Tan Qunzhao is one of the co-founders of Shanda, and has served as technical director, vice president and senior vice president of Shanda Group. In April 2008, Tan Qunzhao became the president of Shanda Group. Since 2009, he has served as the chairman of Shanda Games (Nasdaq: GAME), and then served as CEO. During his tenure in Shanda, Tan Qunzhao released and produced dozens of popular games, such as the famous IP "Legend of Blood" with a history of 20 years, and large-scale online games such as "Legendary World", "Dragon Nest" and "Aion" .
Tan Qunzhao has profound attainments and continuous entrepreneurial experience in the field of game industry. In 2013, he founded China's top early-stage fund "Fenghou Capital", focusing on mid-to-early projects in the fields of new technology, entertainment games, new consumption, etc., and provided strong support to the game industry - including 800+ global game customers ThinkingData, Ubisoft and Tencent’s creative partner AlchemyArt, 2D mobile game developer 91Act, etc., as well as game companies based on other ecology and content.
As a game advocate and Web3 believer, Tan Qunzhao has established a wide network of partnerships in the global game industry, and has now fully invested in the construction of the Web3 field. Tan Qunzhao hopes to create and empower a new game ecosystem starting from his latest project MetaCene (a Multichain supported MMORPG type game).
MarsBit: Mr. Tan, please introduce yourself briefly
Tan Qunzhao: In 1999, I dropped out of graduate school to follow Chen Tianqiao to start a business and set up Shanda Network. At that time, our dream was to create an infinitely scalable virtual world centered on the user. However, at that time, everyone's imagination of the Internet was relatively abstract, and the imagination mainly came from cyberpunk science fiction such as "Avalanche" and "Neuromancer" .
We entered the game circle in a wrong way. At the beginning, we didn't want to start from the game. At that time, we just built a virtual community and got investment from China.com, but later, because we couldn’t make any money, China.com also withdrew its capital. We started to think about new directions. In the process, we found that building a virtual game world It's very interesting.
So in 2001, we launched the legendary MMORPG game. The game has been a huge success since its launch. In 2004, Shanda was successfully listed on NASDAQ, becoming the first listed online game company in China, fulfilling another extension of our entrepreneurial dream. In 2008, I served as the president of Shanda Network Group; in 2009, Shanda’s ecological business was split up and listed on Nasdaq again, and I then served as the chairman and CEO of Shanda Games. Until 2012, when Shanda Group was privatized and the company was delisted, I stayed away from Shanda at that time.
MarsBit: From participating in Shanda’s entrepreneurship in 1999 to resigning as CEO in 2012, you have witnessed the transformation of Shanda from 0 to 1 in these 13 years. How does your early entrepreneurial experience in the traditional game market inspire you to start a business in the chain game field? In addition, I understand that after you left Shanda, you said that you "no longer make games", why are you returning to the "game field" now?
Tan Qunzhao: Answer the first question first. First of all, I have completely experienced the transformation of an industry from blue ocean to red ocean, and I can even say that I have experienced two cycles of the game industry, so I am very familiar with entrepreneurship, and I can also feel that in the early days of Cycle, the industry It is not perfect, and there are many flaws in it, but it also breeds vitality. Entrepreneurship is a painful and joyful life experience, which is a very important motivation for me to start a business.
Secondly, my early entrepreneurial experience gave me insight that now is a more appropriate time to enter the market. The current time node is roughly equivalent to the Internet around 2001, and the market may completely explode in a year or two. At present, the infrastructure in the market has been gradually improved, and the trend has become obvious. At this time, it is a good time to enter the market and do some related applications and content.
Second question. Why is it coming back now? It was because I saw an opportunity to further stretch and realize the original dream. The previous MMORPG games or other forms of online games are actually not perfect, and it has not fully realized my dream of a virtual world that can be extended infinitely. Such games may be fun and make money, but the games themselves are disconnected and the gaming experience is not immersive enough. Most importantly, it is not user-centric, and players themselves play a very limited role in the game.
