Exclusive interview with Chen Xinghan: Five years after its launch, how far is Sky: Children of the Light from becoming an ideal electronic shelter?

Exclusive interview with Chen Xinghan: Five years after its launch, how far is Sky: Children of the Light from being an ideal electronic shelter?

2024-08-16

Reporter | Zhang Yunting

Chen Xinghan never lacks stories.

This is not surprising. Since the release of the game "Sky: Children of the Light" (international version is "Sky: Children of the Light", hereinafter referred to as "Sky") in 2019, the game has been launched on mobile and host platforms such as iOS, Android, Steam and Play Station4, with more than 260 million users worldwide and more than 100 million downloads by Chinese users.

"Sky: Children of the Light" is a multi-platform healing and friendship game.

Many stories have been born among these users, some of which can be called legendary.

For example, during the pandemic, a retired man living in Los Angeles and a psychologist working in Switzerland had an Irish girl as their friend in Sky. The girl was suffering from domestic violence, and during the few days when she was not online, the old man and the psychologist used all means of investigation to find the local police and rescued her from domestic violence. For example, a Japanese girl said nothing at the offline event of Sky, but after the event, she slipped a note to Chen Xinghan, which read: "If it weren't for Sky, I might not be in this world anymore."

As the founder and creative director of the independent game company That Game Company (hereinafter referred to as TGC), Chen Xinghan is both the creator and disseminator of these stories. With "Sky" being highly recognized by the gaming community as a healing social game, it is also a commercial success for an independent game company. According to estimates by the data platform Growjo, TGC's annual revenue is 37.2 million US dollars. Considering that it has only produced this one game in the past five years, this achievement is impressive. Although TGC responded that this data is not credible because it cannot cover all channels, Chen Xinghan also admitted in an interview with YiMagazine that his "current income is greater than his expenditure."

This is not the first time that Chen Xinghan has received praise. Before this, he was already one of the most famous game designers in the world. TGC's cooperation with Sony on several games, "Flow", "Flower" and "Journey", earned him a reputation. After "Journey" was launched on PS3, it won the 2013 VGX Annual Video Game Award for Best Independent Development Game and the British Academy Award for Game Design, among many other awards.

Journey earned Chen Xinghan and TGC global fame.

During the production of Journey, Chen faced his first round of challenges. In 2012, Chen told gameindustry.biz that "Journey is a very difficult game to make." In fact, the production process was so difficult that TGC was saddled with $200,000 in debt and "couldn't pay anybody." Salaries for team members such as designer Chris Bell and art director Matt Nava were affected. In order to cope with the financial difficulties, the studio's founder "reduced to half pay for the last six months of development."

But soon after Journey was launched, TGC received $160 million in investment from investment companies such as TPG and Sequoia Capital, as well as a share from Sony. In a 2013 interview（）Chen Xinghan is already confident in the game design direction of "non-competitive, alleviating the loneliness of modern people". He told China Business NewsYiMagazineHe said: "If you can find an emotion that humans need, you will definitely make a lot of money."

In 2013, although some employees returned, others left, and TGC's core members had undergone major changes. Co-founder Kellee Santiago left, and game designer Chris Bell and outstanding original music composer Austin Wintory and three others started their own game studio Giant Squid, which developed the game "Abzu" in the style of Journey, but it also shows what the absence of Chen Xinghan's role meant to them.

"Abzu" game scene, picture from the official website.

Abzu continues the aesthetic style and music aesthetics of Journey, and even the weak social characteristics of Journey. Players cannot talk directly to each other or communicate through text. However, it has been criticized by some game critics. "If you have played Journey, you will definitely feel unusually familiar when you see the process and narrative techniques of Abzu: Putting aside the story theme and the visual performance, Abzu is simply a degraded version that completely follows the core design ideas of Journey." Nan Shan, a game self-media person, wrote.

Journey is more of a reflection of Chen Xinghan's personal worldview and values, and it also presents this core in an almost perfect form - what a lonely person has to experience and lose in his life. But when another game wants to copy it, despite the highly similar aesthetics, the lack of a solid worldview makes the game lack some emotional appeal in every step of the design.

A complete worldview and values are the core competitiveness of a game designed by a company. Perhaps many game designers would sneer at this statement, but for game designers like Chen Xinghan, there is no controversy.

