Rebirth of the Game Pioneer

Chapter 179 The reasons for the decline of "Bubble Hall"
But since "Bubble Hall" has so many advantages, why did it decline?
This game became popular quickly, and it also declined quickly. In Gu Feng's impression, "Bubble Hall" seems to be popular in China for at most two or three years, and then it is very obvious that more and more people are playing it. not enough.

Since you want to make this game, it is naturally necessary to figure out why "Bubble Hall" declined.

It is impossible for a game to remain popular for a lifetime, but with the excellence of "Bubble Hall", it is certainly abnormal for it to decline so quickly.

After thinking about it, Gu Feng summarized several reasons.

First, cheating is rampant.

It is no exaggeration to say that whether it is the 90s and 21s when it is still in the exploratory stage, or the st century when hundreds of flowers are blooming, the sudden death of many games is inseparable from the presence of plug-ins.

I believe that anyone with a basic understanding of games can understand how harmful cheats can be to a game.

To put it more simply, plug-ins are something that extremely disrupts the balance of the game and the normal order of the game. As long as it is an online game, the damage caused by plug-ins to the life of the game is immediate.

Take MMORPG games as an example. In just half a day, cheat players can easily obtain resources that ordinary players may not be able to obtain in a month. Rich players who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars are killed by cheat players without thinking. This discourages them from quitting. How's the effect?

Let’s take fair competitive games as an example. FPS games see through walls and lock blood. Moba games are like League of Legends, with Xerath who has endless skills, Yasuo who has Q and two winds, and Big Mouth who shakes his head five times a second. .How effective is the persuasion to quit?

It can be said that a game that cannot effectively punish cheats, no matter how excellent it is, will die suddenly sooner or later.There are countless examples in history that confirm this, such as "MapleStory", "Tower of Aion", and even "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" and "Overwatch" became what they were later, which is also inseparable from plug-ins.

At the time when "Pao Pao Tang" entered the country, all walks of life in the country were in a stage of vigorous development. While developing rapidly, it was difficult to keep up with the legal system and management, which also brought about various chaos.

Even the cheating that was so rampant and unbridled could only be regarded as a younger brother in this chaos. At that time, piracy and copycats were the most toxic problems. "Made in China" was once something that countless Chinese people could not afford to look up to in the international community. It took the country 20 years to change the word from a derogatory term to a positive one.

In this era, the country simply won’t pay attention to the plug-ins that cause trouble for games. This also leads to the fact that no matter what game or software comes to the country, it won’t take long for all kinds of messy plug-ins and various cracks to appear. Version software has become everywhere.

In such a general environment, for the games that appeared in China at that time, game developers and agents may not earn as much as plug-in studios. It is obvious that they laid the eggs themselves, but they could only drink the soup, and all the meat was eaten by plug-ins. , some small companies even starved to death and went bankrupt without even being able to take a sip of soup.

Fortunately, although the development of games in this world is not very good, the legal system is indeed quite sound. If plug-ins are produced for illegal profit, once investigated and punished, the minimum start time is ten years. The amount is huge, and it is not impossible to continue indefinitely.

Under the law with such severe punishment, few people dare to set an example and take the risk.

After all, although it is indeed easy to make money by cheating, the probability of being detected is also really high.

Under such legal protection, there is really no need to worry about plug-ins.

Second, plagiarism.

At that time, "Bubble Hall" sued "QQ Hall" which caused quite a stir. As the first case of plagiarism regarding game copyrights in China, this incident attracted widespread attention both inside and outside the industry.

But as we all know, the result was that "Bubble Hall" lost the lawsuit.

This result caused considerable controversy at the time. After all, anyone who is not blind can see that the latter has completely borrowed design elements from the former in many aspects. Even the name may be misleading. suspected.

But just like this, in the eyes of many people, it was obvious that it was plagiarism, and "Bubble Hall" actually lost the case.