Web3 and AIGC have become obvious new technology trends in the past two years.
It will inevitably have a huge impact on the online game industry. Every IT revolution will have a huge impact on the game industry. For example, the last mobile Internet explosion gave birth to mobile games, and the earlier PC Internet brought online games. Therefore, I think that games that have been blessed by Web3 or AI may become a rapidly developing field in the next few years.
To sum up, one is that the game market is full of huge new opportunities, and the other is that the combination of Web3 and AIGC with games is particularly in line with my original entrepreneurial dream, so I have returned to the game industry.
I believe that the game industry is facing tremendous changes. Web 3 can not only reorganize the relationship between players and game producers, but also realize the capitalization of virtual items in games, which can help players.
Players have a strong demand for capitalization of virtual items. If you look at the current user agreement of the game company, you will find that in fact all the virtual assets owned by the user in the game belong to the game company. Many people think that this is an overlord clause, but it is really difficult for you to use legal means to change the game company. But now we can use technological means to change. Through blockchain technology, users can transfer virtual assets to their own on-chain wallets, out of the control of game companies. Not only that, players can also connect game assets to other games, and even rent them to perform various DeFi-related operations. Therefore, only blockchain technology can truly free game players from the direct control of game companies and realize the independence of game assets. Of course, this can also further achieve a peer-to-peer relationship between users and games.
Because I was born in a game company, I am very aware of the reputation of game companies among players. The bigger the game companies are, the more they are scolded. The main reason is that some companies do not do their own products well, and they still maintain an unequal and strong relationship with players.
If I start a game company again, I hope to change this situation. The relationship between players and game companies is equal, and the interaction between the two parties is based on the goal of win-win.
MarsBit: From fighting in the front line to retiring behind the scenes, and then returning to the market with the new project MetaCene—a brand new and unfamiliar market, what kind of changes have you experienced in your heart?
Tan Qunzhao: The mentality has indeed undergone a great change. Because after resigning from Shanda Group in 2012, my mentality was a "retirement mentality", and I decided not to make games anymore, and only made some personal investments. Although I later founded Fenghou Capital together with a few friends, which belongs to institutional investment, it does not directly contact the business, but focuses on investment.
My mentality has gradually changed in the past two years. Looking back at the development path of the Internet, you will find that it is a process from virtual to real, and then from real to virtual. From PC Internet to mobile Internet is the process from virtual to real. The most important applications on the mobile Internet, such as mobile payment and e-commerce, are basically closely connected with real life. It even includes short videos, because the main content of short videos comes from real life, and the more they reflect real life, the more popular they may be. Therefore, one of the reasons why I left Shanda at the beginning was that I thought that games in the mobile Internet era are not particularly important, and I should look at e-commerce and SaaS. So I chose to leave the game group and invest in hard technology and Internet technology.
The development of anything is a spiral, or it will swing back and forth between two poles like a pendulum. In recent years, there has been a tendency to swing back to the virtual world. Backward swing does not mean that reality is unimportant, but that the penetration of the Internet into reality has been quite saturated. Everyone finds that there is some new room for improvement in the virtual dimension. And this new upward space is driven by Web3 and AI. Web3 solves the problem of capitalization, and everyone has more material motivation to create some virtual content; AI lowers the threshold for creating virtual content.
In addition, I would like to mention one point: In the past few years, everyone has misjudged AI-autonomous driving. Do you see how many self-driving companies have fallen in recent years? Because it involves reality, especially for life-threatening things like driving, the current AI is not enough, and it has never been able to reach a level of complete reassurance. But in the virtual world, AI is OK. For example, GPT talks nonsense every day, but everyone still thinks it is awesome. AI is suitable for some industries with better fault tolerance and less life-threatening industries. Therefore, generally speaking, the two trends of Web3 and AI are good for games, especially suitable for large-scale games for deep immersion.
In fact, besides Web3 and AI, there is a third technology. Although it is still immature, it is also good for the game market where users are deeply immersed, and that is VR. Web3, AIGC, and VR are all good for the game industry, and they are not small games, but large-scale virtual world games.