From "Journey" to "Sky", from consoles to mobile platforms, from single-player to multiplayer games, TGC has a wider audience. In this process, Chen Xinghan needs to strike a balance between the free business model and the game settings that are good for the public. He tried his best to introduce TGC to the public as a game company that pays attention to social psychology. For example, during the interview, he would mention more social psychological observations. Once, Chen Xinghan took his team to visit a charity organization in California. The teachers there found that most of the poor students in the class had problems with their original families. In order to reconnect the poor students to society, they let these poor students make friends with each other. He talked about the importance of making friends in "Sky".

This is indeed the case.YiMagazineIn interviews with several Sky players, they all mentioned that this game is "relatively healing, the scenery is beautiful, and most of the people in it are very nice and will help each other."

Scene from the game Sky.

This relies heavily on the game structure of Sky, which continues the healing scenery and traveler core of Journey. In Sky, strangers make friends by sending candles to each other, and experienced people will enthusiastically take newcomers to fly and get familiar with the world, accompanying each other's growth. Giving gifts and companionship are motivated by positive game mechanisms, while negative emotions such as violence and malice will gradually disappear because they are not encouraged. In addition, the biggest change in Sky is its chat and social attributes, and this design mechanism has been continuously strengthened over the past five years.

In China Business NewsYiMagazineIn an interview in 2019（Click to read）Chen Xinghan believes that this is also because mobile games are far inferior to console games in terms of image and music experience and control methods. However, mobile phones can do something that controllers cannot do, that is "typing".

But TGC is also becoming less and less like an independent game company. It seems to have adopted a very popular game strategy, such as free download, allowing multiplayer online (can accommodate more than 10,000 people), allowing the purchase of goods, and providing new maps and ancestors during festivals or other celebrations to give players a sense of freshness. All of these gameplays are no different from past MMO (massively multiplayer online) games.

Chen Xinghan gave himself a difficult problem: if he wanted to stick to the emotional appeals of non-competitiveness, inspiring kindness and friendliness, and healing loneliness, Sky had to abandon the thinking mode of most mainstream commercial games. However, as a free game, the way to make money is inevitably built-in consumption.

In the usual free download and in-app purchase games, it is a common game design idea to give players what they like in order to stimulate their consumption. This has changed slightly in later MMO competitive games. In order to maintain the fairness of the main game experience, some games will choose to make the purchase so that it cannot change the player's own competitive ability.

But in "Sky", Chen Xinghan's team had to constantly adjust how to guide the positive emotions behind consumption. Initially, players could only pay for others because he wanted to encourage altruism in this virtual world. Later, he changed this consumption so that players could not only buy products, but also choose to buy gifts to give to their friends. Chen Xinghan believes that this is a well-thought-out change, "In order to make a person feel that other people's gifts are sincere, we must create an environment where it is a sacrifice when he gives it to you... selfish purchases must occur."

The setting of strong game mechanics almost requires game designers to always pay attention to whether the direction of the game is consistent with the initial setting, and every step of the game design details is tied to its values. Built-in consumption itself, as a business model for online free games, has also been proven to be the most profitable way in the Chinese game market in the past decade. But for TGC, which has switched from buyout games to free games, there may always be an inherent contradiction.

"The business model itself cannot make a work of art no longer a work of art. The key is to consider the emotional tone of the business model when choosing it," said Chen Xinghan.

From the perspective of strong social interaction, Sky is no longer a traditional game. Chen Xinghan gave an example of a typical early player who spent more than 40 hours a week chatting with friends in the game. This amount of time can almost be compared to chat tools such as WhatsApp.

"Sky" manuscript, sociality has gradually become its very important attribute.

Correspondingly, Chen Xinghan also has more loyal fans. In the offline event of the fifth anniversary of "Sky" held in Chengdu in early July this year, more than 300,000 people came to the scene. In this event, they logged into their accounts on the spot, and Chen Xinghan turned into one of the giants, surrounded by a group of glittering wings, running and flying around. After the end of China Joy in late July, he brought 7 pens with him so that he could sign autographs for fans who asked for them at any time.

The fifth anniversary offline event of "Sky" held in Chengdu.

Five years later, Sky is very different from the original. In terms of company setup, TGC has grown from a dozen people during Journey to 200 people, and has opened a company in China, hiring more programmers to maintain the stability of the database and server.

The whole world has also changed a lot after the epidemic. Healing, meditation, and companionship have become people's spiritual needs after the epidemic. As a virtual world, games have been given more meaning by some people who are dissatisfied with reality. They are eager to escape from reality and find some resonance in the virtual world. These resonances should be more fun than fighting each other. It would be better if people here could have more kindness.

