Text | Photon Planet Wu Kun Proverbs
Editor | Wu Xianzhi
A few days ago, the major personnel changes in Ali Games, which once caused a lot of uproar in the industry, came to the fore.
Zhan Zhonghui (flower name: Dingdang), the head of Linxi Mutual Entertainment, a game brand under Alibaba Group, issued an internal letter saying that he and Chen Weian will step down at the end of the fiscal year (March 31), and his post will be taken over by Zhou Bingshu, the producer of "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition".
The internal letter mentioned, "With the gradual improvement of the talent echelon, Linxi’s young people have grown rapidly and have been able to shoulder the heavy responsibility of leading Linxi to continue to develop. By the end of this fiscal year (March 31st), Lao Chen (Chen Wei ‘an) and Chun Jiao (Liu Jiao) and I will officially step down from the Class Committee and hand them over to the new team led by Bing Shu. I believe that the new team can better face the future, practice Linxi’s research and development concept more solidly and take Linxi to a new height. "
It is worth noting that Dingdang and Chen are both veterans of Jian Yue Science and Technology, the predecessor of Linxi Entertainment, while Chun Jiao joined the partnership company Tianjin Jinfan Bailing in April last year, and their resignation means the exit of Jian Yue’s old team.
Since the mutual entertainment with the "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition" hit the volume of Ali games, there was no new tour with enough weight. This also leads to its position in the whole market is always high or low.
Although we are not sure about the real reason for Jian Yue’s retirement, we can be sure that the "new height" of mutual entertainment needs new explosions to touch.
Ali game seeks change.
Mutual entertainment or Ali games, whether from the inside or outside, have long wandered on the edge of the core circle.
In 2014, Ali integrated its mobile game platform with UC Jiuyou and established Ali Games, which belongs to the big entertainment sector. At that time, in the large entertainment sector, the game business was not eye-catching.
Ali Games did not make many achievements in business in the following years, and most of them focused on the distribution and agency of IP mobile games, such as the TV series IP adaptation mobile game "Fire Like a Song" launched in 2018 and "Wu Dong Gan Kun" linked by drama and travel. Even in the course of its development in official website, the explosive proxy game Traveling Frog in 2018 will be the first stop.
The change stems from the fact that in 2017, Ali spent 1 billion to acquire Jian Yue Technology founded by Zhan Zhonghui, the former COO of Netease, which strengthened the self-developed genes in one step and started the shift from issuing and acting as an agent for IP games to self-research. In 2018, Ali Games launched a self-developed MMO "The Land of the Wind" to initially test the water and research the game. In 2019, "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition" was born. On the first day, it reached the top of the App Store for free, and in less than two months, it gained more than 300 million monthly water.
In September 2020, Ali Games was upgraded to an independent business group with mutual entertainment parallel to the great entertainment, and then two games, The History of the Three Kingdoms, Warchess Edition and Forest Country, were launched. It is worth mentioning that these two games came out in 2023. Before last year, the action of mutual entertainment focused on the overseas release of the "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition", which greatly drained the commercial value of the "Three Kingdoms" IP.
The combination of the IP of the Three Kingdoms and SLG, which emphasizes strategy, is really a "golden egg". Even in 2023, the Strategic Edition of the Three Kingdoms still contributed 69.5% of the income for mutual entertainment. However, at the moment when high-quality games emerge in an endless stream, one trick can’t be eaten all over the world. According to Sensor Tower, mutual entertainment ranked 13th in the revenue of China mobile game publishers in January this year, which has dropped out of the top 10.
As the N in the "1+6+N" system, the explosion after the IP of "The History of the Three Kingdoms" makes the mutual entertainment of Linxi show signs of marginalization again under the star business such as rookie, box horse and 1688, even from the perspective of the game industry.
As we all know, the strategic SLG such as "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition" is a typical big ARPU game, and the player’s basic disk is not large, which leads to its low volume in the majority of players’ circles, so that some players don’t even know that Linxi Entertainment is a subsidiary of Ali Group.
More importantly, low DAU games need long-term spending to attract fresh blood. "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition" has won the number one mobile game purchase list for many times, which means the huge purchase cost of ensuring the product flow and the lack of high-quality traffic in the Ali system.
Looking back at its history briefly, Ali Games was originally established by combining the mobile game platform with UG channel, aiming to build a distribution platform for the game, which is extremely dependent on traffic. However, eight mobile phone manufacturers, including OV Huawei, set up a hard-core alliance to restrict third-party application stores from the bottom of hardware, which is tantamount to a fatal blow to Ali’s channel business.
