular vendor, again reducing barriers to entry in this regard.

    In the high performance gaming sector that Riot competes in, companies still need to own and build out their own server infrastructure, often with a lot of proprietary technology developed. This means that this will continue to be an area where a company can gain some competitive advantage.

    Economies of scope

    Economies of scope exists both across different sub-markets of gaming (the different platforms – console, PC, handheld, mobile) and at a macro level across related markets (movie tie-ins, merchandising, e-sports related revenues if any, etc.) For the first kind, it is common to see a title released for both PC and console, so there seems to be a lot of overlap in the underlying development assets; while economies of scope from developing for both mobile / handheld and a bigger screen (PC / console) seems to be very limited because of the dramatic difference in technical capabilities and playing experience.

    For the second kind, it seems that few video-game companies have created a lasting model to extend its games to other product categories such as movies and merchandising. LucasArts comes to mind as probably the only company with clear gaming and film content synergy, and that also originated in film first.

    Network effects

    Network effects are a major and well-documented source of competitive advantage for players in the video-game industry. Console platform owners profit from the two-sided market of developers and consumers. For each game, the developer also tries to create same-side network effects – more players playing means even more players wanting to play.

    With the arrival of the social web and the rise of digital distribution, developers increasingly have the potential to become platforms themselves, in a couple of different ways: the first as exemplified by Valve’s Steam service, is a new digital distribution platform; the second as exemplified by Zynga, is an advertising medium for advertisers thanks to Zynga’s massive (and well profiled) user-base.

    As everyone recognizes the value of network effects, we can foresee fierce competition to build up and own it. One main strategic challenge for Zynga and many other social gaming companies is exactly over this – whether they own their network effects, or does Facebook retain ultimate power over the consumers. And for the distribution platforms, we can also foresee a fragmented landscape, if not only because of the underlying hardware fragmentation (consoles, PCs, mobile etc.) and the respective hardware platform owners’ stakes.

    In the case of Riot, we try to have strong ownership over our players. One of our strengths is our community management. But I can foresee a major challenge in future when the industry moves away from the PC platform to newer platforms that have major platform owners (e.g. Apple with tablets). Then we will face similar challenges as Zynga does with Facebook over ownership of the underlying network.

    Access to capital

    In the console space, access to capital could pose some barriers to entry, thanks to the platform owners’ platform rules. At the other end of the spectrum, the rapidly growing mobile gaming market has almost not barriers to entry from a capital perspective. PC is somewhat in between – hobbyists can develop and distribute games via the Internet very easily, but they are competing with big budget titles from the likes of Blizzard, and a lot of games are still sold via physical retail.

    Regulation

    The industry is lightly regulated in general. There is a self-regulating ratings bureau (ESRB) that imposes some limitations on content, and platform owners may impose their own regulations (e.g. Nintendo’s long-term stance on games being “family-friendly”).

    In certain regional markets, the situation is more hairy. In China and Korea game content needs to pass government approval, and is prime ground for corporate sabotage (blocking out a competitor via the government). Riot’s connection with Tencent helps greatly in this regard, but it only applies to the China market.

    Games from my childhood (2)

    by

     

    This is part of a free-flow series writing about the games that left my mark on my childhood. Previous post.

    Back to China

    My family returned to China in early 1995. This was a peculiar time to be a teenage gamer. Windows 95 would drop soon, but it would be another couple of years before I adopted it (driven by an insatiable desire to play Diablo). I was very happy with MS-DOS, and I knew my way around it reasonably well (at least for the purposes of playing video-games).

    My memory is fuzzy, but those few years in China before Windows 95 was my prime years of playing classic DOS games of the early to mid 90s. To be clear, I didn’t have a great supply of games – it would be the occasional pirated compilation CD that would have hundreds of random games (many of which were the shareware version), or the random 3.5″ floppy disk (or even the rare 5.25″ disk, if my memory serves). I’d run some rudimentary antivirus check on the disk – if it returned a positive, I’d be much dismayed, but occasionally tempted to select “kill the virus” and then run the program anyway.

    Those were also the years where I battled with the various quirks of DOS gaming. The first issue was EMS / XMS memory format – to run a particular game, I’d often have to reboot into the correct format, and sometimes a game wouldn’t run no matter what I tried. And then there were the numerous setup configs – DMA / interrupts and such, and it would often be a trial and error process to get any sound working (the 386 my father bought in the UK had no sound card; I believe the 586 he got in China did). Sometimes things would only half work – my entire play experience with Syndicate was without sound effects and only background music, and it would be years later that I realized how much I missed out 1. But more on Syndicate later.

    Koei games

    Let’s talk about Koei games – for a Chinese teen growing up in the 90s, Koei was absolutely a huge developer. A lot of this obviously is due to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series (which is still running, the latest being the 13th version), but Uncharted Waters 2 was also a massively influential game.

