Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Zhu Siqi

"can I make a better game?"

The spark was extinguished. Unemployment came very suddenly for the watermelon rabbit.

She has been in the gaming industry for 12 years and has only changed her job once before. When I first entered the industry, the domestic game industry was still dominated by PC games and page games. Her company focuses on some of the early female games, focusing on a variety of palace fights, costumes and romantic elements.

In the following 10 years, mobile games became popular. Although the platform has been changed, the content and form of women's games have not changed much, which has become an opportunity for Watermelon Rabbit to change the environment later. " During these 10 years, game users are constantly growing and changing. At that time, people liked to watch bossy presidents and concubines compete for favor, but now they like to watch 'Sister who braved the Wind and waves'. I think we should also grow up with users instead of doing something that is more conventional all the time. " Said the watermelon rabbit.

The main reason is that after 10 years in one place, she wants to seek some breakthroughs in her personal career and do something different in concept. The original company was in a small city, and the play and content of the products were more traditional. She wants to take a look at other cities where the industry is more concentrated and may be able to start her own business. With this in mind, she chose to resign in 2020.

This resignation is a "naked resignation". Before and after she resigned, she blamed herself for her temporary capriciousness. She regarded Zhihu as a "tree hole" and recorded her thoughts bits and pieces. "after all, I have to support my family. I often regret it and keep asking myself, can't I bear the unpleasant things? why bother to lose my job?"

Because she is careful with her money and is anxious about saving money every day, she has lost 5 jin a month.

But compared with now, the setbacks at that time were negligible. After all, there was no shortage of opportunities in the industry where hot money poured in. "at that time, jobs were relatively easy to find, the atmosphere of the whole industry was more active, and I myself was relatively young." When the watermelon rabbit recalls the past, it is as if it were a lifetime ago as people recalled the life before the epidemic.

It is true that the game industry in 2020 did not disappoint hopeful people, and Watermelon Rabbit soon found a new job. The new company is large, headquartered overseas and has branches in several domestic cities, which may add up to thousands of employees. When she joined, she was able to participate in a relatively new project.

This is exactly what the watermelon rabbit wants. In various public situations, when she calls herself a "female to game producer," she refers to games that interest women in a broader sense and do not want to be limited to the narrow categories of dressing and relationships. Leave the original company, but also want to try to expand this category through their own efforts. The new project gives her a seemingly suitable opportunity.

After working in the project team for more than two years, the feedback within the company has been good. Even if there is no popular style, the product is not in a shaky predicament, nor is it stillborn because of the version number problem. Watermelon Rabbit has been working step by step, ready to report a new version to the top.

As a result, at the end of 2022, during the home and office period of the epidemic, "the version was still being prepared passionately in the morning, and the whole staff was disbanded in the afternoon." The first feeling of watermelon rabbit is "very confused". She was so shocked that she didn't have time to worry about her future job and income, and all she could think about was "Why."I really couldn't believe it at that time," she said. "if you said that my project was not good and that my performance did not meet the company's expectations, I had nothing to say, but it was not badly evaluated." This doubt has not been answered and can only be seen as the result of a slump in the industry and a large number of manufacturers reducing investment in the domestic market.

Several head women, like games and other categories, experienced a shrinking and declining process after the early outbreak (photo: AppMagic). After losing their jobs, the job market for watermelon rabbits is much more severe than in previous years. In her view, women, especially women in a narrow sense, have their own special circumstances to the game itself. Colliding with the "cold winter", the difficulty becomes even more serious.

"after all, traditional women tend to. Especially the B-Girl game, which first came from Japan. Learn the model of the love game there at home, and then apply it to the Chinese market." Said the watermelon rabbit. On the other hand, Japanese women have achieved a very high level of industrialization of the game, or there is a set of highly efficient assembly line templates that can copy the mode of a successful game to a new game in four or five months.