Chen Xinghan has also seen the changes in the world. He admitted that he saw many cases of depression during the epidemic. The above is about the people who were saved by "Sky", but some people are still in pain. As a game designer who thinks about social emotions, Chen Xinghan hopes to continue exploring the healing effect of games on people. He also responded to some of our thoughts before and after the epidemic in the interview.

TGC founder and creative director Chen Xinghan.

Yi：A game can be played for 5 years and keep users playing for such a long time. What specific things need to be done behind the scenes?

Chen Xinghan:People will not waste time on something that has no value to their lives. If it is a pure game, it is impossible to play it for 5 years. I saw some early iOS players who were online for 10,000 hours, 2,000 hours a year, and 45 hours a week, which is equivalent to the time of a full-time job. What they really do is communicate with people - the average number of messages sent by each person in Sky is 35 to 40 per day. This average rate is the same as chat software such as What's App. So it is actually a chat software, but some people chat more and some people chat less.

Yi：Are you worried that the move from a pay-to-play game to a free-to-play game is a sign of a loss of independence?

Chen Xinghan:If you mean from a single-player game to a multiplayer game, you may see that the artistic expression becomes less pure due to the involvement of other players, which is also some of the concerns of the industry in the early days. But in fact, multiplayer games themselves are interactions between players. It is an expression and a special medium. In single-player games, designers can choose what the player inputs and what the output is, and use this method to design the content of the game. But once there are multiple people in the game, you will consider what one player does and what another player will receive. It is a more challenging thing.

Yi：Sky has strengthened its social attributes over the past five years. Is it because it sees the social needs or is it for user stickiness?

Chen Xinghan:Actually, it is the other way around. When I was making this product, I wanted to connect people emotionally. Just having a meeting with someone or having a meal with them every day is not an emotional connection between people, but an exchange. So what is a genuine human connection? It is when both parties open up the soft part of their hearts to the other person. After communicating, one person listens, tries to understand, and opens up himself, while the other person feels that he is heard, cared for, and recognized. After this interaction, both parties will feel that the world is particularly beautiful and that they recognize themselves more. This is called a human connection. This society is a very lonely society. Although we see a lot of information every day, the communication of this information is like putting a badge on our shoulders or putting gold on our faces, and it does not really make you feel that you are not lonely. Being understood, recognized, and listened to by others makes you feel that you are not lonely.

The friendship scene in the game "Sky".

Yi：In the specific game settings, how to solve this kind of loneliness?

Chen Xinghan:When we were making our previous game, Journey, we were already thinking about how to make two players not fight and compete with each other, but become two individuals with tacit understanding, friendship, and mutual bond. At that time, we found that it was important for two people to open their hearts and share some of their misfortunes with each other. Another most important thing is that when people are strong, they will not desire to connect. Both parties should feel very small. Imagine if you are standing on a busy commercial street and try to talk to anyone, they will think you are a liar because everyone is busy getting promoted and making money. But if you are put in a deep mountain, you walk in the mountain for an hour without seeing anyone, and you are a little scared. At this time, you see another person coming up the mountain, you will greet him without hesitation. Then you will tell him that I seem to have heard a wolf howling before, you should be careful. In this very small situation, you hope to rely on each other to survive, or rely on each other to give each other warmth.

Yi：So in "Sky" do you deliberately create some contrasts or difficulties?

Chen Xinghan:Yes. For example, in the United States, we hug each other every time we meet, but it is actually a very hypocritical hug. Because when I hug, I don't touch others, it becomes a courtesy. But in the game, we set the protagonist of the game to be a child, and when he hugs, it is full of energy and a real hug. I think the feeling of this hug is the same as greeting in real life. Interestingly, our sound designer is a Japanese. In their country's culture, people greet each other by bowing instead of hugging. It was after he hugged in "Sky" that he felt that people could have such strong emotions.

Yi：When you were making "Journey", you wanted to create a weak social experience, but in today's more extreme social network environment, you strengthened the social attributes.

Chen Xinghan:After doing this for so many years, I have more confidence. At that time, I was very afraid that if a voice or chat function was introduced, the social interaction might collapse. Now, I have made various attempts and feel that I can do better. For example, the message board in Sky has been revised recently. Not only can your friends see and like it, but public comments are also open. At that time, everyone in the company opposed me, saying that the trolls on Facebook trolled in places like this, and this is the most toxic setting. But I think that when a person says I understand you, its emotional value far exceeds a like. Why don't we give players more emotional value feedback? In order to convince my colleagues, we first tested it on Beta, and the results seemed very successful.

