Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 29 Who will win?
As May arrived, time moved on.

The fervor surrounding the anime and manga game market is becoming increasingly apparent.

Open any gaming website, and you'll see all sorts of beautiful white-haired girls.

The explosive popularity of "Final Battlefront" has successfully boosted market expectations for anime-style games, prompting various anime-style projects to accelerate their development.

This month.

Five anime-style games are about to be launched or tested.

These are: Onmyoji, from the NetEase delegation, will begin its open beta test in late May.

The open beta test for "Battlefield Twin Tails" from Kuro started in mid-May.

The mobile game adaptation of the manga "Creation Law" produced by 9you, the dazzling "Gun Girls," and "Final Battlefront," which, although already launched, announced its return to open beta in May.

Besides the games already confirmed for May, there are even more exciting developments in the works, with Xishanju announcing its anime-style mobile game, "Girls Cafe Gun."

Tencent's "Blue War" has begun preparations for its second closed beta test.

Bilibili officially announced its acquisition of the rights to "Fate/Grand Order" and also acquired the rights to "Puella Magi Madoka Magica".

Mihoyo's Honkai Impact 3rd has completed its closed beta test.

The pre-launch publicity campaign has begun, and the leaked footage of the captain logging in via elevator easily garnered over a million views on Bilibili.

Although in the future, many of these games disappeared shortly after their release, vanishing into obscurity.

But in the present moment.

They are the main force behind each company's publicity and marketing efforts, and when it comes to spending money on publicity and marketing, they don't hold back at all.

As for the media...

The more bustling the market, the more excited they become.

The editorial departments of major gaming media outlets have been receiving a barrage of phone calls and their inboxes are overflowing with press releases and review invitations from various companies.

The owners of various news websites were grinning from ear to ear as they looked at their packed schedules.

While people were counting money until their hands cramped, analytical articles sprang up like mushrooms after rain.

Amidst this deluge of news, the games that garnered the most media attention throughout May were "Final Battlefront" and "GunGirls".

Needless to say, "Final Front" has seen a steady rise in popularity since its launch in March, despite the lack of new content updates.

But Chu Chen continued to update the development log.

The game bombards players with promises and promises, and its pay-to-win model is essentially the same as that of Warship Girls R, making it one of the few games where there is almost no difference in experience between free-to-play and high-spending players.

Its reputation is naturally the best.

Even in May, its daily active users remained stable at 600,000 to 700,000, making it a solid member of the top tier of anime-style games.

On the other hand, Gun Girls should not be underestimated.

You can question Tencent's "badness" and say that Tencent can't make games at all except for plagiarism.

However, you cannot deny that Tencent's experience in distributing and operating games far surpasses that of all other ACG (Anime, Comics, and Games) game developers.

After failing to secure an investment in "Final Front," Tencent turned to a less desirable option: leveraging the conflict between Flashbang and its operator, Zhenmian.

Not only did they acquire a 30% stake in FlashBlast, but they also used their financial power to suppress Zhenmian and secure the operation rights for GunGirls.

After that, Tencent launched a major promotional campaign for "Gun Girl".

First, they directly announced the "innovative auto chess" mode for "GunGirls," which was still incomplete, and even claimed that they would hold an "GunGirls" auto chess tournament.
Subsequently, Tencent conducted extensive promotional activities for "Gun Girls" through its internal channels. In addition to promoting the auto chess game, the promotional strategy also included promoting a significant portion of the game's storyline.

This promotional campaign actually made fans of "Final Front" very unhappy.

Before Tencent made its move.

The relationship between players of the games "Final Battlefront" and "Gun Girls" is actually quite good.

Unlike later periods, the community atmosphere of various anime and manga games did not have as many "anti-fan communities" that arose due to developers' passive-aggressive behavior, inaction, haphazard actions, or mismanagement.

There was no manipulation by game developers' paid trolls or marketing-driven content creators to create a sense of antagonism between games. At this time, the anime and manga game community was still quite harmonious.

The core gameplay revolves around the idea of ​​"falling in love with every wife you see" and the sentiment that "your wife could also be my wife."

However, this friendly atmosphere changed after Tencent got involved.

Furthermore, during internal discussions, Huang Yu, the founder of "Gun Girls," repeatedly emphasized that the core advantage of "Gun Girls" is not the anthropomorphism of guns, nor the character illustrations.

Rather, it was the "weight" brought about by the dark and profound worldview of "The Girl from the Bakery" (a novel) that began with tens of thousands of words.

Although Tencent is good at operations, they don't really understand games. They quickly adopted Huang Yu's suggestion and believed that this was indeed Xingchen's weakness.

Therefore, during the promotional process, phrases like "a more profound story" and "another world awaits you" were frequently used.

That's a bit too targeted.

This has led to many players of "Final Front" being somewhat unhappy with Tencent.

Player dissatisfaction, in turn, generated traffic for the media. Coupled with ample funding from Tencent, Starry Night Games' promotional efforts were primarily concentrated on new media channels such as Bilibili and Weibo.

However, it was mainly given to a few media outlets.

Therefore, during this period, the news from both sides could be described as one after the other taking turns.

However, broadly speaking, the entire gaming industry is almost unanimously optimistic about "Gun Girls" in relation to both games.

why?
It's very simple.

Since it's 2016 now, how exaggerated is Tencent at this point in time?

QQ has 8.68 million monthly active accounts, of which 6.52 million are mobile monthly active users. WeChat's monthly active users are even more impressive than QQ's, reaching 8.89 million.

It's no exaggeration to say that if Tencent really wanted to aggressively promote a game, it could directly reach over 90% of China's internet users by leveraging the social networking advantages of QQ and WeChat.

With such methods, even if the game only scores 60 points, Tencent can still make him money, and a lot of money at that.

What's even more terrifying is that before Douyin (TikTok) rose to prominence, this was the largest and only channel in China.

At this point in time, if someone told you that Tencent would be surpassed by ByteDance in the future, would you believe it?
Let alone others, even the current CEO of ByteDance wouldn't believe it himself.

More importantly.

For Tencent internally, this kind of promotion relying on QQ and WeChat is, to some extent, completely "free." In this era where traffic is king, having such a powerful weapon in hand is naturally invincible.

This is why, after news broke in the industry that "Final Front" had rejected Tencent, public opinion overwhelmingly held that StarCraft was getting a bit too arrogant.

Many traditional game companies have even expressed their skepticism about StarCraft, feeling that these anime and manga developers are taking themselves too seriously.

"Now Tencent's big hand is coming down, hey, let's see if you regret it."

To some extent, this is actually quite strange.

As a key figure at Tencent, even now, Xiang Lixuan still represents Tencent in its dealings with StarCraft and has expressed his willingness to invest in StarCraft.

She even explained it very clearly to Li Xuan.

As long as Chu Chen agrees, they can immediately adjust the release time of "Gun Girls" and give "Final Front" a super promotion.

It can be said that within Tencent, although they ultimately chose "Gun Girls"...

However, this group of people agrees that the Starry Sky Games development team has very strong development capabilities.

However, outside.

On the contrary, a group of manufacturers who had no connection with Tencent were gloating and making sarcastic remarks, waiting to see Chu Chen make a fool of himself.

Anyway, with May 5th...

"Final Battlefront" and "Gun Girls" will be launched on the same day.

The outcome will soon be clear.

(End of this chapter)