Finishing / Lin Zhi

On July 25th, the 2024 Global Game Data-Driven Conference hosted by Shushu Technology - The Legend of Jianghu Ranger · broke through the situation and was held in Shanghai.

Zheng Nan, Deputy Secretary-General of the Game Working Committee of the China Audio and Digital Association, and more than 35 senior executives from world-renowned game manufacturers such as NetDragon Tianqing, Shengqu Games, Huaqing Feiyang, and Pocketpair, Inc. attended the conference to explore the game industry.

At the meeting, Takuro Mizobe, the president of Pocketpair, shared the details of the production of "Phantom Beast Palu".

Before starting, he first introduced his career exploration to everyone, said that making games is his original intention, and mentioned that the results of "Phantom Beast Palu" were actually very unexpected by their team.

Next, Takuro Mizobe shared the reasons why he thinks "Phantom Beast Palu" is successful.

On the one hand, they combine multiple game mechanics. This didn't start with Palu, the Phantom Beast, which had already been explored and experienced in several games.

On the one hand, the cute painting style of "Phantom Beast Palu" lowers the threshold of the survival and construction category. In order to create a Palu that more people will love, in their workflow, in addition to the artists, other people will also participate in the voting to decide whether the Palu design will stay or not.

Regarding Palu becoming a part of pop culture in China, Takuro Mizobe released a full-page emoji PPT, saying that he is both an entrepreneur and a developer, and that he actually worked as hard as Palu before the release of "Palu the Phantom Beast".

The following is a summary of the content of the event:

Hi everyone, I'm Takuro Mizobe, the president of Pocketpair, and I'm very happy to be here today, and I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you what we thought when we were working on Palu.

Before I do that, I'd like to give you a little bit of my background.

When I was a college student, I always loved games and wanted to work for Nintendo in the future. In order to learn how to make games, I attended the Nintendo Game Seminar.

It was a very serious workshop with game producers, game planners, programmers, and designers, and nine people as a whole team to make the game.

However, making a game for Nintendo was a very hard job, and after actually making the game, I realized that it would be difficult for me to continue making games, so I decided to change jobs.

Eventually, I chose a completely different career path after graduation. I joined J.P. Morgan Securities as a developer.

But to be honest, working at JPMorgan Chase isn't very interesting.

I love creating new things, so in the course of my work at JPMorgan Chase, I started creating new web services on my own.

In the process of creating various services myself, I created the STORY service. I like this technology so much that when Bitcoin was booming, I created the virtual currency exchange Coincheck.

However, while in the Bitcoin business, I rethought what I was truly passionate about. I've found that the most special time for me was when I was making games at Nintendo. So, I decided to dedicate myself to game production again and started Pocketpair.

Maybe if I had made a blockchain game at that time, it might have had a different result, but I'm very happy with making a Steam game now.

That's all for my experience, and then I'd like to introduce a little bit about Palu.

To put it simply, Phantom Beast Palu is an open-world survival-building game.

In fact, Pocketpair previously made an open-world survival and building game called Genesis Imaginary, and Palu the Phantom Beast is a further development of it.

During the production of Genesis Imaginary Village, we realized that if we added elements of monster collection, it would make the game more interesting.

As a result, Phantom Beast Palu becomes a fun game where players can venture through this cute world, explore the world, build on their base, and occasionally disassemble and more.

One of the things that surprised our development team was that after the game's release, Palu the Phantom Beast was ranked second on Steam's list of concurrent users, behind PUBG.

On Steam, the praise rate of "Phantom Beast Palu" has reached about 93%. I am very grateful to the players for giving us great reviews.

Our goal at launch was to reach 100,000 concurrent players, and we're very happy to be able to achieve that goal.

After the launch, we had a small celebratory party with the dev team and chatted about how happy it would be if it worked. However, as this number continues to rise, we are becoming more and more surprised.