    Romance of the Three Kingdoms 3

    This was the entry that I played the most (probably around the years 1995-97), and have the fondest memories of. Even at the time, this was a dated entry – the game was originally released in 1992, and by the time I got to it, 4/5 were already out. But, this was the copy I got ahold of (on 3.5″ floppy I believe), and I remember my PC couldn’t run 5 for reasons likely related to EMS/XMS memory.

    This game was old enough that the mouse was an optional input – all menu items could be accessed through keyboard shortcuts. Still, it had gorgeous music (that evolved based on your progression), great art (despite the low pixel count, all the character portraits felt vivid), and the ultimate empire-building fantasy sandbox based on the ultimate IP for Chinese players. My copy’s game editor also had 3 max-attribute (every stat was 100) character slots, so these duly became my 3 top lieutenants (I think I created them to be my children, and I spent a lot of time naming them). A typical game for me would be starting in a city in a relatively peaceful (distant) location, and I’d spent years leveling up my city and slowly expanding locally, all the while major battles were being fought elsewhere. I think that says something about my personality even as a kid.

    The other thing was mentioning was, this series’ success absolutely shows the value of IP – to me Koei’s various history simulations share strong gameplay similarities, and the player is really just choosing the fantasy setting. I remember briefly playing Genghis Khan as well as Nobunaga’s Ambition (which has many fans in China as well), but unable to get into either of them.

    Random side note – I remember Koei got into some PR trouble in China due to its World War 2 Pacific Theater simulation. It got some prime time CCTV coverage, and the report was about a studio in Tianjin that was translating the game into Chinese complaining about the game being fascist.

    Uncharted Waters 2: New Horizons

    I started playing this game in junior high (it must have been 1996 or 1997), after hearing about it from a friend in the same class. He copied it to me on 3 floppy disks. Again, this was a very dated game by then – it originally released in 1994 – but this did not deter me from absolutely falling in love with it.

    I believe this game/series is not prominent in the west – at surface level, it has been described as derivative of Sid Meier’s Pirates!. That’s a shame – there’s something magical about this game in how it captures the spirit of adventure and exploration, and my friends and I found it captivating.

    I had a lot of handholding playing this game – I had a detailed guide from a popular PC magazine (Popsoft – 大众软件), so I wasn’t so much as exploring on my own as following a proven path, but that didn’t dampen my sense of achievement one bit. Later on to skip the grind, I’d also hex-edit the binary save-files, though I discovered the game has some way of detecting that edits have been made. Normally, a save-game that has reached an end-game milestone would have an asterisk next to it, but if you edit a save-game and then reach end-game, the asterisk would not be assigned. Another fun interaction from hexediting was when I gave myself an item that is only used in the end-game “cinematic” – when it showed up in my inventory, the description was a funny line to the effect of “how did this get here?”.

    It’s not hyperbole to say Uncharted Waters 2 was the best world geography class I ever had. It introduced the world to me, literally, and above all else it was a deeply romantic game: it was open-ended, and the 6 different playable characters had very distinct motives / objectives that was not all about fighting / naval conquest (build a trading empire; complete the world map; discover lost treasure). Even though the graphics and presentation were simple, the mind would fill in the blanks, and I would experience these vivid experiences. Even to this day, I can recall the burst of relief and joy when successfully docking at a port after encountering a storm.

    (To be continued.)

    1. On the flip side, I do have the Syndicate soundtrack burnt into my memory. ↩

    Games from my childhood

    by

    I’ve been on the beach (literally) in Hawaii this past week for some much needed time with family and away from work. Unfortunately, it’s been hard to take my mind off work, and I’ve been tempted to do some soul-searching on the industry and career I’ve chosen. This post is a personal reflection on how video-games were a big part of my childhood.

    UK years

    As a boy I lived 3 few years in UK before relocating to Beijing, where I spent my teen years. Thus my early gaming history has a rather British flavor. My parents, like most education-minded Chinese parents, refused to buy me a console1. My father was very into PCs though, and splurged on a desktop 386.

    In these years in the UK, despite my nonstop nagging, my parents only bought me 3 game disks: SimCity 2000, Terminator 2, and a compilation disk Award Winners that included Sensible Soccer, Jimmy White Whirlwind Snooker, Elite, and Zool.

    For a 12-year old, SimCity 2000 was immensely educational. I still remember the manual itself being over 100 pages (if not 200), and written like a long essay. It was surprisingly engaging given its open-ended nature – perhaps I spent a lot of time playing it, simply because I was allowed to by my parents2.

    The Terminator 2 game was supremely forgettable – a bland, weird mix of a few different arcade mini-games thrown together loosely based on scenes from the movie. If anything, it did teach me the lesson that IP-licensed games do not by themselves warrant my time and attention, and on the contrary is likely bad. There was a silver lining: in the game packaging there was a booklet that had reviews / intros to dozens of other games, and some of these games were legit classics such as various Sim-games,  Populous, Mega Lo Mania (this was a series of discount titles from a budget publisher – it’s telling that to an undiscerning consumer I chose the movie tie-in game instead of any of the actually great games). I must have read that booklet a dozen times.

