Hello everyone, my name is Dr. X.
To say that the most popular game type in recent years, eating chicken games is definitely a part of it.
As the beginning of the explosion of such games, the birth of PUBG directly set off an upsurge of this new category. It not only saved Blue Hole, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, but also sent its CEO to the Korean Rich List. In the next five years, it has been continuously used and imitated by large, medium and small manufacturers all over the world, but few of them can shake its status.
This kind of change in the pattern is especially obvious in the Korean game circle where kimchi MMO and casual competitive games are popular. In recent years, there have been countless “Korean chicken-eating new tours” that have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. The market is either slightly innovative but difficult to get started, resulting in a huge gap between the old and new players, or the feel is extremely poor and the seams are a mess.
These may be attributed to “following the trend for a while”, but in fact, they have not figured out how to make a really fun chicken-eating game.
However, recently, another big-shot character has joined the track, and has completely pointed the finger at the ancestral game of PUBG.
What Dr. X is talking about is Wonder People, the game company founded by the father of DNF Xu Min, and the new game “Super People (Super Breakthrough)” he recently opened in early access. , “Superman” as the core concept of the big man, has an ambition to re-create the game myth that our people rarely know.
Focus 1: 1 billion DAU in 10 years? After the father of DNF returns to the game industry, he is ready to gamble!
Tracing the past of Xu Min, the father of DNF, can be called a “geek” career with ups and downs.
In 2001, after graduating from the Department of Chemistry at Seoul National University, he founded the game company Neople with five college classmates, which is later known as the DNF developer.
But Xu Min didn’t have smooth sailing at the beginning of Neople. The first game he developed was an online dating game called “Candy Bar”, which earned him his first pot of gold – 1 billion won in ten months. (about 5 million RMB)!
However, the next 18 games released by Neople, without exception, failed miserably, once burdening him with a debt of 3 billion won.
It was not until “Dungeon and Warriors”, which was launched in South Korea in 2005, was a hit that he completely escaped the crisis. In just six months, the number of Korean DNF players exceeded one million, and this number hit a new high after landing in China in 2008. Up to now, the cumulative sales of DNF has exceeded 120 billion RMB, and the global players are about 850 million. This game, which is called “myth” in the industry, has also established Xu Min’s status as the “father of DNF”.
But what is surprising is that Xu Min, who became a winner in life by virtue of DNF, chose to sell the entire Neople to Nexon for 380 billion won (about 1.9 billion RMB) in 2008, the peak of his career, and to 220 employees. Billions of won in stocks were distributed as “partnership fees”.
As for himself, he happily studied abroad, played music and baseball, because he had a baseball dream since he was a child.
But compared with many rich people who just become “players”, Xu Min is the kind of person who likes to dig deep into research, wants to become an expert in a field, and also wants to cultivate talents for various fields. investment spirit.
Therefore, after he left Neople, he not only went abroad to study music, but also established the first independent baseball team in Korea. In the era when e-commerce was just emerging, he opened WeMakePrice, a large Korean e-commerce company, and invested in real estate to increase his assets. Over one trillion won (about 5 billion RMB), Wonder People was also established during that time.
It is also because of these special achievements that Xu Min has the name of “Geek” in the eyes of the Korean people.
In 2017, Xu Min, who had been away from game development for many years, returned to the game industry at the invitation of Nexon. As an external consultant of Nexon, he also served as the chief producer of Wonder People and Ace Storm, two game development companies under Wonder Holdings. , to guide game development efforts.
According to him, he came back this time because he smelled the “next game market explosion”, “With the sales of mobile phones and electronic devices, 5 billion people in the world will soon have their own game devices. Really exciting time.”
Therefore, after 2017, Wonder People, which has been established for many years but is still unknown in China, has ushered in the real “backbone” (several mobile games developed before have not landed in China).
And this company with “Wonder (miracle)” in its name has officially formulated its own grand goals and challenges – with the goal of making great games that change the world, and achieving 1 billion DAU in 10 years ( daily active users)!
(Wonder People’s official website)
You know, Tencent’s revenue pillar “Honor of Kings” also took five years to achieve the achievement of 100 million DAU, 1 billion? That’s an unimaginable magnitude.
Although the ideal is lofty, the dream is still to be done. For Xu Min, the beginning of this journey is “Super Breakthrough”, aiming at the biggest dark horse in South Korea and even the world in recent years: PUBG.
With the unique aesthetic vision developed by DNF in the research and operation of the year, Xu Min wanted to take another gamble.
Point 2: Stitching monsters is still really fun? 7000 hours of PUBG players have something to say
As a game that has been online for more than five years, the popularity of PUBG most of the time is less than 5% of the 3 million at its peak.
The reason is that the old game mechanics and the more and more hard-core rules make the entry threshold of the game too high, and the gap between the old and the new cannot be filled. You can’t even get into the finals, plus plug-ins and other reasons, the game experience can be imagined.
