With the continuous improvement of players' requirements for game quality, game giants are also gradually learning to find increment in emerging categories.
In the recently released 2023 financial report, Tencent highlighted "Breaking Through the Dark Zone" as a strong emerging game for the local gaming market. This is the fifth time Tencent has mentioned this game in its financial report, and its importance is evident. At the same time, "Dark Zone Breakout" also represented Tencent in the GDC (Game Developers Conference), which is known as the "Game World" Spring Festival Gala, and shared the latest breakthroughs made by the project team in the cutting-edge rendering field on stage.
This is a hardcore FPS (first person shooter) mobile game developed by the Rubik's Cube Studio group. Unlike the conventional chicken eating gameplay, "Dark Zone Breakout" is similar to the hardcore shooting PC game "Escape from Tarkov" in that it features survival evacuation and tactical gold medal winning. The pursuit of the game is not to kill players in all directions after entering the game, but to require players to collect more equipment to complete evacuation while preserving their lives after entering the game.
The complex and counterintuitive gameplay has raised the threshold for the game. Hu Jie, the main planner of the "Dark Zone Breakout" project, revealed to Time Finance that in 2018, the producer of "Dark Zone Breakout", Sun Yiming, was looking for a game system that could connect multiple single innings of shooting games, and thus came into contact with "Escape from Tarkov".
The gameplay of survival evacuation began with Battlestate, a Russian game manufacturer, developing "Escape from Tarkov". The game began testing in 2016 and gradually attracted a group of loyal users with its unique gameplay. After a version update at the end of 2019, it began to receive wider attention and briefly became a popular live streaming category on major gaming platforms.
But even as a seasoned gamer, Sun Yiming almost couldn't keep playing. Coincidentally, there happened to be an intern in the team who was a player of this type of game, leading the entire project team to experience it hand in hand.
"Breaking through the Dark Zone" was not well received at the beginning of its release. Many voices believe that the high understanding threshold of games makes it difficult to continue to attract players in the mobile game market that emphasizes mass consumption.
However, to the surprise of the market, since its launch in July 2022, the popularity and player base of "Dark Zone Breakout" have been steadily increasing.
Starting from 2023, game officials have successively announced the results of registered users, exceeding 50 million in April and 80 million in August. By December, the global registered users of "Dark Zone Breakout" have exceeded 100 million. In late February of this year, "Dark Zone Breakout" once topped the top 5 best-selling games on the Apple Store, achieving its best performance since its launch.
Official Weibo account of "Breaking through the Dark Zone"
As a game that has been online for a year and a half, such results exceed market expectations.
Allow players to interpret stories themselves
Why can "Breaking through the Dark Zone" continue to gain player recognition through countercyclical growth and receive high attention from Tencent?
The exquisite and realistic visual representation is the first reason why "Dark Zone Breakout" can attract many players. Xu Feng (pseudonym), who played the game for over 600 hours, told Time Finance that as a fan of shooting games, he was initially attracted by the visuals. "At present, the widely popular shooting mobile games on the market have been online for a certain period of time, and the graphics performance is slightly lagging behind. In contrast," Dark Zone Breakout "is a new game launched in 2022, with better graphics quality," Xu Feng said.
In fact, in order to highlight the visual performance ability, "Breaking Through the Dark Zone" has expended a huge amount of energy. Zhong Jianbin, the technical director of the game project, pointed out to Time Finance that in order to create a realistic, realistic, and immersive shooting game, the game has made a lot of technological breakthroughs in terms of visual performance, surpassing similar competitors. Not only has it adopted industry-leading technologies such as real-time global lighting, dynamic weather systems, and volumetric clouds, but it has also achieved automatic exposure and human eye adaptation technology for the first time on mobile devices.
Dark Zone Breakout also applies ray tracing technology for the first time in mobile world scenes, achieving reflection, soft shadows, and ambient light shading, bringing players physical light and shadow effects comparable to the real world, making the game graphics more realistic and vivid. However, due to the extremely high performance requirements of ray tracing devices, it can only be applied on very few high-end models.
Comparison of light tracing effects in "Breaking through the Dark Zone", provided by Tencent
Zhong Jianbin believes that this breakthrough is not just about showcasing skills. On the one hand, it can create a word-of-mouth effect and maintain the best visual and technical image on the player end. On the other hand, technological breakthroughs also serve the gameplay.
"The scene density and information density of 'Dark Zone Breakout' are much higher than other competitors. The optimization ability of graphics performance is crucial. Without such ability, we would not be able to complete such a complex environment presentation and support breakthroughs in gameplay." Zhong Jianbin pointed out that this is the underlying reason why the game can gain widespread recognition from players.
