How can small and medium-sized development teams carve out a niche in the mobile gaming red ocean?

2014 was a year of revelry for mobile developers. According to the "Cocos Developer Platform White Paper" released by Chukong Technology, small and medium-sized teams with less than 20 people accounted for a high proportion of 77.8% of the total mobile game development teams, and more and more dreamers joined the field of mobile game development. However, according to data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Research Institute, from January to June 2014, China's smartphone shipments fell by 9.9% year-on-year, which was the first time that China's smartphone shipments fell sharply. In the red ocean of mobile games, how should small and medium-sized development teams cope? How to improve efficiency and reduce costs without changing the number of people? All of this has become a problem that mobile game developers need to solve urgently.

Dealing with the Red Ocean: Improving user experience, high-quality mobile games are the key to breaking through

It is very appropriate to describe the operation ideas of some small and medium-sized mobile game teams in the past as "mobile games are permanent, but users are changing". Due to the rapid growth of smartphones in the past few years, mobile game development teams have an inexhaustible supply of new users to develop. Therefore, a trend of focusing on quantity rather than quality has emerged. Now that the popularity of smartphones has reached its end and the demographic dividend is no longer there, changing the mindset in time and focusing on how to improve user experience and strengthen product stickiness will become the magic weapon for small and medium-sized game development teams or independent developers to go against the current in the red ocean of mobile games.

Take "Dota Legend", "My Name is MT", "Fishing Master", "Everyone's Town", "The Great Master", "League of Goddesses" and other popular games as examples. Although the operation and promotion methods are different, they all pursue the best in user experience. With gorgeous scene pictures, interesting and novel gameplay, adding social interaction elements and other high-quality game methods, they meet user expectations beyond expectations to ensure the game's own stickiness.

According to data released by iResearch, in the third quarter of 2014, 63.3% of mobile game players played games for less than 30 minutes a day on average, and more than 60% of mobile game players played games every day. It can be seen that for mobile game developers, although the alarm bell of the demographic dividend has been sounded, there is still a lot of room for development in terms of high-quality games and improving product stickiness.

Improve efficiency: Choose a one-stop solution for game development and optimize your workflow

When it comes to improving user experience, small and medium-sized teams and independent developers engaged in game development will certainly complain that they have to sacrifice game quality to a certain extent in order to improve efficiency. Without the strong capital support of game giants and a lack of sufficient talent reserves, some problems encountered in game development that seem small to game giants can interrupt the development process of small and medium-sized teams and independent developers, and even cause the game development to fail midway.

Faced with the problems encountered in game development, some small and medium-sized teams and independent developers chose the "ostrich policy", and the outbreak of low-level, plagiarized, and crude problems led to a large number of shoddy money-making games in the Chinese game market. The practice of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is prevalent, which has greatly damaged the reputation of Chinese games.

Sacrificing quality for the sake of improving efficiency is a misunderstanding of small and medium-sized teams and independent developers engaged in game development. The reason why you feel constrained in game development is, first, due to the imperfect workflow in game development, and second, due to the compatibility conflicts in the later stages of selecting engines, frameworks, tools and other modules. Choose a mature workflow to close the loop of game development from project establishment to release, and let each position in the team focus on doing what they are good at in multi-person collaborative office, reduce communication costs, reduce rework rate, and maximize efficiency. The compatibility issues of modules such as engines, frameworks, and tools are the core factors that determine whether a game can achieve its development goals in the end.

Small for big: Will the giants share their core competitiveness with us for free?

Through investigations of industry giants, we know that the initial development teams of most of the "hottest mobile games" were limited to about 20 people. For example, in 2013, Xing Shanhu, CEO of Ledong Excellence, revealed that the development team of "My Name is MT" had only more than 30 people, and the initial development team of "Fishing Master" launched by Chukong Technology, which once had a monthly income of 40 million, was only 20 people. Can't their success of winning big with a small investment be replicated?

So let’s summarize briefly what common characteristics these gaming giants that grew from small teams have.

First, we chose a standardized workflow to reduce the various trivial processes in the development process and maximize efficiency. Second, we chose the right engine, framework, tools and other modules, and combined the best distribution model in each link. In the early stage, we ensured the quality of the game with low cost and high efficiency, and occupied the market at a very fast speed. Third, we chose a game engine that supports multiple platforms, so that games on different system terminals can be synchronized, etc.

Many small and medium-sized teams and independent developers engaged in game development will certainly ask, the above three advantages, these intangible wealth are the core competitiveness of game giants, will the giants share them with us for free? The answer is: Yes.

The success of "Fishing Master" is related to the fact that Touch Technology has chosen a standardized workflow and selected the right engine, framework, tools and other modules for the best combination; popular games such as "Dota Legend", "My Name is MT", "Everyone's Town", "The Great Master", and "Goddess League" all use the Cocos 2d-x engine provided by Touch Technology that supports multiple platforms. Last October, Touch Technology CEO Chen Haozhi revealed at the Cocos 2014 Developer Conference that 80% of the games with the highest revenue in the Chinese market were developed by Cocos, and said that Touch Technology will transform from a game company to a platform company in the future. According to industry rumors, Touch Technology has been trying to integrate its mature game development tools, engines and frameworks into a one-stop solution for game development called Cocos for free. It is said that this legendary game development tool will be launched in 2015.

Cocos Artifact: Promote model innovation and carve out a path in the red ocean

According to some news, this day will come soon. Chukong Technology will make a big move on January 29th, integrating its strong products to launch the Cocos one-stop solution for game development. Cocos will continue to launch new features around the game development workflow, such as one-click deployment. After editing the game scene in Cocos, it can be directly packaged and deployed to the mobile phone for real-time preview. In addition, Cocos will integrate the code editing function in the resource editor to make the interaction between resource editing and logic code smoother.

This legendary Cocos will provide a full set of game development tools to meet the tool needs of different professions in the team, thereby improving development efficiency and reducing time costs. Cocos also has powerful features such as one-click game project establishment and one-click deployment, and convenient generation of apk/ipa programs.

Amid the bad news about the mobile game red ocean, whether Cocos game development one-stop solution can become a life-saving straw for game developers and help small and medium-sized development teams and independent developers to carve out a bloody path out of the red ocean is beyond doubt. The rumor will be revealed on January 29, so wait with the editor.