"Find your sister" developer Zhang Fan: out of "entrepreneurial Despair Valley"

Find your sister game "find your sister" game red. This is what its team cloud midsummer expected to do while playing the game, but they also did not expect the game to fire that much. Zhang Fan, CEO of cloud middle reaches revealed to Tencent Technologies that at present, the download volume of "Find Your Sister" has reached 55 million times. The game is very simple, is to allow players to find a variety of different things in a pile of things. Because the gameplay is simple, but also a war function, it is very contagious. Hot cool company is "find your sister" in the Andrews platform publisher, its CEO Liu Yong Tencent technology analysis, the main reason for the success of this game is the content witty, humorous and contagious. Zhang Fan has been a game lover, doing several games at college. After graduating in Netease, Perfect World and other companies, at the same time in his spare time also developed a number of small games. Like many independent game developers, let Zhang Fan really see the game opportunity is the emergence of the iOS App Store. In 2010, Zhang Fan and his partners spent two months developing an iOS game in their spare time. Although this is a fee-based game, but through limited time free marketing tools, or in the rankings have achieved good results. "Although this game has very little return on earnings, it gives us a lot of confidence and the game has received a lot of praise." Zhang Fan said. After the success of "Find Your Sister", Hot Cool quickly found the team and proxied its Android release, and at the same time began to leverage its mature marketing team to help Yunzhong Tour to sign up more partners and expand the game's influence . But before "Find Your Sister", Zhang Fan and his friends developed a total of 5 games. He said that they do more of the game is the love of the game, feel cool to do the game, enjoy the creation of the game process. This sounds easy, but it's not easy to walk along the middle reaches of the cloud. Zhang Fan, who stepped out of "Business Despair Valley", very much agrees with the entrepreneurial curve once drawn up by Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinatior, a famous entrepreneurial incubator: In the early days of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs often tended to be ignorant and optimistic because of the small amount of information they received , Will think they are doing very well. But when it comes to a blow, it's about to enter Desperate Valley. Many companies will give up for various reasons during low troughs, but if they persevere, there will be some slight ups and downs. When the right way is found, these companies may get out of desperate valley and make a difference - and thus enter To the optimistic. After some achievements in the first game, cloud middle reaches into Venture Desperate Valley soon. "In fact, when entering the trough, psychology will have some contrast, and we often question ourselves." Zhang Fan said. But it is the love of the game, and encouraged by partners, Zhang Fan persevered. Cloud middle reaches in the trough struggled for about two years time. Now look back at the cloud in the desperate valley for two years, Zhang Fan is quite sensible. In his opinion, these two years are very important to the midstream of the cloud. It is during this time that the team in the middle reaches of the cloud has been sharpened, but also accumulated more experience in the game. Before "Find Your Sister", Yunzhong You made a spoofing application called "Gui Jie", some of which are quite similar to "Find Your Sister". The idea of ​​"finding your sister" comes from another member of the team whose major is art and has not done game planning before. "In this way he has no inherent thinking constraints, dare to try .He had this idea, and I have the experience before, this is also used in this game." Zhang Fan said. In doing "Find Your Sister" game, in fact, Cloud Travel has come to the entrepreneurial curve of "optimistic about the state of knowledge": they know the future is very difficult, but have found out the market, but also know their own strength , Already know how to deal with. Small team and differentiated competition Zhang Fan believes that differentiated competition is a characteristic of the cloud middle reaches, even if the current team size will be slightly expanded, but still will stick to the path of differentiation. Because of the small cloud midstream team, research and development costs will be very low, which means they can try high-risk games. The other is to do the game's thinking is to look at the market what are popular games, followed by popular games go. Differentiation is more suitable for small teams. In the hot-game arena, competition is more intense, often in the details of the fight game, as well as the company's funds and resources, which is more advantageous for mature large companies, because large companies have a mature game process. Zhang Fan is highly respected Imangi Studio Team, who developed Temple Runaway, with only two core members. According to the hot cool monitoring, "Find Your Sister" in China surpassed "Temple Escape 2" for a long time in influence. In the game concept, Zhang Fan believes that any game can be divided into internal and external, the game includes the gameplay, style, etc., these are the most in need of innovation; and the game's external include increasing user retention, pay-point design, games Marketing, etc. These can in fact gain some inherent skills through experience accumulation. In the "find your sister", cloud middle reaches have also prepared two or three games. Talking about his changes, Zhang Fan said: "On the one hand, my thinking goes from the product level to the product strategy level and the company level. At the same time, I am even more confident because I have also worked out some patterns in the past and are now more certain that these are suitable our."