When I write a bug it becomes the core gameplay.

Chapter 520 Excellent Work "Nine Swords"

"Nine Swords...

"I vaguely feel like I've heard of this before. Is this game still in operation?"

Lilith subconsciously opened the official platform to search, and indeed found it.

However, judging from the current data, it is quite cold. It can't even make it into the top 100 on the best-selling list of mobile games. As for the specific profit data, it is naturally impossible to estimate.

"When did our old friend Shengjing Group launch such a game without making any noise?

"But it's normal. Shengjing Group is a big company with so many games under its umbrella. Some of them have very little investment and are all lottery-based. It's normal that you haven't heard of them." Lilith said as she flipped through the game introduction.

Gu Fan shook his head slightly: "No, President Li, this game is not a lottery game. It is said that the investment is as high as 1 billion."

Lilith was shocked: "What? Duo Shao?

“One billion!!

"One billion dollars and they produced something like this!
“Isn’t this money laundering?”

Gu Fan was silent for a moment: "This... is hard to say.

"In short, this game project was launched very early, probably about ten years ago.

"It took more than seven years to develop and was officially launched about three years ago. It has been languishing until now, and no one knows its revenue level because it has never disclosed specific data.

"Anyway, it has never been on any bestseller list, and players suspect that the game has long since lost its operating costs. However, Shengjing Group cannot accept that its 1 billion yuan has gone down the drain, so it has been holding on and has not shut down the service.

“Oh, by the way, two years ago, Shengjing Group launched a vigorous internal investigation and sent some corrupt officials to prison.

"So everyone speculated that perhaps an insider had embezzled half of the 1 billion yuan in R&D and promotional funds for the game Nine Swords. But there is no real evidence for this, so it can only be a topic of conversation after dinner.

"But leaving aside issues like money laundering and corruption, if we only study the game itself, we can learn some useful lessons from it."

At this time, Lilith had already found some promotional materials for this game, including CG and PV, as well as actual game demos.

Actually, it looks pretty good at first glance.

"Hey, why is there another game called "Nine Swords"? Oh, it's called "Legend of Nine Swords", but this one is ranked 97th on the best-selling list!" Lilith asked curiously, "Is this a remake by Shengjing Group?"

Gu Fan explained: “No, no, no, this is the work of another company.

"Because the name "Nine Swords" comes from a very classic martial arts novel, or fairy tale novel. Its story background is a martial arts novel with a high level of martial arts, and it is a classic work that was well-known to everyone decades ago.

“Then the various copyrights of this book sold a lot, so it’s not just Shengjing Group that’s making the Nine Swords game, other companies are also doing it.

“But what’s a bit frustrating is that Legend of Nine Swords is a relatively old-fashioned mobile card game, and its production level is strictly speaking only at the level of ten years ago.

"And Shengjing Group's Nine Swords is known as the top open world 3A masterpiece of the next generation.

“As for investment, it’s hard to say whether the former has 10 million or not. Compared with 1 billion, the difference is definitely a hundred times.

"As a result, Shengjing Group's 'Nine Swords' was decimated by the mobile card game 'Legend of Nine Swords' in terms of revenue. This is enough to show that Shengjing Group must have done more than one thing right, otherwise it wouldn't have ended up like this."

Lilith couldn't help but stand in awe: "Well, you are right!"

Before, although Lilith knew that the game "Nine Swords" was a failure, she didn't have a particularly clear idea of ​​how unpopular and how big of a failure it was.

Now she has it.

Investing a hundred times more but being killed by an opponent of the same name would seem outrageous even in novels, but it actually happened in the real world.

I can only say that the matching mechanism of this world is really amazing!

This also shows one thing: the failure of "Nine Swords" cannot be explained simply by "corruption".

No matter how greedy he was, he could only get 500 million at most out of that 1 billion.

You can't be defeated by a game that has an investment of less than 10 million, right?
So he must have made a series of wrong decisions to achieve such a great achievement.

What were the specific things that were done wrong? This is something that the game Against the Heavens should learn from.

Gu Fan continued, “What’s even more interesting is that within Shengjing Group, there is actually a very strict screening mechanism.

"When Shengjing Group was making games, the competition between the various projects was very fierce, and it could even be said that they were 'breeding poison'.

“At every stage of project development, a comprehensive assessment will be conducted. If the assessment does not meet expectations, it may be significantly changed or even directly cancelled.

"The game Nine Swords is interesting: it is actually the winner within Shengjing Group." During the development period, it went through many evaluations, but passed every evaluation.

