news

Last Monday (July 22), the official announcement of "Ring War" was released to shut down the recharge. The developer Guangzhou Indra explained that since the capital chain broke in mid-2022, the company has been struggling and providing game operation services to players without any profit.

Officials admitted that the company could no longer continue and was unable to support server costs, and "had to enter bankruptcy liquidation."But they still promised in the announcement: "The company is here, the game is here! The server will not be shut down!" After shutting down the recharge, they will still insist on periodic event updates and distribute game benefits to players every day.

at the same time,Indra CorporationThe game producer posted on TapTap, and seemed to hesitate for a long time, but finally decided to open his heart to the players (now deleted): "I'm sorry, as everyone expected, I failed."

"I couldn't stand up. I was too tired. I really didn't want to stand up..."

"I haven't been home for 10 years to celebrate the New Year or spend time with my parents. I tried my best."

“If there is an opportunity in the future, I will be more cautious in developing projects.”

Liao Yu, game producer, founder and CEO of Guangzhou Indra, once worked at Gameloft and participated in the art and planning work of "Assassin's Creed" and "Prince of Persia". Despite such rich industry experience, Guangzhou Indra has also had its own glorious moments.But according to his own account, he has "incurred tens of millions in debt", and there are even rumors online that employees who are owed wages are selling the company's game codes and art resources in the group to "pay off their debts."

Of course, he also emphasized in the player community that Ring Wars will not shut down, but will only stop recharging. He also joked that if players still love the project, they can just recharge the server fees occasionally. "If no one recharges, I will recharge as much as I have and try to keep the server open. I hope I can still make it in my spare time in the future. This is just my apology to the players."

Talking about the present again, Liao Yu repeatedly typed the words: "My defense is broken, I am very tired."

He had not been home for ten years in order to "endure", and now he says that "I just want to spend more time with my elderly parents and young daughter" - the words are full of fatigue and loss, the helplessness after a difficult struggle, and a hint of bitterness and relief, adding a tragic color to this already difficult industry.

While feeling emotional, what happened to Guangzhou Indra and "Ring War"?

There was a highlight moment: Representing Tencent in the "dark year", the shareholder list was shining with gold

Industry insiders should still remember that Guangzhou Indra, which is now in its darkest hour, once welcomed the highlight of its industry in a high-profile manner.

At that time, Guangzhou Indra spent 5 years (2014-2019) to create its first self-developed product: the Diablo-like mobile game "Raziel". It began to receive investment from Yinhan, and the product was later handed over to Tencent for agency. It was the eve of the Diablo year, and "Diablo: Immortal" and "Diablo 4" began to warm up. "Raziel" also played an important role in representing Tencent to fight for Diablo users and compete with NetEase.

Therefore, Tencent gave "Raziel" a lot of resources at that time. For example, Tencent Game Academy's "Discussion" column invited Philip Shenk, the chief designer of "Diablo 2", to have a dialogue with Liao Yu. "Two generations of creators, discussing Diablo", it was a great success for a while.

The game's early data was also impressive: the number of reservations on the official website before the launch exceeded 5.2 million, which was quite good at the time. In June 2019, "Raziel" was officially launched in public beta, topping the iOS free list and ranking sixth on the best-selling list on the first day. It was rated by players and media at the time as: the domestic ARPG mobile game that is closest to the Diablo experience.

The third-party data showRazielThe peak revenue in the first month exceeded RMB 100 million, and the estimated cumulative turnover has exceeded RMB 500 million so far. The success of "Razel" also enabled Guangzhou Indra to obtain multiple investments including Tencent, Sequoia China, and Gigabit. According to media reports, the company quickly moved from a small bungalow in the red brick factory to a Grade A office building in Pazhou.

But soon, the second round of game license winter arrived, and Tencent, which did not get its first game license until September 2022, had to "reduce costs and increase efficiency." More than 20 games were removed from the shelves in the first half of the year alone, including "Raziel."

Afterwards, Tencent Games announced that the agency agreement with the developer of the game "Raziel" will expire soon, and the game will cease operations in September 2022 (originally scheduled to be extended after June 15), and the developer will restart and operate the project on its own. After the re-launch, only free trades and Battlepass will be retained.

Now, with the broken capital chain of Guangzhou Indra, the self-operated "Razel" also announced that it would stop recharge on July 22, and only insisted on periodic activity updates and daily benefits. Although the company's shareholder list is glittering, it has fallen into debt of tens of millions and no one cares about it, which is a pity.

So, what went wrong?

In fact, judging from the software copyright registration of Guangzhou Indra, it has multiple games under development at the same time, most of which are dark games, and can be said to be a "dark professional". Among them, "Ring War" was registered as a software copyright as early as 2019, and even "Raziel 2" was registered, but all projects were "difficult to give birth".

Currently, a total of four of its games have obtained publishing licenses: "Raziel", which obtained the publishing license in 2017, the magical meat-and-pigeon ARPG mobile game "Ancient Treasures", which obtained the publishing license in 2020, "Ring War", which obtained the publishing license in 2021, and the latest one is the card + elimination fusion gameplay mobile game "Knight's Oath", which obtained the publishing license in 2022.

butIndraThe company has only released "Raziel" and "Ring War" so far. In other words, when "Raziel" was transferred to the company for independent operation, there was almost no follow-up income. The company almost put all its cash ALL IN the research and development and distribution of "Ring War". It was the failure of "Ring War" that became the last straw that broke the camel's back.

It’s not that I don’t work hard, it’s just that the industry is changing too fast.

From the product point of view, there is not much to fault with Ring Wars. The first impression of the game is that it uses UE4 to create next-generation graphics, ultra-realistic modeling, excellent production, and extremely high art quality. It is a next-generation Team RPG that is hot in the European and American markets, and it should have a bright future.