Regarding this point, we actually need to know more about the core definition of intellectual property law. The core of intellectual property law is to "protect expression but not ideas."

If there are only limited rules for accomplishing a gameplay purpose, those rules should not be considered an original expression.

For example, on a square display, everyone has made a square map, so the rule of "square map" should not be used as an expression of originality.

Setting obstacles in such a map and leaving a straight path for players to move, the map presents a "chessboard" layout, so the "chessboard map" cannot be used as an expression of originality.

If a bomb is placed on this map, the explosion trajectory of the bomb can only be a cross explosion, so "cross explosion" cannot be used as an expression of originality.

Speaking of which, only the artistic styling of the bomb and the visual special effects after the explosion can be recognized as original expressions, and these are what the law wants to protect. It just so happens that "QQ Hall" has indeed made great achievements in these things. "Bubble Hall" has changed differently.

Therefore, on this basis, "QQ Hall" was able to successfully win the lawsuit.

In fact, what is interesting is that Nexon used this point of view to win the case before this regarding whether "Bubble Hall" plagiarized "Bomberman", and "QQ Hall" won the case against "Bubble Hall" The argument cited was exactly the argument they used at the time, and it was considered karma.

In fact, the boundaries of game copyright protection have always been quite controversial, but no matter how controversial it is, proper legal protection is still essential.

It's just that how to control this boundary requires constant experimentation and exploration.

Being too demanding will inevitably lead to pioneers having too great an advantage, thereby creating the risk of monopoly; being too loose will lead to game creators being lazy to innovate and waiting to learn from other people’s proven gameplay.

If you think about it carefully, it does make sense to protect expression but not thought.

The gameplay of "Bubble Hall" is too simple. Under the premise of borrowing the gameplay and changing the expression, it is almost inevitable that the resulting games will be highly similar. Therefore, it is normal for players to subjectively identify them as plagiarism. It is precisely because of this The reason is that the simpler the game, the more difficult it is to determine whether it is plagiarized.

If the original intention was to make "Bubble Hall", it is possible for Longteng, Huanyu or any company to make a "QQ Hall". In terms of operations, Gu Feng admits that he is not afraid of anyone.

Third, the game gap between players is too big.

This is a problem caused by the design of the game itself.

As mentioned before, the gameplay of this game seems simple, but in fact the upper limit of operation is quite high.

In the early stage, everyone is a rookie, and with the rookies pecking each other, the game will naturally be fun and enjoyable.

But over time, there will always be some people who will slowly transform into veterans. In this unrestricted level, everyone will randomly choose a room in the lobby to start the game. In the matching mode, it is bound to cause veterans and rookies to appear frequently. In the same game.

After playing more than ten games in a row, some players always make you unable to kill them despite all your efforts. On the contrary, if you kill them, you can just follow them and blow up a brick. This must be a very poor gaming experience for a novice player.

Over time, under the potential screening of such a matching mode, there will be fewer and fewer novices or even players with good skills in the game. Only those experienced players who have played tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of games are still enjoying the game. The game naturally and unknowingly became cool.

It is not difficult to solve this problem.

First of all, you can add a ranked mode, and try to attract experienced players with good skills and players with a strong competitive mentality to this mode.

Secondly, a matching mechanism is set up in the non-ranked mode. The matching mechanism will try to match opponents with roughly the same average rank, average winning rate, and average number of games as the players in the room. Although this still cannot completely avoid the problem of veteran abusers, it can at least greatly Reduce the chances of this happening.

Finally, the matching hall will be divided into several different fields according to rules such as novice field, expert field, and master field, and players must follow the rules that can be higher but not lower when entering these fields, that is, players whose strength is in the master field range can enter through higher levels. The master field, and you can't downgrade to the novice field to fry fish.

Under the three measures, even if the phenomenon of food abuse still cannot be completely eliminated, the game is unlikely to cause players to quit the game on a large scale due to this reason.

(End of this chapter)