[Game-Timespecialarticlenoreproductionwithoutauthorization!】
Game-Time report/A screenshot of a recently circulated email shows that Xu Kan, the legal person of Shanghai Yuhai Information Technology Company, told employees that the company announced its dissolution due to a break in the capital chain. The content of the email shows that the investors made judgments and decisions on the cold environment of the game industry, the product market performance of Yuhagi’s projects, and the cost-effectiveness of the projects, and decided to stop supporting the team.
After taking a closer look at the background of the project, one can’t help but feel a sense of regret. This Shanghai company was formerly an independent game club, and later turned to the development of the two-dimensional action mobile game “Small Shadow”. The game was officially first revealed in November last year. The first trailer even received nearly 1.7 million views on Station B, and a small-scale test was held in December.
Unexpectedly, just two months later, the development team sadly bowed out.
The B station and TapTap page of “Glimpse of Strife” recorded for us every move of this team before their “death”. After looking back at the development history of the team, we can easily outline this mental journey: In order to achieve higher results, a group of game developers with artistic pursuits and ambitions took the initiative to change tracks, but in the end they were set by themselves. High expectations drag you down.
And behind this public case, this is a road that countless manufacturers have repeatedly embarked on.
From a solo travel club to a second-tier entrepreneurial recruit
According to other media reports, members of the Yuhagi Information team come from Arrowiz, an independent game development community with a two-dimensional orientation, and have released a number of games on PC and VR platforms. Among them, “Sojourn in the Corner”, launched in 2018, is Arrowiz’s most popular game.
“Book of Strange Events in Sojourn” is a Cthulhu-style visual novel that was published by Bilibili. As of January 2024, “Book of Strange Events in the Sojourn” has received 1,686 Steam reviews, and the estimated sales volume on a single platform is less than 100,000 copies. At that time, with the help of Bilibili, the game obtained a version number and was ported to mobile phones for release.
However, Arrowiz’s next stand-alone work suffered a serious overturn, the fantasy city-themed RPG adventure game “The Lost City” released in 2023. The game is developed in full 3D. Arrowiz priced the game at 139 yuan, obviously because of the high development cost. Despite this, it has only received 75 reviews in the past year since its launch, and sales have been dismal.
“Strange Dreams” game screenshots
The tonality of these two games also shows us that the core creative team of Yuhagi Information or Arrowiz is undoubtedly idealistic and has a high pursuit of the artistry of game products. Both “Book of Strange Events in the Sojourn” and “Strange Dreams” boldly adopted niche art-style themes, and even took the initiative to challenge more difficult 3D game development. This may mean that the team has consciously accumulated and improved its own development capabilities.
“Glimpse of Strife”, which pronounced the death of the team, also continued this artistic pursuit. The game is officially described as an “urban transformation hero live drama RPG”. It uses a tokusatsu theme that is almost unprecedented in the second game circuit. Each character has a transformation form like a “Kamen Rider”.
In terms of absolute size, the circle of tokusatsu enthusiasts is relatively niche, but user stickiness and participation are generally high. Due to the lack of comparable products on the same track, core special photography enthusiasts have a lot of interest in this game. Driven by these players, “Glimpse of Conflict” received good early attention and received more than 50,000 reservations on Bilibili channels.
It can be seen from the first trailer and action gameplay demonstration that “Glimpse of Strife” adopts a vertical screen 3D real-time combat gameplay. From the perspective of a small team, the development cost of this type of game is inherently high. Not only that, the game sets high art standards and also adopts a full dubbing mode.
Qichacha information shows that the number of insured persons in Yuhagi Information Company will be 21 in 2021 and 39 in 2022. It is reported that the team had about 50 employees when it was disbanded.
In addition, Atomic Punk and Shanghai Youla Entrepreneurship Incubator, investment institutions jointly established by Youxing and Eagle Point Network, invested in Yuhagi Information Company in June and December 2021 respectively, with shareholding ratios of 16.2% and 19.0% respectively. .
It can be seen from public information that the research and development of “Glimpse of Strife” first started in 2021. After receiving investment from two VC institutions that year, the team used the funds in hand to gradually expand the team size and complete the subsequent development of the game.
In light of the closed beta test of “Clash of Shadows” in December, according to the content of the online email, although the product performance of “Clash of Shadows” met the expectations of the investors, the investors were still concerned about the product’s subsequent commercial performance and market expectations. Judgment, still choose to divest.