I slept and woke up to look again, thinking that things would change, but the numbers continued to grow. Others have experienced similar situations, sleeping and waking up to find that the numbers are still rising.

About a month after its release, we had 15 million players on Steam and 10 million players on Xbox, which means that Palu has a total of 25 million players, so thank you very much.

This chart shows the distribution of Phantom Beast Palu players on Steam. While United States accounts for the largest share, the growth of the Chinese market has also been significant. We attach great importance to China, the second largest market on Steam, so we have conducted a detailed analysis of this market.

By the way, I want to share one more thing.

In fact, Palu the Phantom Beast encountered many difficulties during its development, one of which was translation issues.

This may be a problem with the translation company (though we can't speak too loudly), but the quality of the translations in the original version was a bit poor for both simplified and traditional characters.

However, our engineers, especially the Chinese members, showed great enthusiasm and reworked all the translations to ensure that the quality of the translations was up to standard. I think this enthusiastic membership has also played an important role in the success of the Chinese market.

That said, I think one of the reasons for the success of Palu is that we've combined a lot of different game mechanics.

Since starting Pocketpair, all the games we've made have combined existing elements.

The first game, Over Dungeon, was a combination of card games and tower defense games.

The second game, Genesis Imaginary, combines elements of The Legend of Zelda-style survival building and automation. On top of this, "Phantom Beast Palu" also adds elements of monster breeding and collection.

In fact, in the game industry in Japan, mixing multiple game elements is generally discouraged, but we found it interesting to combine different game elements, so we continued to do so.

Personally, I think this way of creating a combination of games is a great way to do it.

The second important reason is that we managed to make these characters very cute.

I think the expressions of each character are very appealing to Chinese players who like the ACG style. We strive for characters to be vivid and emotional.

Originally, most of the games in the survival building genre originated in Europe and the United States, and usually had a high level of difficulty.

By adding cute character elements, we've lowered the barrier to entry for survival building in this more difficult genre, which I think was a big factor in success.

Another important factor was something that we didn't anticipate at all.

Although it was not a deliberate result for us, we were very happy to see that everyone enjoyed the game.

I'm both an entrepreneur and a developer, and I actually worked as hard as Palu before the release of Palu.

Next, I will introduce how to make these characters full of vivid emotions.

During the design process, we solicit input from the team, gradually refine it, and finally decide on the final design through team voting.

One of the great features of our company is that all members of the team discuss and think together. While the creative ideas provided by the artists are often great, sometimes from the perspective of other members can also help to better create characters that players will love.

For example, regarding this frog character, we added it in a recent update and discussed which version you prefer. While both versions of the creative are interesting, we discussed with everyone to determine which one was more popular.

Unfortunately, the Palu on the right did not turn out to be a good result and therefore did not appear in the game.

However, we have some very passionate fans within the company, and there may be an opportunity to add this character to the game in the future.

In addition, we have done a lot of work on background explanations and questionnaires. The process of preparing for the survey was really tedious, we started with various sketches, sometimes I came up with the idea first, and sometimes the artist designed it himself.

For example, I remember asking artists to design a very large character, and that was the starting point for the Mammoth Forest.

It's also not uncommon for the first draft to be very different from the final design. Through discussion and iteration, we will gradually optimize the design to make it more in line with the requirements.

This discussion can sometimes lead to the introduction of new elements or styles, such as some initial designs that may seem simple or not fit the character set up well, but we keep tweaking to make sure the final character design is both relevant and appealing.

For example, this most popular character is the result of many discussions and revisions.

As another example, we initially had vague requirements for the mushroom character – I just wanted some poisonous-looking palu. After many times of polishing and cooperating with each other, the artists in the team finally presented an excellent character.

One of the hallmarks of our company is that the design process is not just the work of a single artist, but the collaboration of the whole team. Artists, engineers, and others discussed and voted on to ensure the quality of the final design.

That's all for today's sharing, I hope it will be helpful to everyone.

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