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Even though a month has passed, the things worth paying attention to at ChinaJoy this time are far from finished. For example, the "Tang Legend: Pipa Xing" exhibited at the venue, this game DEMO attracted the attention of many players at the time, and Grape Jun couldn't rank it even if he wanted to.

Why does everyone want to play so much? Because this game is really special: it's a buyout game with a subtly main gameplay, and it's planned to be released on PC/console.

At present, the story shown in "Tang Legend: Pipa Xing" is relatively simple. It is set in the Tang Dynasty and features the protagonist as an assassin disguised as a luthier who seeks to retrieve her brother after a betrayal.

In the open beta version, players need to infiltrate the roof of a tall building. And whether it is at the door of this building, or at the entrance of each floor, there are many people guarding it. Not only that, but there are also a lot of patrols on each floor. The player can assassinate these enemies from behind, but if the player is caught head-on by these people, it usually takes only three turns before they are taken down.

As you can see, the game doesn't seem to advocate close-quarters dogfights with guards. Fortunately, players have enough stealth ability items.

For example, players can build portals in some special locations to bypass the guards directly; You can also make tripwires and tie them to the aisles, so that some of the pursuing guards can be solved; Players can also use a string skill to kill guards in a head-to-head battle, giving them more time to escape in case of emergency.

Overall, although the game is still very early, it looks very good both in terms of its gameplay and its art quality. In today's domestic PC game boom, if they can be improved, they have a good chance to become the front-row products in the current batch of games.

So who made such a game? You may also be surprised to say that the team behind it is the well-known "outsourcing brand" Virtuos.

As the world's largest outsourcing company, Virtuos actually started to do its own research, will they want to transform in the future? In order to get the real answer, I paid a special visit to Tian Li, General Manager of Virtuos China, during my time at CJ.

Tian Li has been in the industry since 05 and now has nearly 20 years of work experience. He worked for about three years as one of the first employees of Chengdu Virtuos, and then moved to Beijing. It wasn't until 2018 that Virtuos Chengdu wanted to recruit a new general manager, and Tian Li also returned to Chengdu by chance, and experienced the rapid growth of Virtuos in the following years. This year, he became the General Manager of Virtuos China.

In a conversation with him, he not only shared with me the current state of Virtuos and Tang Legends: Pipa Xing, but also explained what they really wanted to achieve with the game - spoilers ahead of time, not for the sake of transformation.

01

Why is Virtuos the world's largest?

Virtuos founder Rangili is France. As the founder of Ubisoft China, Rangili came to China around '95 and '96 and helped Ubisoft set up its Shanghai and Beijing studios. He realized at the time that even a top game developer like Ubisoft wouldn't be able to keep up with the development needs on his own. Seeing a huge opportunity here, he founded Virtuos.

In the early days, Virtuos was given the opportunity to provide services for major overseas games with the help of Rankili's personal background, and they also proved themselves through these opportunities. Today, Virtuos is now the world's largest independent third-party developer with more than 20 locations. In addition to its headquarters in Singapore and three studios in Shanghai, Chengdu and Xi'an in China, Virtuos also has studios in Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and North America. Recently, they also acquired Beyond-FX, a full-service visual effects (VFX) studio in the United States.

The distribution of studios displayed on the Virtuos website

Even though Virtuos is now the "world's largest", they currently have only about 4,000 people worldwide. Virtuos has done some internal market research, and the results show that they account for less than 5% of the entire To B game industry, and there is still a lot of room for growth.

Why is Virtuos the world's largest? Tian Li believes that from an internal point of view, the first point is Virtuos's positioning of itself: they want to make high-quality, high-end games. That's why the games they make are basically console and PC games, and most of them are triple-A products, or some well-known IPs.

In the industry, Virtuos is better known for its art outsourcing services, but Virtuos actually has two main departments within it: the art department and the games department - as long as it is a non-art job, such as planning, engineer, sound effects, etc., it is all classified in the games department. In terms of business revenue composition, Virtuos accounts for almost half of its revenue from art outsourcing and game production.

In Virtuos's view, if you only make assets, you are putting yourself at a low position in the value chain. "The lower the value chain, the more competitors there may be, because it has a low threshold, but there are still fewer manufacturers who really have the ability to make a full set from scratch."

The second point is that Virtuos places a strong emphasis on globalization. Tian Li said that the founder, Lan Jili, is convinced that globalization is an important way to solve the problems of uneven manpower and quality in the game development process. Globalization not only allows Virtuos to balance costs but also leverage the strengths of different teams around the world.