Yi：What is the design concept?

Chen Xinghan:Traditionally, if you want a player to go in a certain direction, there are two ways. One is to put a pole in front of you with a carrot hanging on it, as an inducement. If you are nice to others, I will give you this prize. The other is to report you. If you are not nice to others, I will beat you to death. But both methods have great flaws. When there is no carrot in the inducement, you will not be nice to others. In the latter case, you will be mean to others when you are not seen. We have a core design that I call "universal gravity", which is to show the post to the player's friends before showing it to the world. If his friends have no problem with it after reading it, we will open it to a small number of people in the world, and then to 1 million people. If they all like it and say that this thing is good, then we will send it to the world. Facts have proved that its results are very positive.

Yi：How does the game balance itself in terms of players and mechanisms?

Chen Xinghan:In the game itself, if there are some bugs, we tend to fix them if they affect other people's normal gaming. If they don't affect other people and they still say it's fun, we won't delete it.

Yi：Why did you change from paying for others to a model where you can also pay for yourself?

Chen Xinghan:We found that when everyone is altruistic, all payments become transactions between each other. This can be understood as when everyone is superhuman, no one is superhuman. At that time, we implemented in the game that players cannot buy anything by themselves, and must rely on others to give it to them. At this time, they used gift-giving as a transaction between each other, but gift-giving is a very delicate social relationship, and it cannot be forced.

In order to make a person feel that the gift given by others is sincere, we must create an environment where the gift is a sacrifice - he wants this thing very much, or this thing has a lot of value to him, and then he gives it away. In this case, the setting of selfish purchase must appear, because without selfish purchase, there is no preciousness of altruism.

I initially set up a season ticket, which costs $9.99 to buy on the international server, $19.99 for three tickets, and the other two tickets are actually half price. This setting is to encourage you to give the remaining two tickets to your friends. At the beginning, many people said it was great, but then it changed, and it became that they were not friends at all, and Xianyu made up the order or the black market appeared. So later we added a gift setting. Originally you could buy clothes for yourself, and now you can buy them for others, but the price is the same. At present, 20% of purchases are given to others, and one in four people is altruistic.

Yi：Is it also due to the profit pressure in operations and costs?

Chen Xinghan:I don't think it's pressure, but I hope that if someone pays, he or she will feel proud of it. For example, you won't admit that you spent 200 yuan in a game to surpass your friend's level, because it feels like cheating. You also won't admit that you spent tens of thousands of yuan in a game and then beat another person to death, because it's unfair competition. When you spend money, there is a list behind every purchase. I hope that this kind of consumption is full of warm and positive emotions. So when it comes to payment, we will consider how to influence a person to pay.

Yi：At present, what kind of paid positive emotional guidance settings do you think are more successful?

Chen Xinghan:For example, we have a swing on Valentine's Day. This swing is more expensive than a piece of clothing or ordinary things. But after buying it, he shared it with another person, so no one has ever complained about it. When we set prices, we evaluate the behavior we hope to see.

Yi：Do you have a dedicated employee behind this who makes user decisions, or do you do that?

Chen Xinghan:Designers have been discussing this all the time, because none of us are experts. We spend more time discussing internally how to evaluate this thing and what it should feel like.

Yi：When debating, will it be based on the consumption behavior of existing users, or will it discuss more social psychological issues?

Chen Xinghan:It is definitely based on our predictions of the possible thoughts and emotions of game players. After the analysis, I think I will think this way or that way, and then we debate with each other, for example, your idea is actually extreme, more people will think this way, and so on.

Yi：In order to maintain TGC's current operation, will you set a safety value for your revenue and company size?

Chen Xinghan:The size of a company is indeed proportional to its profit. At present, our revenue is greater than our expenditure. But we will not over-expand. During the epidemic, our growth was not too fast, so we did not experience a wave of layoffs. As for the specific upper limit, we are still a very conservative company.

Yi：The new product promotion and in-app purchase methods currently adopted by "Sky" seem to be not much different from ordinary MMO games. Are you worried that it will lose its spiritual core?

