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Game-Time report/Big 3A manufacturers make mobile games, especially adapting their own “super IP” into gold-priced mobile games. This seems to be a trend in Europe and the United States to learn from their Chinese counterparts in recent years. However, a number of major European and American mobile game companies seem to be in the same boat.
Activision, EA, Ubisoft and many other companies have successively used their top IPs to make mobile games, but the results have not been smooth. Recently, Gamelook just wrote that Activision’s self-developed “Call of Duty Warzone Mobile” performed less than expected, and there were obvious game optimization and adaptation issues.
EA also encountered challenges when developing 3A mobile games.In early 2023, “Apex Legends” developer Respawn Studios officially announced the discontinuation of its mobile game version.Almost at the same time, EA also announced the cancellation of the 3A mobile game that had already launched three rounds of internal testing.The development of “Battlefield Mobile” and has laid off the entire Industrial Toys studio responsible for the projecthundreds of people are unemployed.
Just in mid-March, Ubisoft’s self-developed 3A mobile game “Rainbow Six Mobile” announced that it would stop the expansion of the test area and the launch of new content to solve the problems reported by players.
On April 9, Ubisoft also officially announced the closure of its Korean branch. This is the first time Ubisoft has entered South Korea in 22 years. The company said on social media, “As part of our global restructuring in response to the rapidly changing game market, we have made the difficult decision to terminate the operations of our Korean branch.” Ubisoft Korea will officially close its operations on April 30. Officially closed, game distribution, customer service and other Korean businesses will not be affected.
Ubisoft, Activision, and EA, the major AAA console game companies that were originally worshiped by Chinese companies, have encountered setbacks in the development of AAA mobile games one after another, which indeed surprised and shocked their Chinese counterparts. After all, they have experience in AAA game tool chains, pipelines, and project management. In fact, they are much ahead of Chinese companies, but why do mobile games collectively encounter periodic difficulties? Against the background of foreign friends, the experience and strength of China’s leading manufacturers are particularly evident at this time. So how did Chinese companies survive? Today Game-Time is coming to 818.
《Rainbow Six mobile game》Endless testing due to server and game bugs
Ubisoft can be said to be the most enthusiastic among the major foreign companies for mobile games. After all, Gameloft, a mobile game company founded by the brother of Ubisoft’s boss, has always been famous. In terms of mobile device performance and network environment, it can gradually support the development of 3A games. Later, Ubisoft also began to place heavy bets on mobile games, intending to adapt various of its popular IPs into mobile games to keep up with the general trend of free online games and service-oriented games among its Asian counterparts.
The project of “Rainbow Six Mobile” was established under this background. It launched its first beta in May 2022 and was originally planned to be released in 2022. Before the first beta, this mobile game was said to have been developed for 3 years. Left and right, it can be described as menacing.
It is understood that the development team of “Rainbow Six Mobile Game” was independently formed by Ubisoft, and its members are composed of veterans from the 3A console games and mobile game fields. The team is headquartered in Montreal and belongs to the same region as the “Rainbow Six: Siege” PC/console team.
Since the test started in 2022, it is already 2024. Not to mention the original plan to release in 2022, after two years of testing, there is still no possibility of “Rainbow Six Mobile” being officially launched in the short term. In mid-March, Ubisoft announced that it would suspend the test release of “Rainbow Six Mobile” and expand it to more regions, while also suspending the launch of new content.
Ubisoft mentioned in the official announcement, “Our beta releases over the past few months have gathered important insights and information that make us very proud of the development of the game. We realize that there are still areas that need improvement. The decision has been made to pause the rollout of new areas and content from beta testing, which will allow us to focus on enhancing key elements and creating new content based on community feedback to deliver a better mobile Rainbow Six experience globally.”
As for shrinking the scope and content of the test, Ubisoft’s explanation is, “Our main focus is improving server performance and resolving game bugs and networking issues. We also hope to enhance the compatibility and optimization of the game to ensure an optimized gameplay experience on more mobile devices.“
In other words, even though Ubisoft invested 11 studios in research and development, “Rainbow Six Mobile” still encountered obvious optimization problems and device compatibility difficulties during testing, and even encountered server performance challenges. The expansion of testing areas and content had to be suspended.