MarsBit: You once said that "the game itself is a luxury". Times have changed. Do you think this sentence is also applicable to the chain game market?
Tan Qunzhao: This should be what I said a long time ago. After so many years, I may need further in-depth explanation.
Simply put, game experience is not a luxury, but some assets in the game are indeed luxury goods. Because the direction that everyone pursues may not be exactly the same. Some players think that it is OK to have a basic game experience, and he is not willing to spend money, so he has no chance for luxury goods; but some people may pursue the ultimate experience in games, so at this time he must be inclined to pursue luxury goods of. This can be reflected in MetaCene product design. Most of the items in our game are NFTs, including items for daily use as well as luxury-grade, high-value, and rare items, which correspond to different classes of players.
For some items necessary for survival in the game, we will provide services through our own appChain and on-chain exchanges to ensure that users' transaction costs are low and item prices are relatively stable. On the other hand, we will put game items called luxury goods on mainstream public chains such as Ethereum and BNB for transactions, because this will have better Liquidity, and luxury goods are not afraid of hype.
MarsBit: As an entrepreneurial veteran in the game industry, what do you think of the current chain game market?
Tan Qunzhao: My idea is to look forward, not only to serve existing GameFi players, but also to see more mainstream user needs. Chain games will become one of the mainstream game types in the world, with hundreds of millions of potential users. But the prerequisite for achieving this goal is that blockchain technology must serve the user's gaming experience, rather than being reduced to a tool for hype. I also don't like the term GameFi very much, Crypto Game may be more appropriate.
Plus, AI will undoubtedly have a huge impact on many industries, including gaming. In the game industry, AI will firstly greatly reduce the production cost of games. Relying on AI, small and medium-sized teams and even individuals can have the opportunity to create products comparable to large game companies. Because non-creative work still accounts for a large proportion of game development. In addition, the logic of many games is relatively fixed, which is also very suitable for AI to do. Of course, creativity cannot be replaced, and game developers should focus more on creativity in the future. At the same time, it should also be noted that development is only one aspect, and more importantly, the developed products must be played by people.
If you make an analogy, without considering the version number and policy, the game industry may flourish like the self-media industry in the future. Because the threshold for self-media generation is much lower than traditional media. However, although there are many self-media accounts in the market that are doing well, there are not many self-media accounts that can really gain traffic, user attention, and social mainstream recognition. The game industry may also be like this in the future-the market is full of products, but only a few of them will get enough traffic and revenue.
What does this mean for us? The company I founded is called Pangu Software, which is registered in Singapore for overseas users. With our product Pangu Universe, I hope to create a universe that can host multiple games.
On the one hand, Pangu Universe has the native characteristics of Web3 and is a large-scale Crypto Game; on the other hand, it benefits from AI, which is equivalent to a UGC game platform. That is, MMORPG+Web3+AI=Pangu Universe. Why should Web 3 and AI come together? As mentioned earlier, although AI can reduce costs, it cannot solve the problem of business models, and Web3 can do this very well.
The implementation path of Pangu Universe is to first create a large-scale game Metacene, and then allow users to operate a single server in the game, and re-create content on the server. This path is a bit like the previous Warcraft Warcraft MOD. If you are familiar with the history of the game industry, you should know that the current Glory of Kings/League of Legends is a MOD derived from Warcraft, that is, Dota, which has developed all the way from Dota. In fact, its gameplay was created by players, but it was later carried forward by commercial companies and turned into a series of very successful commercial products.
The difference with Warcraft is that we are not a stand-alone game, so the large-scale game provided is an online game, and players do not need to develop a separate copy, and can directly modify it on a certain server of the game.
The Metacene game itself will have a very special NFT called MOD Server. After the game public beta, we will start selling MOD Servers. Players or player organizations with MOD Servers can have a group of servers to operate the game. From the simplest publicity diversion, to more complex operation management, and more advanced content creation and so on. As players continue to participate in depth, the proportion of Token feedback we will give will become higher and higher. Through this model, a large number of users participate in the marketing, operation and development of the game, and participate in the content expansion of the game itself.