The third point is the diversification of capabilities. Tian Li mentioned that some of their clients may have focused on one style or type for a long time in the past. Their team may be experts in this style, but when it comes time to try a new style, they also start from scratch.

In the 20 years since its founding, Virtuos has completed more than 1,500 projects, covering a wide variety of styles, and has tried it in different era backgrounds and hardware conditions. Tian Li believes that this is why Virtuos is doing well: it has done enough.

Some of the customers featured on Virtuos' website

Fourth, Virtuos attaches great importance to experience learning and talent training. Tian Li said that this is also an important reason for the strength of Virtuos's art.

When Virtuos set up studios in Chengdu and Shanghai, there weren't many game training institutions in China, and there weren't teams to make triple-A games. In order to solve the problem of domestic game talents, they launched their own "training courses".

Virtuos goes to colleges and universities to recruit young people who are passionate about the game industry, especially art school students. These individuals do not have to pay any tuition fees and can participate in a 3- to 6-month full-time training in small classes taught by veteran Virtuos staff. Even during the training, Virtuos pays out training allowances. At the end of the course, Virtuos organizes a very rigorous exam, and only after passing the exam will they sign an employment contract with the student.

For regular employees, they have also established a knowledge management system. Virtuos has set up a dedicated knowledge management department at the group level to extract IP-related production experience from each studio's projects and turn it into training materials. Then, they organize the learning of employees according to their needs. At the same time, when employees move from other projects to new projects, they also need to complete some mandatory training to ensure that the standards required by the project are met.

In this way, Virtuos has built a talent pipeline and improved its knowledge structure. Tian Li told me that in this way, they have cultivated a large number of art talents for the industry, many of whom are working for their clients or other game companies, in addition to working at Virtuos.

The work of Virtuos art experts

02

When the world's largest outsourcing started self-development

Referring to "Tang Legend: Pipa Xing", Tian Li said that this is not Virtuos's first self-developed product.

Virtuos has been working on its own games for a long time. As early as about 13 years, they cooperated with CMGE to develop a mobile game called "Vampire Tooth Girl", and it was successfully launched, but the market response was mediocre.

Later, Virtuos France studio first developed the mobile game Carbon Warfare, and last year released a card game called Magic Swordsman on Steam. However, none of these self-developed games achieved the results they expected.

"Of course, we also developed our own games to train our team and let everyone accumulate experience in making games from scratch." Therefore, Virtuos is still continuing to do self-research internally, and has incubated many self-research projects.

Tang Legends: Pipa Xing is just the first game to launch a full demo in China. This game is from the Chengdu studio. The entire project is expected to take two years, and has only been developed for six months.

But why launch a "stealth/national style/console" game? Tian Li said that this is not only related to the willingness of the project team itself, but also a choice made based on the company's positioning.

"We encourage small teams within the company to come up with good ideas and develop them. The company has a dedicated editorial team that reviews these ideas." These small teams may not have considered much of the market or player preferences at first, but more out of their own interests and passions. Tian Li revealed that for example, the core members of the "Tang Legend: Pipa Xing" project team are all loyal fans of "Dishonored", so the project team wanted to make a stealth game from the beginning.

Initially, they chose Western themes, but because the whole team is Chinese, they don't know that much about Western culture. Later, they thought, if they used Chinese elements, could they do better? At this time, Virtuos also happened to find an excellent screenwriter who knew a lot about ancient Chinese culture and could help the team build the worldview of the game. The project team has also strengthened the direction of "Chinese style stealth".

Virtuos also invited the director of the Xi'an Tourism Design and Research Institute as a consultant to help them study the details of the Tang Dynasty architecture and furniture in the game, and try to present the style of the late Tang Dynasty as authentically as possible.

The reason for choosing the console/PC side is obviously because of Virtuos's experience. They have accumulated enough experience in console games and have a corresponding player base, so it is natural for them to choose this direction.

Tian Li said that Virtuos certainly hoped that "Tang Legends: Pipa Xing" would be a commercial success, but they did not set a high KPI for the team. They believe that if it pays off financially, it would be the icing on the cake, but more important is the exercise value of the project for the team.

Why did Virtuos, which is outsourced, want to have the ability to make a complete game? Tian Li said that in fact, most of Virtuos's studios already have the production capabilities they call "whole package" internally.

In the beginning, the client outsourced some of the more simple tasks to Virtuos, such as the production of scene objects, and the design specifications of the objects were set by the client himself.

