Interesting that the Western game press completely missed out on this game until someone (Reuters?) wrote an article about Tencent and mentioned the game’s failure a few days ago. It may have been designed for the Chinese market, but they clearly expected some US users - apparently it has full English voice acting. Someone really dropped the ball on marketing this game, apparently.
The video game industry hasn’t (yet) figured out any of the scams and creative accounting that the movie industry has built itself around. This is a pretty straightforward failure.
Traditionally, back in the days before mobile games, the Korean model for online games was to make something cheap and quite rough (in terms of polish but also particularly on a technical level), see if anything got popular, and then throw some money at it, to reduce risk. (Though if the game got popular, you had the issue of trying to scale up a game, while it was live, built on a framework that was likely janky and insecure, costing a lot of money in the long term.) The US MMO model was to make something polished and technically sound to start off with, that would have immediate appeal and would have a solid foundation (and then the company would crater hard if it failed). Chinese MMOs tended to go with the Korean model. Subsequently, mobile games have tended to go with the traditional Korean model, but this is definitely more in the US MMO tradition. Tencent have enough money and experience these days that they back some quite large projects. (Their name isn’t always prominent on them, though.)
These kinds of things are pretty unknowable. Personally I thought the industry had hit zombie saturation a good decade ago, but apparently not, as I’m seeing games with seemingly identical gameplay find their own fans, year after year. Also “zombies” isn’t really a genre for a game, really - differences in mechanics make two superficially similar games into completely different experiences with different audiences.
Plus, it takes so long to make a big game like this, the conditions when you greenlight the project and the conditions when you finally release the game are going to be totally different. It’s almost comical how developers frantically scan new releases, desperately hoping that everything coming out is sufficiently different from the game they currently have in development, and their intended audience won’t be tired of that kind of gameplay years before they’re even done making it. (And you could try shifting development to make it different if something too similar comes out, but then you’re adding more development time and money to the project, and you still have the same potential problem with future games.)
They publish a lot of games - quite a few have been… not successes, let’s say. What’s remarkable about this one is that absolutely no one in the US/UK market seems to have even heard of it. That’s a pretty drastic marketing failure for such a big game, especially given the stunt of hiring Will Smith.
The irony is, the bigger the budget, the safer - and blander, ultimately - you have to make the game, to be safe and not alienate potential players. Which risks making the game less popular. It’s a fine line to navigate.
He’s been pretty consistently a marketable name, internationally. I think he still is, but it also depends on when he was attached to the project, which could have been a while ago…
With mobile gaming, a big chunk of revenue gets spent on user acquisition, so it can be worthwhile to spend some money to make things that stand out. Tencent is all over the place, in terms of the scale of its games. It has published, for example, the extremely popular mobile versions of Call of Duty, Pubg, League of Legends… they have big stakes and ownership in big US companies, too (a good chunk of Epic, they outright own Riot these days, etc.).
It’s interesting because up until really the last few years, a known actor doing voice work in a game didn’t contribute anything to a game. Most were stunts, the actual performances were poorly directed using bad scripts, and made up a negligible part of the experience. Companies just hired recognized actors for marketing purposes and were completely ignorable in the games themselves. But suddenly we’re getting actors being given proper scripts, with motion and facial capturing that allows them to give real performances that add something significant to a game experience. You can even have games that are all about those performances (e.g. Sam Barlow’s games). It’s a pretty far cry from what long-time gamers got used to, which was that performances were completely irrelevant - at best.
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