During this period, players in the test area can still play Rainbow Six Mobile as they do now. However, servers outside the test area will be shut down, and players outside the test area will encounter matchmaking connection issues or higher delays when logging into the game.
In contrast, the choice of “Rainbow Six Mobile” is relatively rational. Before the optimization and server problems have been solved, Ubisoft chose to re-polished instead of making “Call of Duty Warzone Mobile” global like Activision. Issues were encountered only after release. If the optimization goes well, Game-Time believes that “Rainbow Six Mobile” is still expected to be successful after it is launched in the future.
However, “Rainbow Six Mobile” can be said to be ill-fated. As early as when it was announced in April 2022, Ubisoft said that the game took three years to develop. Now after two years of testing, there are still obvious problems. If it waits for another year to polish and optimize, then the total development and testing period of the game will be It will reach 6 years, and if the release is delayed, it may even reach 7 years.
This is obviously very unfavorable for a mobile game. In the rapidly changing mobile game market, going online late means missing new opportunities, and six years will undoubtedly make “Rainbow Six Mobile” miss a lot of opportunities. Chance. For example, assuming that the game can be launched before iOS 14.5 in 2021, it can still catch up with the dividends of the “stay-at-home economy” and have a better advertising buying environment.
After EA and Activision’s self-developed 3A IP mobile games have encountered staged setbacks one after another, it is still unknown whether Ubisoft can solve the optimization problems encountered by “Rainbow Six Mobile”. At present, Ubisoft has not given an exact official launch time, and of course, it has no plans to abandon the project. However, if even the leading 3A manufacturers who are not short of money cannot make 3A mobile games, will other European and American manufacturers still have the confidence to continue?
How did Tencent get over the 3A mobile game hurdles that major European and American companies couldn’t overcome?
If we talk about R&D strength alone, whether it is EA, Activision Blizzard or Ubisoft, they all have rich accumulation, mature pipelines and complete R&D supply chains in 3A games. To this day, this is still something that Chinese manufacturers need to learn from. of.
However, why are major European and American manufacturers with strong R&D capabilities unable to overcome the hurdle of 3A mobile games for a while?
In fact, the reason is also obvious. The accumulation of major European and American companies mainly focuses on consoles and PC platforms, while they started late in the research and development of mobile games, especially the research and development of 3A-level mobile games. Among the three major European and American manufacturers, Activision Blizzard has its own mobile game division, King, but the latter is mainly engaged in match-3 casual mobile games, which have lower requirements for mobile device performance and will not trigger hardware performance to be squeezed to the extreme. Later bugs, in addition, casual games are not in a strong network environment, while competitive mobile games run in more complex network environments and encounter all kinds of strange problems.
Both EA and Ubisoft have actually tried mobile games, but apart from earlier transplanted products and smaller casual games and 2D mobile games, the two companies have only started to make 3A mobile games in recent years. It’s still in its early stages.
So, why can Chinese companies solve this problem? How did Tencent do it? In fact, when it comes to mobile game research and development, Tencent is not smarter than others, but it started early enough, had enough trials and errors, and accumulated enough experience.
Unlike major European and American companies, Tencent began to enter the smartphone mobile game market as early as 2012, and achieved certain results in the feature phone game market earlier. It was also exposed to various problems encountered in mobile games early. In the operation of PC online games, Tencent encountered technical difficulties early on when millions of people were online at the same time, laying the technical foundation for strengthening online mobile games.
To mention Tencent’s earliest 3A mobile game, we must mention “Peace Elite”. In 2018, it was also the only Unreal Engine competitive mobile game besides EPIC “Fortnite” to have tens of millions of daily active users. For mobile games, to support so many players to play the game smoothly and achieve good image quality, the first thing is the adaptation and optimization of the equipment. Compared with PCs, consoles, and mobile phones, the memory and computing performance can never be enough. To ensure that players can play games without getting hot or crashing, it will test the optimization skills and the team’s manpower invested.