After the two-dimensional bubble burst, this place has become a fighting arena
By the standards of the entire gaming industry, it is nothing new for a mobile game product to be “stillborn”. According to a survey conducted by SuperScale, an overseas game consulting company, 43% of overseas mobile game projects have been canceled during the development stage. However, it was announced that it was disbanded two months after it was first exposed and attracted a lot of attention. This kind of “death in public” is relatively rare in the gaming industry.
After reviewing the launch process of Yuhagi, the direct factors that led to the demise of this team are actually somewhat representative. “Glimpse of Conflict” only obtained software copyright approval in February 2023, which means that it has most likely not completed the version number approval process. From the perspective of project establishment, overly aggressive product strategies and wrong track choices were the main reasons for its collapse.
The background for the establishment of the “Glimpse of Disputes” project occurred around the time of the “Second Dimension Wave” in 2021. At that time, “Genshin Impact”, as China’s first full-platform game product that fully meets 3A-level industrialization standards, set a record for Chinese games going overseas, which in turn attracted major manufacturers to develop a number of high-standard two-dimensional products.
It is not difficult to imagine that the independent game development team back then may have been inspired by this wave and chose to join the wave of two-dimensional games.
But three years later, the entry threshold for this market has been raised to the point where it is out of reach. “Genshin Impact” and “Honkai Impact: Star Rail” still firmly hold the top position in domestic second-game products. Even the production quality of “Honkai Impact III” is something few manufacturers can match.
The two-dimensional track has received the most attention from the industry in the past four years. It is also the track with the most drastic market reshuffle, and it is also the track with the most serious Matthew Effect. Players who have been “raised” by high-level games are no longer willing to accept the quality of products other than the top games, so user consumption is only concentrated on a few top products.
Looking at the past hot-selling records of the 2D circuit, apart from MiHoYo, which is the undisputed top spot, almost all 2D game products that can “seize food from the tiger’s mouth” and grab a piece of the market are in the first tier. Product development capabilities, such as Deep Blue Interactive’s “Back to the Future: 1999”, ByteDance’s “Crystal Core”, Perfect World’s “Phantom Tower”, etc.
Therefore, like categories such as MOBA and FPS that have already become popular, the field of two-dimensional mobile games is now an exclusive arena for leading manufacturers, and it is not suitable for entrepreneurs with less experience to get involved.
What’s even more fatal is that Yuhagi chose the resource-intensive gameplay of 3D ACT for development. Even if the team has sufficient investment support behind it, the “money burning” of this gameplay cannot be underestimated. In fact, as early as when the project was first exposed, the game’s 3D animation design had become the main problem point of the project.
With the benefit of hindsight, in Game-Time’s view, if this independent team had not been dazzled by the wave of the second dimension, but had chosen to stick to the independent game track, they would have launched a sequel to the popular “The Strange Case of Sojourn”. 》Iterates and further expands and completes the gameplay while maintaining the core player group, then perhaps the company can still survive today.
For small and medium-sized manufacturers, this may also be the only solution to “survive” at the moment. Players are often keen to tell the legendary story of MiHoYo, which started its business from a college dormitory. However, in a sense, today’s start-up manufacturers no longer have the market environment that MiHoYo did in the early days to grow together with the nascent mobile Internet. .
For today’s entrepreneurs, no matter which track they enter, they have to compete with the already full-fledged giants. In this case, if you do not carefully evaluate your own strength, but choose to compete head-on with the giants in terms of art resources, action design and long-term operation capabilities, then there will undoubtedly be a “dead end”.
In contrast, completing a “small but beautiful” undertaking at a lower cost is not a beautiful road, isn’t it? In today’s Chinese game industry, there are long-lasting representative works of small and medium-sized manufacturers such as the “Paper Wedding Dress” series and the “Lost Island” series. On the Steam platform, “Vampire Survivor” and “Stardew” are released every year. “Tales of Grain” is a super hit game developed by a very small team.
For small and medium-sized teams, creativity and differentiation are still the most valuable abilities when facing large companies. If Mihagi chooses to continue to use its expertise in art design, then this team may also be able to achieve something.
Game-Time only hopes that cases like Yuhagi will not be repeated in the future gaming industry. For developers, every game is the fruit of their hard work. If the entire team is in trouble due to directional errors, then it will not only cost money and capital, but also a group of passionate developers who are most valuable. Years of youth.
As the saying goes, “If future generations grieve and ignore it, they will also make future generations grieve for future generations again.”