Moreover, Ali’s core e-commerce business is a big consumer of traffic demand, as is the game. Under the huge cost of buying and the allocation of traffic resources, the game business is doomed to not get too many resources, which may be one of the reasons why it is difficult for Linxi to have a second explosion.
Under this circumstance, it is not surprising that Ali’s game, which is seeking change, chooses to trade in the old for the new, so that Zhou Bingshu, who made the first explosion, is at the helm.
Internal three-nation killing?
The alternation of old and new is a common occurrence, but in today’s Ali, it adds a bit of enterprising meaning.
On December 20, 2023, Cai Chongxin, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Alibaba Group, announced the reform of comprehensively promoting the rejuvenation of cadres in a full letter. He said in the full letter: "Next, we will fully enable young management teams who have been trained at the grassroots level to create their own innovative environment for young people." Immediately after the core management of Taotian changed blood, Wu Jia, Chen Weiye, Wang Tingxiang and many other post-80 s young people took the lead. At the beginning of last month, Yu Yongfu, Chairman and Hungry CEO of Local Life Group, announced that he would step down from his management position on March 31, and his successor was the post-80s generation.
From this aspect alone, the personnel changes of mutual entertainment can be seen as a part of Ali’s younger management reform. After all, Zhou Bingshu, who succeeded him, was also born in the 1980s. There are only more signs that there is an internal struggle in its reform.
A person close to Ali said that Jian Yue had been marginalized for a long time in mutual entertainment, and the old people headed by Zhan Zhonghui had long been put on hold by the new generation represented by Zhou Bingshu. Perhaps, after the handover of the old and new teams, it was followed by a big change of blood from top to bottom.
As for the reasons behind it, some sources said that the internal discord between Linxi and Linxi originated from the "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition". It is understood that Zhan Zhonghui tried to cut this project when the game was established, and the reason may be that the core gameplay is too similar to Netease’s "Land of the Land".
In fact, Netease sued the former for copyright infringement and asked Linxi to stop the game. In May last year, the court ruled that the infringing content of The Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition needed to be deleted or modified, and compensated Netease for 50 million yuan, but the court rejected Netease’s request to stop operating The Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition. Linxi said that "some of the contents in the judgment will not be recognized and an appeal will be filed", which shows that the rip-off of copyright is a "psoriasis" that Linxi can’t get rid of.
As a result, the dilemma of "no follow-up" is becoming more and more prominent, and it is naturally necessary to work together internally. However, since Linxi Entertainment became an independent business group in September 2020, Yu Yongfu, the former chairman of Gaode Group, who was in charge of the subsidiary, was not familiar with the game business, and he also took over the local life business in July 2021, which may have caused Linxi to lack a strong voice to move forward.
In January of this year, Fan Luyuan, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Entertainment, was in charge of mutual entertainment. He not only served as the leader of Ali’s game business leading group, but also experienced the launch of games such as "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition" and "Three Kingdoms Fantasy Mainland" during his tenure. His return is like several arhats who took over Ali last year. The first priority is to do a good job of "anchoring the sea".
Now the replacement of the person in charge of the mutual entertainment business has come to an end. When the granularity is completely aligned, what Ali Games is seeking is further growth, that is, launching a new tour with enough influence as soon as possible.
end
For insiders, mutual entertainment was once regarded as the "second Netease".
First of all, most of the core leaders of Linxi Entertainment were born in Netease games. In addition to former Netease COO Zhan Zhonghui, Chen Weian was the vice president of Netease and the general manager of Netease Blizzard Joint Venture. Zhou Bingshu, who will take office on March 31, is also an old man of Netease. He once worked as a game planner for Netease.
Today’s new and old alternation, do we regard it as Netease in the 2010 s replacing Netease in the 2000 s, or the Netease of Ali games?
In Fan Luyuan’s letter of taking over the mutual entertainment of Linxi, he mentioned that the future direction of Linxi’s mutual entertainment is: embracing AI, globalization, producer-centered system, and insisting on R&D leading business. Mutual entertainment will give enough support, space and incentives to potential young producers.
At first glance, this is similar to Netease’s small team development model. At the beginning of this year, Tencent also released the "Bamboo Shooting Plan" to support small and medium-sized development teams. It can be seen that vertical independent games will be the main theme of the game industry for a long time to come.
In any case, in the face of 2024, which is destined to be a big year for the domestic open world, it is impossible to continue the old gods with the golden egg of the Three Kingdoms.
As soon as the dragon looked up, news about the new tours of Tencent, Netease, Kuluo, Lilith and other manufacturers in the open world was constantly exposed. Or it’s possible to set up a project to raise a gun or start testing soon. A battle for the attention between players has already started, and the mutual entertainment of Linxi has lagged behind for more than a year.