Fang Liang, the person in charge of Tencent’s WeTest cloud testing platform, previously stated that Tencent’s mobile games were initially completed purely manually. Different models were purchased and then tested manually. However,As the number of games increases, the number of test models has increased to the Top 300. Even so, it can only cover more than 80% of users, and the key parameters should be 100% covered, so the test models were increased to the Top 1,000 models.
What brings greater challenges to mobile game testing is the tactical shooting mobile game “Peace Elite”. The huge game map, 100-player real-time competition, and a large number of interactive details not only put forward higher requirements for hardware configuration adaptation , also makes testing more difficult.
The version of a mature competitive game is also updated very frequently. The cycle of this testing process alone can make developers “smoke”, not to mention the numerous channels in the Chinese market, which brings about the trouble of APP packaging.
Take “Shrinking Circle”, one of the core designs of “Peace Elite” as an example. The “Destiny Circle” that many players talk about is actually automatically generated by the game. The terrain, buildings, flowers, trees and other details in this circle are likely to be If it has not been accurately tested, the probability of bugs will be greatly increased.“Peace Elite”The testing team allows the AI to learn automatically, let the AI ”carpet-style” check points, find out the characteristics of each location on the map, and conduct targeted tests, thus avoiding players from encountering problems in various situations.
From a research and development perspective, making a successful 3A mobile game is no less difficult than building a 3A console game.
Unlike consoles, which have relatively few models, mobile games face thousands or even tens of thousands of models with different configurations and different performances. Equipment adaptation alone means a huge workload. From the cases of “Peace Elite” model adaptation and shrinking test, we can see the many and difficult problems a 3A-level mobile game encounters from development to launch.
Not to mention, online games, especially competitive mobile games, also face a series of problems that need to be overcome, such as real-time voice, server optimization, disconnection and reconnection, initial AI robot design, etc. Many problems can only be understood after experiencing them. How many resources to prepare.
Even if all these problems are solved, when facing the global market, you still need to understand the cultural customs and user behaviors of various places, and consider many factors such as local religions and festivals to operate effectively. For example, the success of “PUBG MOBILE” in overseas markets proves Tencent’s deep foundation in the development and operation of 3A mobile games.
It is also worth noting that a successful competitive game will often add numerous game modes and gameplay over time, gradually evolving into a platform game, and even adding a UGC creation mode. Take “Peace Elite” as an example. On the one hand, it continues to make changes and iterations in each version. The recently launched “Sky Island Gathering” version has added five major sky island theme areas, launched new vehicles, weapons, and increased the weight. The airdrop mechanism, the launch of new super-body tutors, etc., are still continuing to try to satisfy players’ freshness and imagination; on the other hand, “Peace Elite” has launched the Oasis Qiyuan Ecosystem in 2021 to support developers to co-create , so far, more than 70+ gameplays have been launched, the cumulative number of players has exceeded 200 million, and the total incentive share has exceeded 50 million yuan.
From the above point of view, successful 3A mobile games in 2024, especially competitive games, will gain entry into the market only by solving the technical hurdle. To achieve success, the ecology of the game, the development of competitive events, and platformization Ecology determines the long-term vitality of games. This climbing process is not easy for major European and American console manufacturers. IP cannot cure all diseases, but it requires accumulation of technology step by step, and passing a level first before taking on the challenge. next level.
Conclusion
Unlike when the mobile game market was just starting out, when major European and American companies were making AAA mobile games, industry standards had been set very high. It would obviously take time to accumulate experience from scratch and overcome various difficulties encountered. Of course, this is undoubtedly a good thing for Asian mobile game manufacturers, especially powerful Chinese companies. It not only proves the strength and level of Chinese manufacturers in 3A-level mobile game research and development, but also helps Chinese companies obtain European and American 3A game IP. It may even help drive down IP licensing prices.
As major European and American manufacturers continue to encounter setbacks in 3A mobile game R&D, more European and American manufacturers may begin to realize that the ability and level of 3A mobile game R&D is not achieved overnight. In the long run, cooperation with Chinese companies may be necessary. The choice to make.