Players also quite agree with this. Xu Feng believes that emphasizing the design of a safe evacuation mechanism has given the game more possibilities, which is why he can still not feel bored after playing for more than 600 hours.
Xu Feng explained to Time Finance based on his gaming experience that in the game, once a player dies, all the equipment brought in will disappear. Therefore, there are multiple game variables for players to choose what equipment to bring and how much equipment to bring. After entering the game, players can also choose from various gameplay options such as frontal battles, setting traps, running and scraping maps, further enriching the playability of the game.
As the main planner of the project, Hu Jie made a more detailed breakdown of this.
He joined the "Dark Zone Breakout" project team in 2019, and at that time, there was only one narrative method on the market, which was player storytelling. The early popularity of chicken eating games was also due to the rich player self narrative experience of this type of game.
However, the limitation of chicken eating games is that the variable elements within the game are extremely limited, including the player's landing location, resource and equipment refresh location, safety zone, etc. After the game duration exceeds a certain period of time, it is easy to fall into the routine of constantly repeating the "big escape" mode gameplay.
And "Breaking Through the Dark Zone" adds more variables on the basis of the chicken eating gameplay, bringing more possibilities.
Hu Jie believes that the Tarkov like game category is actually a kind of road movie logic. Conflict with various people during the process from point A to point B. The entire single game will become a large stage, and players will become actors on the stage. They will interpret the story on their own and have a stronger player self narrative experience.
"In the absence of content based products at that time, I believe this gameplay could very well meet the needs of players' self narrative. Even now, there are still no other particularly successful narrative game products in the market except for miha games. From this perspective, the path taken by" Dark Zone Breakout "is also a good solution," said Hu Jie.
Tencent and NetEase engage in another confrontation
Tencent is not the only manufacturer targeting this hardcore gaming category.
A few years ago, after "Escape from Tarkov" became popular, there were many voices in the market who believed that it may not become a popular game for most people, but it may foreshadow the appearance of emerging game blockbusters in the next decade. It not only has thrilling single games like multiplayer battles, long-term economic and social MMO games, but also a rich map like an open world.
For example, Pei Pei, an Internet analyst, once wrote and analyzed that "Escape from Tarkov" was the best attempt to integrate the three types of the current game industry MMORPG, the open world and e-sports, and its importance even exceeded the "chicken eating" game of the year.
Under such high expectations, Tencent and NetEase quickly responded by launching their own Tarkov like gaming products. Starting from the second half of 2020, NetEase took the lead in launching multiple products in different directions overseas: "Lost Light" that restores the hardcore route, "ZOZ: Final Hour" with zombie themes, and "Badlanders" that follows the lightweight RPG route. Unfortunately, none of these games have caused much hype overseas.
Tencent is slightly slower, but it has not taken a detour. "Dark Zone Breakout" was initiated in 2019, and the first trial of the Chinese version began in September 2021. It was officially launched in July 2022. However, several Tarkov like mobile games under NetEase have not yet received their licenses, making "Dark Zone Breakout" the first survival evacuation FPS mobile game officially launched in China. Relying on leading graphics and excellent game quality, it slowly attracted a group of core users and gradually broke through the circle.
NetEase, which lost its first mover advantage, did not give up. In January 2023, "Badlanders" (domestic version) obtained its license and was launched in June of the same year. NetEase is attempting to gain a share of the expanding emerging gaming market through RPG based and lightweight differentiated product design.
From the results, the performance of "Vanguard" was mediocre. According to Qimai data, "Super Pioneer" briefly entered the top 2 of the iOS game free list at the beginning of its launch, but then fell all the way. After two months of launch, it remained outside the top 100 of the game free list for a long time.
In January of this year, NetEase's tactical gold winning game "Lost Light" (domestic version) launched a large-scale deletion test and announced in mid March that the number of game reservations had exceeded ten million. As a heavyweight product with a team of over 100 people and an investment of about 500 million yuan, NetEase clearly has high expectations for it. When the game received its license in December last year, it even posted the slogan "Abandon Darkness and Throw Fireflies" on promotional posters, and the smell of gunpowder was already very obvious.
Firefly Assault official Weibo
In response to competition, Tencent is also constantly increasing its efforts. For example, "Dark Zone Breakout" is attempting new technological breakthroughs to maintain its leading position. Not only did it apply the ray tracing technology mentioned earlier in the mobile world scene for the first time, but it also successfully used a self-developed algorithm based "frame prediction" technology to help players improve game frame rate and smoothness without reducing picture quality, enhancing the gaming experience.
It seems that in 2024, Tencent and NetEase will inevitably engage in another battle on the emerging gaming battlefield of survival evacuation FPS. The final result remains to be tested by the market.