Chen Xinghan:No. Of course, I have also considered such a question, but I think the key is to release a game on mobile phones. If it is free, then its business model must be different from the pay-for-play model. I think the pay-for-play model is more suitable for selling the game as a complete work, while the free service model is to continuously polish and maintain the game, which has both advantages and disadvantages. I believe you also know that after George Lucas finished filming the "Star Wars" movie, he always regretted those shots in it, and only changed them with CG when the DVD was re-released later. But if it is a service game, I can modify it every few weeks. Now almost 90% of the games on mobile phones are based on such a business model. This business model itself cannot make a work of art become not a work of art. The key is to consider its own emotional tone when choosing a business model, whether it is in line with the emotional content you want to make. If it does not meet the requirements, it will create a sense of alienation and break a perfect work of art.

Yi：Let's talk about the changes after the epidemic. After the epidemic, it seems that having a complete world view and values has become a trend in many game designs?

Chen Xinghan:During the pandemic, many game companies made a lot of money. After making more money, in order to protect their current status, they began to put money back into the quality of content. So they began to think about what the background of the world is like, what characters there are, and write a story. But what I want to say is that there is no relationship between a good game atmosphere and a story. The core is still design, and it is every detail of the interaction that makes people begin to slowly feel and change.

Yi：What you just mentioned about “people feeling powerful” seemed to be true in the positive era before the epidemic, when people felt they could do anything.

Chen Xinghan:I call that era the golden years. It's when we become adults, no longer restricted by society and parents, no longer restricted by school, and can do anything. I can be president or an astronaut, my body is at its peak, and I am the most beautiful. But after you have a child, or when you are over 40, you will feel that your body is not as good as before, and you will start to think that not everything is so optimistic. You have to make a choice, what should you do now? What can you leave behind before your body is completely gone, when your child is slowly replacing you.

While working on Journey, I discovered that people have a kind side and a dark side. But our environment forces us to magnify something in our hearts. When I started working on Sky, I thought, since I could do it in Journey, why not try to show more of the good side of human nature in a free online game?

In "Journey", a certain journey is set as the golden years of life.

Yi: Sky has been around for 5 years. Do you think this approach of creating a good environment for people has been successful?

Chen Xinghan:I am a designer, and I believe that people's behavior is caused by the responsibilities given to them by the environment. First of all, we cannot regard people as purely bright beings, because the darkness of human nature must exist. You have to keep doing bright things, silently and everywhere, and don't expect that one action can change the whole world. As long as you can change enough people, even just one person, you will be successful. I hope we can provide a blueprint in the game to help people release their good side. In the game, the relationship between people is different, and everyone can see and touch it. Although the game is not a place that is not respected, I can use this place to try some different designs. When enough people have played it, they will ask why it can't be like this in reality?

Yi：How deep can the communication in the game reach? After all, it is a virtual environment.

Chen Xinghan:For example, among the romantic oil painters, they wanted to paint a beautiful sun, but the sun was much brighter than any other pigment. In order to capture this feeling, they began to use green pigment next to the red sun. The sky is not green, but they used green pigment because green is a reflection of red, so the red sun feels brighter. Artists are using different exaggerations and techniques to capture, and they personally experience a real feeling. This is actually a lie, because in reality you would not use such colors and behaviors. We are the same, using so many exaggerations to capture a real feeling. So what you feel here may be even stronger than the real world.

The game design of "Sky" hopes to alleviate the loneliness of gamers.

Yi：Is it possible to solve the loneliness of such people in real society simply by shaking hands, hugging or something else?

Chen Xinghan:I don't think this is a solution, because digital things are never real things. But you can have specific cases. In the five years of Sky, I received many wedding invitations, and they were international. Many players would tell me in person or in letters that if it weren't for this game, they would no longer be in this world. I was very moved when I saw it, but I couldn't express that emotion in words.

Yi：The post-epidemic world seems to have fallen into a more extreme, hostile, and single value system. Have you observed such changes in the gaming world?

Chen Xinghan:In fact, what I heard the most during the epidemic was not extremism, but depression, because many people in Sky felt that they were already depressed. When I was making the next game, I was thinking about what I could do for these people. Because in the stories I heard, some people did meet someone who was willing to listen to them, and felt that the world had not completely abandoned them, and were willing to try to stay. But I also know that others are still struggling in pain. This is my biggest feeling after the epidemic, thinking about how to help the latter.

Yi：What kind of game do you plan to make next?

Chen Xinghan:I hope that in this game, even if he has lost all demand for him in the real world, at least when he is playing this game, there are people who need him. I hope this kind of help can be more direct than Sky.

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Exclusive interview with Chen Xinghan: Five years after its launch, how far is Sky: Children of the Light from being an ideal electronic shelter?

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