Overall, Pangu Universe is divided into four layers. The bottom layer is the blockchain layer, our own appChain, on this chain, we integrate solutions suitable for the game industry, such as UniPass wallet, and NFT Marketplace, etc.
On top of the bottom layer of technology, we have built a content layer, which will release Metacene and other games; on top of the content layer, we enter the UGC layer I just mentioned, or the Mod Server layer, where users can modify and operate games based on the game. .
On top of the mod layer, we also designed the interconnection layer, which is what we call the world island, which is a group of public servers. This 3D virtual space does not have much gameplay, but more social content, including non-game content such as e-commerce, concerts, and museums. The official server and the server operated by the user can be interconnected. We hope that through the connection of the world island, our whole world can be integrated. Players can seamlessly transition from one world to another. Different worlds may have different styles , different content, and may even have different NFTs and gameplay. The infinitely expanding space provides players with the possibility to explore, which is a bit like the scene in the movie "Ready Player One". I hope that Pangu Universe can turn the plot in the movie into reality.
In May of this year, our first large-scale game, MetaCene, will conduct NFT pre-sale and Alpha test, and then go through one or two rounds of Alpha testing before launching a public beta in the second half of the year. The game is multi-terminal, including pc and mobile terminals. The front end of the entire game is based on the L5 engine, which supports more than one million players online at the same time, and supports thousands of people to PK and fight on the same screen. The painting style is more 2-dimensional, but it is relatively tough, which is more suitable for the needs of Asian users.
At present, we have completed the seed round of financing, led by HashGlobal and SevenX, followed by South Korea's Wemade, Linekong Interactive, Innovation Factory, and CMC Capital, as well as some well-known individual investors.
At present, our team has hundreds of people and has rich industry experience. The project consultants include David, the co-founder of Blizzard North Studio, who is known as the "Father of Warcraft" in the industry; Wang Feng, the founder of Element and Linekong Interactive; and Perfect World Bill Wang, founder of the North American Business Unit, etc.
MarsBit: Judging from the current market situation, do you think it is possible for a "legend" to be born?
Tan Qunzhao: It depends on how to define a legend. If you just regard it as a single game, it is very likely that there will be products with similar industry status. But if you look at the gameplay and design of the game, it may not be exactly the same as the previous legend. I always believe that technology is to liberate people, Web3 is to liberate people, and AI is also to liberate people. Our games themselves should liberate players, or be more dependent on players (from the perspective of game companies). If there is a game with a similar legendary influence on the market, it may be far from legendary in terms of gameplay and structure, but it may be better than before in terms of relying on users and liberating users.
MarsBit: There are many types of blockchain games, why choose MMORPG?
Tan Qunzhao: Before I started my business, I had a dream of building a virtual world, which is why I chose to make large-scale MMO games when I started my business. Because the core of the virtual game world is the interaction between people, not the interaction of one or two people, but the interaction of hundreds of thousands of people. This is a real virtual society. In today's words, it is the Metaverse. With the support of Web3 and AI technology, this virtual world will be extremely rich and vast.
Aside from the dream, the reality is that I have a deep understanding of MMORPG games, and it is not easy to make mistakes when starting from this type of game; in addition, in terms of economic system design, the MMORPG model is most suitable for chain games, because in it In the rules of the game, the user's virtual assets are very important and have a decisive influence on the player's status and achievements in the game.
MarsBit: What is special about the economic model design of MetaCene?
Tan Qunzhao: Our game was positioned as Web3 Native at the beginning of design, and the whole team is also thinking about how to combine Web3 economic structure and technology well. According to the idea, the game is divided into three systems, namely: resource collection system, PVE system, and PVP system.