According to GameLook's observation, in recent years, as the SLG track has become oversaturated and increasingly difficult to win, "RAID: Shadow Legends" developed by the Israeli company Plarium has set off a new trend of Team RPG (a card RPG with multiple roles and multiple lines of development) overseas, prompting many companies at home and abroad to transform.

Similarly, Team RPG is also suitable for the transformation of Chinese game companies. Whether it is a turn-based game, chess, or tower defense game depends entirely on the game company itself.

Coupled with the paving of the way by predecessors and the verification of the scale of the overseas market (the peak monthly turnover of "RAID: Shadow Legends" was over 200 million, and it currently remains at around 150 million), there is obviously a predictable formula: if the domestic and overseas revenue ratio of a successful TeamRpg game is 1:1, theoretically the product is expected to reach more than 500 million per month; if there is also PC revenue, the beautiful wish of 100 million US dollars per month is not far away.

Therefore, there are many well-known domestic game companies in the TeamRpg track, such as Diandian, Chaoxi Guangnian, Hero Entertainment, and even NetEase has represented overseas benchmark games.《RAID：Shadow Legends……

In comparison, Guangzhou Indra may be the one with the biggest gambling nature. After all, it is a startup company, unlike other companies that have other projects to provide stable cash flow, or the company itself is strong. In addition, after "Raziel", it cannot provide stable cash flow, so Indra can only fight with its back against the wall.

GameLook observed that Guangzhou Indra was not the only one to fail in the Team RPG race. Even the UE5 cross-platform TeamRPG King Arthur: Legends Rise developed by the European and American SLG giant Kabam was forced to "shut down the server and refund" after a year of testing, and could only announce a full refund for paying players.

Similarly, many powerful domestic companies have entered the market, but only Moonton's "Watcher of Realms" and Chaoxi Guangnian's "Dragonheir: Silent Gods" have emerged. However, although they are in similar directions, Tencent recently incorporated the entire "Dragonheir: Silent Gods" team under ByteDance, but did not take a fancy to Guangzhou Indra, in which Tencent itself holds shares. This is really a pity.

Byte's "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence"

Why is Team RPG so difficult to survive? To put it in one sentence: it’s not that the R&D team didn’t work hard, but the external environment changed too quickly.

Just like the performance of Baldur's Gate 3 that exceeded expectations, it brought a lot of new users to the niche CRPG, which should have directly benefited TeamRPG with a magical and realistic style. However, with the soaring production quality, Unreal Engine production, next-generation graphics... it does attract many players, but the high R&D costs also bring greater pressure to recover the investment. What's more, the marketing environment has changed dramatically.

Ring Wars, which was launched in 2022, is at the forefront of facing Apple's new IDFA privacy policy, which is very unfriendly to all games that rely on heavy core players in terms of marketing and buying volume. Many overseas SLG mobile games have also begun to alleviate the pressure of the market decline and buying volume through multi-platform versions and official website recharges, struggling to survive.

For startups that are already short of funds, the sudden change in the marketing environment will naturally bring many practical difficulties. Even large companies like Kabam have not been able to survive, and small and medium-sized companies are even more difficult to survive. We can also see that the entire market is splitting up: high-stakes projects cannot afford to lose, and startups are collectively flocking to the casual SLG and small game tracks.

In this process, Guangzhou Indra became a tragic industry case.

Liao Yu once said in an interview with the media that the core competitiveness of his team is the pursuit of process standards and quality standards. Although the "internal cultivation" of quality has always been important, the drastic market changes outside are beyond our control. Guangzhou Indra, which did not adjust its direction in time, continued to encounter difficulties. After all, this industry has always been so cruel.

The biggest regret is not making stand-alone products or going overseas

In the comment section of the announcement of the closure of recharges for "Ring War", GameLook found that players generally recognized the "excellent game foundation" and "top-notch graphics and excellent mechanism design", but they all believed that the mobile game operation method failed to fully demonstrate the charm of the product, which was one of the reasons for the game's failure.

There are even quite a lot of voices suggesting that it be changed to a single-player system with a buyout. GameLook also believes that it is indeed a great pity for Ring Wars not to be able to go the single-player route.

After completing "Art of War: Red Tides", Game Science turned to stand-alone games. The upcoming "Black Myth: Wukong" has attracted great attention from players at home and abroad; "Shadow Blade Zero" has returned to stand-alone games from a pay-to-win game, and the series has also gained a chance for new life. The recent offline exhibition trial has made the game more popular.

On the other hand, the art quality of "Ring War" also reached the level of PC games, but it encountered survival difficulties because it became a pay-to-win mobile game and ended up being shut down and stopped accepting recharges, which is a pity.

In the domestic mobile game market, young players prefer two-dimensional games, while middle-aged players prefer martial arts and legends. Although Diablo-like also has a large number of loyal fans, Blizzard's brand is more popular. The lack of a large enough audience is another major reason for the failure of Ring Wars.

In GameLook's opinion, the game is more suitable for overseas expansion. Although globalization also has its own barriers, especially for a startup, the challenges are also not small. However, the dark style, ultra-realistic graphics, and the "brain-burning but not hand-burning" soul-based strategy experience have many fans overseas. What's more, TeamRPG is much more popular in the European and American markets than in China.

There are also thousands of Ring Wars players who feel sorry for this. As the official said, they have received enthusiastic support from players after the announcement. They also said: "If there is a chance in the future, we hope to update the product again in an independent production way and meet everyone again."

"So don't rush to provide support, just focus on the game first."

····· End ·····

GameLookDaily game industry reports

Global Vision/ In-depth Information

Copyright © GameLook® 2009-2024