    From the compilation disk, I played Jimmy White Whirlwind Snooker the most while I was still in the UK. I was watching a lot of snooker back then – BBC would prominently cover it (and other British sports favorites such as cricket and rugby). I also remember a TV show on video-games inviting Jimmy White to play against the AI version of himself. Elite I played the least, which is a shame given its stature in video-games history – but I really was too young to comprehend it (and enjoy the fun combination of exploration and trading), and I struggled to do basic things such as successfully docking my spacecraft. My only memory of Zool is the vast amount of Chupa Chups lollipops in the game – I guess product placement does work!

    Ah, and then there was Sensible Soccer. Years later I would shamelessly ditch it for EA’s FIFA series (from 98 onwards), but this was easily the football game I played the most growing up. It was not love at first sight – I repeatedly tried to get into this game, and failed, due to the controls and the lack of any meaningful tutorial. Indeed, it was not until I was a year or more in Beijing that I accidentally stumbled upon a basic comprehension of the controls – a light tap of spacebar was a directed short pass, while a press was a long pass / shoot; after shooting you can continue to hold direction keys to apply spin. The game had a mesmerizing pace when you chain short passes together, and the simple yet elegant ball physics3 allowed for what seemed like endless varieties of emergent gameplay – you can have spectacular long range banana shots from outside the box, or you can do a diagonal pass from the wings and attempt a dramatic forward-leaping header. After finally getting a hang of it, I quickly turned this game into the ultimate football fantasy fulfillment engine. I would vigorously create fictional leagues of my imagination, and my team (“Beijing United”) would be comprised of not only my friends and I, but also some characters I made up that I got surprisingly attached to – for example, I still recall a Mr. Tony Klinsky, of unknown (Eastern?) European origin, that was a key central midfielder to my 4-4-2. (I was number 11 and the star forward, of course.)

    (To be continued.)

    1. The only sustained console exposure I had was going to my neighbor’s place to play the Sega Game Gear. I remember playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Batman Returns. ↩
    2. Years later, I would buy the collector’s edition of SimCity (2013) out of nostalgia, only to never play it past the first 15 minutes. ↩
    3. Unlike FIFA, where the ball “sticks” to the player in possession, in Sensible Soccer it seems the ball is always free-moving and thus dribbles are hard. ↩

    God of War (2018)

    by

    Some quick thoughts on the new PS4 exclusive God of War. This is my first play of any game in the franchise (was on xbox 360 last gen, and before then was in China during console ban era), so I’m looking at it with only a superficial understanding of the lore and no gameplay experience.

    The high review scores (3rd highest reviewed all-time PS4 game, was tied for 2nd initially) are not surprising. This is best recent example of a game playing squarely within the constraints & definitions of a single-player AAA experience – super high polish, beautiful world and graphics, satisfying combat, and engaging narrative. Of these points, the narrative may be the least accomplished – it’s kind of a road-trip plot1 with a very limited cast, but it does quite a lot with this little material. (I found it especially hard not to love many of the side characters.)

    Indeed, from a production standpoint the whole game is a great example of exercising constraint. The insane polish and presentation is achieved through tightly managed scope2 – small number of enemies, smart level design which reuses and builds upon lots of areas3, and relatively cheap optional content that adds lots of gameplay hours through difficulty.

    This may not sound like high praise, but I found myself totally immersed (and going into an obsessive “I must beat this boss” mode for a lot of the optional content, spending hours on a single encounter) despite not finding any part of the game groundbreaking. You could argue, perhaps superficially, that everything God of War has to offer has been done before – there are clearly strong elements of other modern video-gaming giants such as The Last of Us, Uncharted, and Dark Souls / Bloodborne. But it is darn impressive how well put together the whole thing is, and how it reinvigorates a perhaps outdated protagonist (and commercially sets the scene for a big new series of games).

    If there’s anything to nitpick, my only complaint was the game’s collectibles design felt at odds with its narrative goals. Unlike games such as Uncharted, where collectibles were a pure achievement goal (for the completionists), the hidden treasures in God of War unlock abilities or represent rare gear. Therefore there is strong motivation for even the gamer who just wants to have a good story to poke and run around the levels, to try to find every nook and cranny. At times this breaks the immediate flow of the narrative (at a tense bit of the plot, yet here I am backtracking because I spotted in the distance a chest I missed earlier). At a meta-level, it also created a disconnect for me in the main plot vs the side content: I was aggressively tackling some of side content, which was much more challenging in combat, so that by the time I got back to the main plot, I was clearly over-geared and none of the intricately staged combat designs were remotely challenging. This is clearly a minor issue to a great game, though it does showcase the inherent tradeoffs to any design system.

    1. And it’s easy to call out the resemblance to The Last of Us. ↩
    2. It’s probably way more chaotic in the actual production, and lots of painful decisions, but alas such is the development of video-games. ↩
    3. but avoids feeling too repetitive by “designing vertically” – i.e. you are in an existing area, but there’s a new shortcut or an alteration of the terrain ↩