But as hardware improves, games get bigger and more complex. During game development, even after a simple asset like a table is made, there is still a lot of follow-up work to be done in the engine, such as scripting, lighting, and so on. Many manufacturers are no longer able to work out all the details in detail and then hand them over to an external team to make them. Increasingly, they expect outsourcing companies to have the same design capabilities and all the relevant production knowledge as they do.

Therefore, since 2015, Virtuos has proposed a "turnkey" or "end-to-end" service model. The customer only needs to give them a very concise description, or even just a text version of the requirements document, such as what the level wants to look like and what the requirements are. Virtuos does the rest, from design, fabrication, integration, and even final testing and debugging. They end up delivering a ready-to-run version of the game to the customer.

Tian Li said that Virtuos has been developing this model for almost 10 years now, and their large studios, especially in China, are fully equipped with this ability to make games independently from 0 to 1.

For example, a remake project with clear requirements. Many old games need to be remastered, but now more games tend to upgrade the graphics while also adding some elements of the gameplay to keep up with the times, so as to attract new players.

When it comes to this type of game, Virtuos has done a relatively mature job. Tian Li told me that their most recent high-quality project is Metal Gear Solid 3 Remake, which is basically finished and is just waiting for the customer to confirm the final release date.

Another example is custom development projects. At present, Virtuos has received relatively few similar requests, but Virtuos feels that in addition to passively waiting for customer needs, they also need to actively practice. They have recently developed a series of actions such as "Tang Legend: Pipa Xing", which is for this reason.

Tian Li said that now, customers want to be able to hand over game production to partners who have the ability to do "turnkey", and even some customers are only responsible for marketing and distribution, and the production process is completely outsourced.

The team at Virtuos is confident in the game's production, but they still need more training from the birth of the idea to the polishing stage. Therefore, Virtuos has established a self-developed project plan internally, and in addition to "Tang Legend: Pipa Xing", they have other projects in development and are considering launching them in due course in the future.

03

the game market of the future,

There is a greater need for all-round outsourcing

In December last year, Virtuos made some organizational changes and proposed the concept of China for the first time. Tian Li said that Virtuos's purpose in establishing China is very clear, that is, it hopes to unite the strength of the three studios in Shanghai, Chengdu and Xi'an to provide some customized services for Chinese customers.

Today, mobile games have accounted for half of the game market, and almost all of the leading mobile game manufacturers are from China. Therefore, they hope to establish cooperation with domestic customers in the field of mobile games in addition to console and PC games.

The current trend of mobile gaming doesn't mean that Virtuos's experience with PC/console gaming is no longer useful. First, the development trend of console games in China is relatively optimistic. "There has also been some good news recently, such as the release of Black Myth: Wukong. I believe this will bring some positive signals to the capital markets."

On the other hand, more and more game manufacturers are adopting an omni-platform publishing strategy, or want to enter the triple-A game field. But the cost of assembling and maintaining a console game development team is very high, especially for companies that are new to this space, and the challenges are even greater. If the project is cancelled, the company has a large number of full-time employees and cannot find a suitable project, which can be a big burden.

Tian Li believes that working with an external team like Virtuos has no such concerns at all. Virtuos can provide them with a turnkey service, but also apply the experience of console game production to mobile game projects, helping customers improve the quality of their games or complete content faster.

The work of Virtuos art experts

But he also said that, objectively speaking, the price of Virtuos is indeed relatively high. This, he argues, can be explained in one sentence: the best games are not necessarily made by the cheapest people. They have been aiming at the high-end market from the very beginning, and have always insisted on giving the best treatment to talents, so they have come to this day.

Tian Li told me that Virtuos attaches great importance to "putting people first". He believes that the gaming industry is a healthy and long-term industry, and if you want to develop in this industry for a long time, you should have a long-term mentality. As a gamer, just choosing the 996 or even 007 way of working for short-term profits, maybe after two or three years, regardless of the success of the project, you will leave the industry because of physical and mental exhaustion.

Virtuos' Chengdu studio, for example, has more than 1,000 employees, more than 300 of whom are veterans who have been with the company for more than six years. This also shows that they have renewed their labor contracts for the second time, which is equivalent to lifelong employees. Their annual employee turnover rate is also at a relatively low level in the industry.

"If you're at the bottom of the value chain, the competition is definitely the fiercest, and at the end of the day, it's all about price. But in the whole outsourcing industry, there are not many companies that are really capable of doing turnkey projects, and we still have such a large scale, which puts us in a relatively high position in the value chain. This positioning has given us more room for development and allowed our employees to enjoy better treatment."

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