From the perspective of “Super Breakthrough”, PUBG’s current dilemma is its opportunity, and it is also an opportunity for many players who still have nostalgia for PUBG.
In the past several free public tests, many students must have seen its full picture. The participation of more than 4 million players around the world and the No. 1 ranking of the most popular new games on Steam all prove everyone’s expectations for this new chicken-eating game.
In Dr. X’s view, this game is indeed trying to awaken the entertainment pleasure of hacking with people when players first played chicken , rather than having to live with a steel gun.
“Breakthrough” is not the kind of game that strives to make subversive innovations to attract players. On the contrary, it quite “chicken thief” has absorbed various elements of the popular battle royale on the market, and made it all at once. into the game.
If you want to use a current fashion stalk to evaluate it, it is:
Bad news: the ultimate seam monster, it’s time to sew all the seams.
Good news: it’s fun to sew? !
The game does not shy away from the similarity with some games, especially PUBG. Maps, skydiving, airdrops, armors, etc. will make people wonder if they are playing the wrong game.
However, the various gameplays integrated on this basis have gradually formed the new features of “Super Strike”.
(Remote release of nuclear bomb)
For example, characters and equipment have a “level” system like MOBA.
Each profession has 9 small skills and one big move. Each small skill has three levels. Generally, the big move can be unlocked at level ten.
The big moves of each profession are different, but without exception, they are very cool skills of imba. Once the big move is opened, you can incarnate as a “super human” like the English name of the game, and you can turn the battle situation with one ace. , which is more “not about martial arts” than other chicken-eating games.
In the previous test, 13 occupations have been opened, such as the explosion expert who can summon nuclear bombs, the shotgun master with super jumping and protruding face ability, and the titan who can attack and defend with a shield, etc. Today’s early experience has a new occupation. “Destroyer”, with the strike skills of launching grenades and remote-controlled cars.
If you follow the frequency of two or three new jobs a year, you don’t have to worry about keeping the freshness of eating chicken.
The upgrade system for equipped armor is also a big difference from PUBG. All non-top heads, armors, bags, and guns can be manually upgraded to a higher level by collecting enough materials.
And because you can upgrade and make equipment at any time and anywhere, “Super Breakthrough” also likes to mention a series of nicknames such as “Super Blacksmith / Iron Monster / Iron Warrior”, and that scene is quite happy.
On the other hand, Dr. X feels that the most interesting point of “Super Strike” is the ubiquitous randomness, which allows players to regain the unstable factors that are completely different from traditional shooting games when they first played chicken.
For example, every time you start, you will randomly get a different profession. If you are not satisfied, you can re-select ROLL with gold coins. The map for each skydive is only a random quarter of the total map. Although the map is small, the combat experience with different maps is obviously more exciting.
Players also need to pick up three colored capsules to upgrade their levels and skills. Various energy bars can also provide different buffs to enhance the rhythm of the game. With the addition of shorter TTK and smaller gun recoil, players can enjoy the experience. There is a sense of faster rhythm in “Breakthrough” than in PUBG.
This game has also made some particularly friendly designs for friends to play together.
For example, after being knocked down by the enemy, teammates can save people within a limited time, and the rescue is full of blood. Even if you run out of gold coins, it doesn’t matter, you can spend your teammates’ gold coins. Some occupations can also use smoke bombs for cover, which is especially useful when saving people without worrying about being overcast.
It can be said that many of the core problems that PUBG has been criticized for before have been fixed and improved in “Breakthrough”. The addition of various new mechanisms also makes “Super Breakthrough” confident to make other FPS or action game lovers feel fun, as the 7000-hour PUBG veteran player said. ↓↓
Finally, a very bonus point for Chinese players is that “Super Breakthrough”, which has the same “father” as DNF, is also highly valued in the face of the Chinese market.
Not only does it build a separate server for China, it supports Chinese in the first launch, and the pinching of the character’s face also really hits the aesthetic preferences of Chinese players. During the internal test period, it vigorously held competitions with rich prizes in China, attracting PDD, dumb girls, etc. The participation of well-known anchors, maybe after the official pre-emptive experience, will also set off a wave of anchors running water.
Summary after class:
“Breakthrough” can be said to be the first PC work that Xu Min, the father of DNF, really pointed out after he returned to the game industry. Whether it is to reproduce the myth of DNF, or to achieve the ambition of 1 billion DAU in 10 years, it is destined to eat chicken. The important mission of the new tour.
At present, the positive improvement attitude shown by “Super Breakthrough” and the goodwill released to Chinese players have won a lot of fans for itself. It also promises that there will be no Pay in future games that will affect the game’s victory or defeat. To Win mechanism, this is especially important.
But at the same time, as a superhero career mechanism and a completely free game that charges conscience, it is obviously just getting started in terms of career balance and combating cheating, and there is a long way to go in the future.
Dr. X will also continue to pay attention to whether “Breakthrough” can still create “Wonder (miracle)”.