A similar situation has occurred in China. After Love and producer became a popular style, many manufacturers flocked to it, following a similar template to create their own female-oriented games. " Whether it is a small company or a large company, when you are involved in this field, the first thing that comes to mind is stability. As a result, people tend to follow frameworks that have been proven to be commercially effective. With this framework, I may not be as popular as' Love and', but if the scale of others reaches 100 million, it is also good for me to do 90 million. " This is how the Watermelon Rabbit describes her years of experience: "crossing the river by feeling a stone, or making a new attempt, is actually a great challenge, and the risk of failure is also very high. After all, you can't take the existing data to investors and prove to your boss that this new path works. Within the company, you will be challenged in the first place, and you will not get particularly good resources."

After the success of the first few years, "seeking stability" has also brought some consequences. In a narrow sense, women tend to play more and more homogenized to categories, especially cross-dressing and love simulation, so it is difficult to attract new players. And the core audience of other countries, new games are also difficult to dig out.

It is not that no manufacturer is willing to take risks to break the rules. The two women who folded the paper to the new project, one is the second girl game "Love and Deep Space" with action elements, and the other is "Infinite warmth" with open world play, which has actually attracted a lot of attention from the industry. Everyone hopes that the folded paper, which is regarded as a "big business" in the field of women, will be the first to create a different model. The former company of Watermelon Rabbit is willing to do "word-of-mouth project". In fact, it is also exploring new ways. However, when the cold winter comes and the company must put survival first, such projects become the victims of a broken tail.

Although the feedback from the player community on "Love and Deep Space" PV is mixed, the industry is more concerned about what kind of innovation it can make in the female category. "I once made a game that took a big step forward in innovation. It is not the traditional female-oriented play, more interactive narrative, and a lot of elements related to reality. After the launch of the game, the data retained by users is very good, and some breakthroughs have been made in technology. And the initial positioning of the project is to do word of mouth, not to do running water, so the assessment of the data is not very strict. " The Watermelon Rabbit said, "but when the company needs running water, the project has no way to exist and has to be terminated."

In the end, the recession of the environment and the nature of the game itself have contributed to the current situation: companies and investors have become more cautious and wait-and-see about women's theme during the industry downturn, and no one is willing to take a step. Practitioners who focus on women like Watermelon Rabbit also fall into the double predicament of the industry and category in the cold winter.

The threshold of being questioned repeatedly is that big companies are as prosperous in a good year as they are in a period of decline. There was a joke spread on the Internet, someone passed by a place, saw a long line, thought it was to make nucleic acid, so they stood at the end of the line and followed. When I arrived in the queue, I found that those were all the people who went to the nearby company to issue a certificate of resignation.

Watermelon Rabbit said that the situation of the former company was similar to that in the joke, and there were not a few people who were laid off at the same time, so they became "difficult friends" with each other. In the days when you are looking for a new job, communicating with them becomes a comfort in anxiety.

The Watermelon Rabbit did not say much about the specific plight of unemployment. "the biggest headache must be economic pressure," she said. "after all, people are middle-aged, old and young, housing and car loans." This is a state in which there are items everywhere but there is no input. "I know everything I know." She now lives in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Although she is nominally a prefecture-level city, GDP ranks among the best in the country every year. With the possible exception of house prices, the cost of living is close to that of first-tier cities. Coupled with the fact that the urban railway runs directly to Shanghai, in her view, "the degree of involution is not lost at all."

After three months of unemployment, she has received quite a few interviews, but because there are too many people wandering outside and too many job seekers, coupled with the fact that the company itself is shrinking recruitment, people are obviously very cautious about the selection of talents. some interview processes can even drag on for as long as two months. This makes the job-hunting process even more worrying.

Economic pressure is only part of the story. Frequent setbacks in the process of looking for a job again is a great emotional sharpening and consumption. In particular, her age was repeatedly mentioned in the interview. This completely irresistible, but has been imposed a lot of value of the "subtractive items", which makes it particularly difficult for her to accept.

"I happen to be 35 years old this year, and then everyone will challenge you with this." When it comes to this, the working women who were just fluently stating their ideas seem to have suddenly disappeared. The watermelon rabbit was silent for a long time and seemed to be trying to sort out his mood. "I'm sorry, I've been challenged so many times since the Spring Festival."... "

No one can say exactly when the "35-year-old curse" that spread from the Internet industry began, or why this age is regarded as a curse. Someone said to the watermelon rabbit, "you are 35 years old and have children. What do you use to compete with young people?" To some extent, this may be the epitome of high-intensity work in the gaming industry. Although no company explicitly claims to implement the "996" working system, the requirements on the age and family status of practitioners are more or less of a "consumable" nature of talent.