“Even if there were some project management issues in the project team, which led to a waste of investment, overall, the money should have been spent wisely. Otherwise, the senior management of Shengjing Group would not have realized something was wrong only after the game was released and started a thorough investigation.

“So I think that analyzing the failure of this game is very important for our subsequent success.”

Lilith nodded quickly, “Yeah, that’s right!

"Gu Fan, you have successfully aroused my interest. So what is the problem with this game? I am so curious!"

Gu Fan said slowly: "Ms. Li, please listen to me slowly.

“First, let’s go back to when the Nine Swords project was first launched.

"At that time, the project team of Nine Swords was very ambitious. Their idea was to use the standards of a 3A masterpiece and an open world gameplay to create a groundbreaking mobile game.

"By drawing on the strengths of many companies, combined with the powerful IP of Nine Swords and the accumulation of successful games from Shengjing Group, isn't it easy to create a super hit?"

Lilith thought for a moment and said, “Well, it does sound reasonable.

"Wait, this seems a bit like what you said before.

Read the error-free version at 69shuba! 6=9+shu_ba is the first to publish this novel.

"A AAA mobile game that costs money?"

Gu Fan nodded: "That's right. Looking back at the failure of "Nine Swords", the first reason is that Shengjing Group decided to use 3A standards to develop mobile games, and a very important point is the choice of game engine.

“We all know that Qianhuan Editor is cheap, easy to use and stable, so most mobile games at that time were produced with Qianhuan Editor.

“However, at that time, the official beta version of the Vientiane Editor had just been launched and it was not even open to general game developers.

“After all, Shengjing Group is a large company, so it is easy for them to get the Vientiane Editor from the official website.

Lilith thought about it seriously for a moment: "Wait! Wanxiang Editor, but there are still a lot of bugs when we use it!
“Wouldn’t it be even more of a disaster during the internal testing?
"Has Shengjing Group lost its mind? They are not trying to collect players' negative emotions, so why would they use this editor?"

Gu Fan explained: "This is of course an opinion in hindsight. In fact, there were quite a few game companies that fell into the trap back then, and Shengjing Group was just one of them.

“When the Vientiane Editor was first released, everyone knew that it would be unstable as a new engine, but how unstable would it be? That was hard to say.

"It was only after a large number of game companies fell into the trap over the past three to five years that people gradually came to the consensus that 'Vientiane Editor is a rip-off'.

“At that time, Shengjing Group had many reasons to choose Vientiane Editor.

“Compared to Qianhuan Editor, Wanxiang Editor certainly has many advanced features, which was also the highlight of the official promotion at the time.

"These include a fully automatic lighting system, which means that producers no longer need to adjust the light; an advanced scanning import system, which means that modeling costs are greatly reduced; and a powerful AI generation function, which can save a lot of time in the production of templated dialogue actions...

“In general, these new features have a common benefit, which is that they can reduce the cost of developing large-scale 3A masterpieces, and also give some small companies the opportunity to overtake others.

"The price is that the engine is not stable, and there will be all kinds of strange bugs. The game will become more and more stuck as time goes by, and there are all kinds of unexpected small problems.

“But how should I put it? At that time, Shengjing Group thought that these were small problems that could be solved. Anyway, wouldn’t it be better to spend more time on optimization?

"In hindsight, Shengjing Group was indeed too optimistic, because these problems have only been barely resolved today through the joint efforts of us and the authorities."

Lilith said with some regret: "Yeah, it's been solved. What a pity."

Obviously, the first thing she thought of was to "replicate the successful route".

Gu Fan continued, “However, this success needs to be qualified, that is, it was successful on a high-end computer.

“So far, there has not been any successful game made using the Wanxiang Editor on mobile phones.

"After all, there is a huge gap between the configuration of mobile phones and computers."

Lilith nodded suddenly: "What about then? The game "Nine Swords" should also be known as a three-way interoperability, right? How does it perform on mobile phones?"

Gu Fan coughed twice and said, "At that time, the players all joked like this:

“The graphics of this game are really good. On high-end computers, it’s Nine Swords, on mid- and low-end computers, it’s Five Swords, and on mobile phones, it’s One Sword.

"Because at that time, in order to ensure that the game could run on mobile phones, Shengjing Group had to reduce the image quality and special effects after exhausting all conventional optimization methods. The originally lush hillsides turned into green polygonal mounds, and the number of cool fairy sword special effects around the characters was directly cut to the ankles.

“But looking at it optimistically, this is still pretty good. After all, even with the slashing of One Sword, these players’ phones can still barely run the game.

"Many players' phones are stuck on compiling the color tint or loading the interface, and in the end they can't even play One Sword, and can only play Zero Sword."

(End of this chapter)