The resource collection system is integrated with the mining gameplay familiar to players. In the game, users can purchase virtual mining machines, and the assets obtained from mining can be synthesized into props circulating in the game to upgrade game resources. Through this mechanism, there is no need to worry about the situation of "mining, withdrawing and selling", because the mining system and the game system are organically integrated. In the game, the more abundant resources are produced, the more challenging they are. Therefore, players will not break away from the line of game growth and interaction, and go to mine exclusively. We hope that users can gain certain benefits while experiencing the game. Of course, the user's income is not "Ponzi income", but based on real consumption demand.
Compared with the traditional Web2 business model (games are free, props are charged), our current model has achieved major improvements and optimizations. The disadvantage of the item charging model is that the game atmosphere is fragmented. Some people are willing to spend, and they hand over the money to the game company. The game characters become very powerful, while those players who do not buy items are at a disadvantage. There is no difference between the two. too fair. Of course, those paying players will also complain about the payment traps in the game and so on.
In our game design, we do not sell equipment to advanced players. They need to buy advanced equipment from other players, or buy resources from other players to synthesize items by themselves. In traditional games, 100% of the player's total consumption is taken by the game company, but in our game, most of the consumption in the game is returned to other players. This is our way to achieve continuous P2E. From another perspective, this can also greatly ease the relationship between players.
MarsBit: Compared with traditional games, what do you think are the difficulties in building blockchain game projects? You come from a technical background and have been in the game industry for many years. I believe that technology is not a problem, but the difficulty lies in operation?
Tan Qunzhao: Indeed, there are no insurmountable technical obstacles in development, and the difficulty lies in operation. In terms of operational ideas, we have learned from many Web 3 communities, including industry leaders. The operation of Web3 is indeed very different from before, especially the token economics, which must consider both community governance and player incentives.
MarsBit: If you go back to the past and look at the current P2E from the "grand period", what do you think?
Tan Qunzhao: Web3 provides tools that have long been lacking in the Web2 game market. In fact, 20 years ago, the game design concept was quite rich. At that time, there were many game guilds in the legend. Players went to mine, and the synthetic items were sold to giant whale players. As a result, the market has also derived a large-scale prop trading market "5173.com", which can be said to be more profitable than game companies.
Although the concept of the game is rich, there was no infrastructure such as blockchain at that time. The game company's code is private, and there is a lack of financial-level security and interconnection capabilities between games. The lack of infrastructure caused players to often lose things at that time, and there would be bugs in transactions, and there was no way to create some derivative trading methods. Now the development of blockchain can make up for these shortcomings. In contrast, I am more envious of having a good infrastructure in the market now.
MarsBit: How do you see the future of the chain game market?
Tan Qunzhao: At present, the chain game market is cold. On the one hand, the reason is that due to the external environment, the Crypto market has turned from bull to bear; on the other hand, most GameFi games emphasize Fi too much, and the support for Game is very insufficient. Focusing on the existing Web3 users, these users mainly participate in the game under the premise of profit-driven, and leave the game after making money, which creates a vicious circle. Therefore, the previous GameFi gameplay has come to an end, and this road is no longer feasible. There may be many ways in the future, but I only firmly believe in one way: making games must be fun, and games that are not fun are not games.
I especially agree with what Wang Feng said a few days ago: GameFi is not enough to express our design concept for Web3 games, and it may be better to call it Crypto Game.
Crypto Game must first become a good game, and Crypto is relatively secondary. Crypto Games should use the various functions brought by Web3 to enhance the fun of the game, rather than conversely engage in financial hype. Of course, hype and trading are also part of the fun of the game, but it should be organically integrated with other fun of the game. And those GameFi players who are pure wool, they are also human beings, and they have human nature. If they are given a suitable game, they will also play it, but the previous game cannot be called a game, so they are too lazy to play.
I hope to make a product with both game fun and trading attributes, but it is based on game fun. I believe such games will also appeal to more traditional gamers. I also believe there will be a huge market for true Web3 games. At present, the GameFi games that everyone is discussing can only have millions of users at most, and the truly high-quality Crypto Games will bring hundreds of millions of users.