Some people think that the age of the watermelon rabbit makes her out of the times: "you are 35 years old, how do you know what a 15-year-old girl likes now?"

Watermelon Rabbit thinks this is not the case, but she can't come up with anything substantial to prove and refute. "Women's understanding of women is sometimes a very emotional thing."... since I came here from the age of 15, I will re-experience the age of 15 with my children, and there are a lot of things that are run-in by feeling and intuition, which are difficult to measure with standardized data. " It is this "difficult to explain" that makes Watermelon Rabbit feel that he has not performed very well in the interview.

Watermelon Rabbit himself likes to play "A Dream" very much. Although many women are relatively young to the game audience, there are some games that do not take "female orientation" as a selling point to attract relatively older female players. In an ideal situation, really good works should shape the aesthetic, rather than blindly cater to the aesthetic of users. In Watermelon Rabbit's previous experience of playing games, she hopes to communicate with users through her own communication, so as to find her real audience. But this is not a common practice in the industry. "everyone depends on data." "I have to ask the user first, do you like this thing?" she explained. "if you like it, do you like it? if you don't like it, it won't work, so I won't do it. Fundamentally speaking, this is two different design ideas from actively guiding users' tastes. In order to achieve a variety of data indicators, active guidance must be much more difficult than pandering."

In any case, Watermelon Rabbit does not understand why the age of 35 has become a popular hindrance in the industry. But in reality, age does become a hindrance. After looking for a job for 3 months, the watermelon rabbit received only one Offer. This repeatedly dragged her back into the quagmire of self-doubt and self-examination.

The only company hired also puts the watermelon rabbit in a dilemma. She really needs a job, and although the salary offered by the company has shrunk, it is still within an acceptable range, but employee benefits and security are difficult to ease the pressure on her family expenses. The main point of "dissuasion" is that the company's project has been running for 10 years and uses ancient engines and technology. If she joins that project, she won't have much room to play except for a smooth operation. This makes her feel that she will completely bid farewell to her career ideals.

"I'm 35 now, and I'm really not very young," the Watermelon Rabbit pondered and pondered over and over again. "but around the age of 35, isn't it the most mature period in one's life, with a high level of experience, ability and physical fitness? can I make a better and more successful game? can I try again to expand the relatively narrow field of 'female-oriented games' in the market?"

Reality gives her a negative answer for the time being, but she hasn't given up persuading and proving herself.

It is still possible that Watermelon Rabbit and I talked about "a dream of rivers and lakes", "Moonlight Blade" and even "Onmyoji". They all account for a high proportion of female players, but the way of playing does not belong to the narrow sense of "female-oriented" games. Compared to talking about the current state of the industry and the plight of finding a job, these topics seem to make her really happy. "you know what? when I knew that the producer of A Dream was female, my first reaction was:'no wonder I love to play! I think these works are designed from a female perspective in many ways, which is why they are popular with female players."

As for what is a "female perspective", this is also a biased concept. This may mean that there are not so many plots of "pulling heads" and palace fights in the story, and it may mean that female characters have relatively independent growth storylines. The shaping of play and world outlook may start from a more delicate perspective, but it does not rudely and tagging abandon the complexity of the so-called "women do not like" operation and solving puzzles.

It is precisely because there is still a lot of room for conceptual expansion, in the view of Watermelon Rabbit, although women are facing difficulties in the game, but in fact not to the degree of saturation, "the female audience is still a big blue ocean." However, this blue sea may take extra effort to step into, for the industry and individuals are full of unknown.

After thinking about it, Watermelon Rabbit still turned down the job on the old project. She is still waiting for the next opportunity, and still can't help but jump and pull herself in the emotions of "I can do it" and "I can't pick and choose anymore". Everyone says that spring in the industry is coming again, and maybe she can find her place as a producer in the spring flower bed.

When I asked Watermelon Rabbit if she could give me some pictures that made her feel good, she sent me such a spring flower bed ("Watermelon Rabbit" is a pseudonym at the request of the interviewees. )

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