Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 54 The Japanese Market
That night
Japan, Tokyo

In the Tokyo nights of May, a gentle breeze carries a faint coolness, dispelling the lingering heat of the day.

The neon lights along the street flickered, reflecting off the wet asphalt.

Pedestrians were in twos and threes, most of them walking in a hurry.

Li Suhao carried the pork cutlet rice bento he had just bought from the convenience store and walked towards a nearby building.

It was already 8 p.m., but many lights in the office building were still on, and you could see that many company logos were still lit up.

The logo on the ninth floor is the newest and therefore the brightest.

[Starry Night Games]

Lee So-ho carried a pork chop rice bowl in one hand and took out his phone with the other to take a picture of the logo.

Even though it has been three months since he came to Tokyo, he still feels like he is dreaming most of the time.

As someone who dropped out of high school and went to Shanghai to work alone, he had a wide range of work experience, including food delivery, waiter, and cleaner.

If you're talking about salary, it's not actually that low compared to my hometown.

However, unlike others, Li Suhao did not work from dawn till dusk for money.

On the contrary, after entering the workforce, he realized the importance of learning. Therefore, he preferred to earn less money and stopped delivering food or doing part-time jobs after 6 pm.

After 6 o'clock, it's his study time. He learns things on his own, things that he didn't learn in school because of his rebelliousness.

Over the years, in order to make up for the gap in educational background.

He obtained many certificates because a relative of his worked for a Japanese company, so he learned Japanese and programming.

Although he ultimately failed to get a job at his relative's company, these certificates did help him find employment.

He was among the first employees to join Starry Night Games.

The reason I joined StarCraft was because StarCraft didn't care about academic qualifications, even though StarCraft's games seemed incredibly basic back then.

But it is, after all, a legitimate game company.

So he worked on it for more than a year, and when Chu Chen suddenly had a breakthrough, Li Suhao worked even harder.

Because he truly saw hope.

Chu Chen could naturally see his efforts.

So at the end of March this year, which was last month, he was dragged to Japan by Chu Chen to run the Japanese branch and set up business.

Chu Chen was very eager to enter the Japanese market.

It's no exaggeration to say that Japan will account for half of the future domestic ACG (Anime, Comics, and Games) market.

Furthermore, due to the exchange rate between Japan and China, Japanese players' desire and sensitivity to spending money on in-game purchases are completely different from those of domestic players.

For example, the same amount of 648 can be perceived completely differently by players in two different countries.

One 648 is equivalent to 12000 yen in Japan.

Is 12000 yen expensive?

This is certainly expensive.

However, you need to consider Japan's purchasing power and wage levels when making the calculation.

Here, we can use a common global benchmark for purchasing power: Coca-Cola.

In Japan, a bottle of Coca-Cola costs 180 yen, and 12000 yen is roughly equivalent to 66 bottles of Coca-Cola.

In China, a bottle of Coke costs 3 yuan. How many bottles of Coke is a 648? It's equal to 216 bottles of Coke.

In short, if we consider spending power, although both spend "648" in-game currency, the perception of players in the two countries is completely different.

The price of domestic second-hand games has dropped from 648 to around 200, which reflects the actual spending experience of Japanese players.

Once you understand this, you'll understand many things.

Why do Chinese anime-style games sell so well in Japan, and why are Japanese players more tolerant of them?

With the first-time purchase bonus, spending 200 yuan gets you 80 pulls, which is three times the price of spending 648 yuan for the same amount. If all in-game purchases in domestic anime-style games in the past were discounted by 80%, many problems might not have been so severe.
The topic seems to have drifted a bit.

In short, Chu Chen coveted the Japanese market, so he made his plans for Japan very early on.

Li Suhao arrived in Japan two months ago.

Chu Chen's requirements for him were not high, and there was only one: that the Japanese server launch be completed by mid-May.

At that time, Starry Sky Games Studio itself was also extremely busy.

Therefore, Chu Chen granted Li Suhao two special permissions.

One aspect is people. Apart from the management team, who need to be interviewed by phone, all other decisions at the Japanese branch are made by Li Suhao himself.

Secondly, it's about money.

Li Suhao could directly ask Chu Chen for money through the approval process, and as long as he applied, Chu Chen would basically give it to him without even looking at it.

You could say this is Chu Chen's trust.

But in reality, Chu Chen was trading cost for time. When he decided to use Li Suhao, Chu Chen had already prepared himself for certain "management costs."

However, as mentioned before, Chu Chen had only one goal: to ensure that the Japanese server would launch on time without him having to worry about it much.

Chu Chen was willing to incur additional "management costs" if he could achieve this.

It's the same principle as Emperor Qianlong being willing to pay "management costs" for Heshen.

At worst, Chu Chen can just go to Japan to "make changes" after the public beta.

Against this backdrop, it's no exaggeration to say that if Li Suhao had been quick-witted, he could have unknowingly "earned" tens of thousands, or even millions, in the past two months.

however.

Li Suhao, however, chose a different path.

Although Li Suhao was only 25 years old at this time, he had been in Shanghai for a full 8 years since he was 17. What kind of people did he come into contact with when he first arrived in Shanghai?

Who are he associating with now?

Without the slightest hesitation, when Li Suhao accepted the job, he felt that it was an opportunity that could change his life.

Perhaps the saying "circumstances create heroes" is truly true.

In short, Li Suhao's work attitude over the past two months can be summed up in one sentence.

As long as you don't kill them, keep pushing them to the limit.

Knowing he lacked experience, the first thing he did upon arriving in Japan was to poach talent. Others would poach people by hiring headhunters or making phone calls.

He also hires headhunters, but instead of calling them, he visits the right person in person once he finds a suitable candidate.

They even went to wait downstairs at other people's company buildings.

On one occasion, in an attempt to ambush a target, he spent an entire afternoon sitting in the coffee break area of ​​the target's office building, managing to "bump into" the target five times.

Don't be fooled by what you see on TV or in novels, where people often visit Zhuge Liang's thatched cottage three times, or pester him relentlessly, to finally recruit talented individuals.

But in reality, how many people can actually do that? And how many are willing to do it?
If you're a little shy and have a strong sense of self-respect, you might give up after just one rejection.

Only someone like Li Suhao, a seasoned veteran and a quiet, unassuming young man, could pull it off.

In addition, Chu Chen promised the Japanese operations team that they would receive 10% of the profits as a year-end bonus, and this 10% of the profits was not from the company's profits, but from the project's profits.

To put it simply, if the Japanese server of "Final Battlefront" generates 200 million RMB in revenue this year, then after deducting operating costs and channel revenue sharing, the amount Chu Chen receives is, say, 100 million RMB. Chu Chen will then share 10 million RMB of that revenue.

Even if Chu Chen spends all of the 100 million he earned this year, the remaining 10 million will not be affected.

These conditions are not bad for the operations team.

In addition, two months ago, "Final Front" had a monthly revenue of 20 to 30 million RMB in the Chinese server, so it is not a completely unknown small company.

With this information in hand, the difficulty of arresting people naturally decreases considerably.

(End of this chapter)