May 1st, Sunday.
Pei Qian came to the café near the university again. Today, he was meeting a new game producer.
Of the 1.6 million yuan allocated by the system for tuition fees, only 1 million had been used, leaving 600,000 yuan unspent.
So, Pei Qian had previously asked Assistant Xin to look for a designer who had some failed projects but also maintained a certain reputation, hoping to learn some successful experiences.
As for why the designer needed to have a certain reputation despite failures, this was because Pei Qian wanted to eliminate interference from personal ability factors as much as possible.
If a producer was inherently unsuccessful and worthless, on one hand, the system wouldn’t allow paying such high tuition fees for him, and on the other hand, his failure factors wouldn’t be prominent enough to learn from.
If someone were full of failure factors, which one should Pei Qian learn? If he accidentally learned an irrelevant factor, wouldn’t that be a waste of effort?
He needed to find designers with the ability and successful experience. The failure factors in such people would be very obvious, as if “highlighted” for easy learning.
What He An taught was mainly about the reasons for Tenda’s project successes, which for Pei Qian was like an error correction book, a large-scale correction exercise.
This expert today would mainly talk about his own failure experiences, which for Pei Qian would be a standard practice book.
Combining what He An taught with what this producer would teach today, wouldn’t that be perfect?
Plus, by inviting two experts to lecture him, he successfully spent 1.6 million yuan and learned professional knowledge about game development.
If he could pass the system’s assessment during settlement and then use what he learned to make money-losing games in the future…
Wouldn’t that be a huge win?
Compared to He An’s “error correction” format, today’s expert would directly provide “standard answers,” making it easier for Pei Qian to absorb the knowledge of how to lose money.
So, Pei Qian was very much looking forward to this meeting!
Not long after arriving at the café, the game producer showed up.
“Hello, Mr. Ma! I’m Qiu Hong.” A man with flowing long hair, looking to be in his thirties, warmly shook hands with Pei Qian.
Before coming, Pei Qian had already briefly reviewed Qiu Hong’s background.
Unlike He An’s illustrious ancient expert resume, Qiu Hong’s game production career could be described as quite bumpy and ill-fated.
His career could be seen as a template for the middle-aged generation in China’s current game market.
He entered the industry around 2001, joining a major domestic game company as a numerical designer, and successfully developed a successful Xianxia-themed PC game—of course, a pay-to-win game.
Two years later, leveraging his successful project experience, he jumped to another game company as the lead designer for a Western fantasy PC game. The project failed after a full year of development, with extremely poor test data, and was eventually abandoned.
Afterward, he moved to yet another game company, continuing as the lead designer for a pay-to-win national war-themed game, which became successful, achieving the impressive feat of over 100 million yuan in monthly revenue.
This national war game could be considered an evergreen. Although revenue declined after six months, it still maintained operations for three years, building Qiu Hong’s reputation.
With the reputation accumulated from this project, Qiu Hong decided to strike out on his own, finding investors to establish his own game company, developing a pay-to-win mobile game, which failed again.
Currently, because his game project had already failed, Qiu Hong was somewhat disheartened and happened to be in a state of idleness, wanting to clear his mind. So when he heard that someone was willing to pay 100,000 yuan to listen to his lecture, he readily agreed and came to Jingzhou.
Pei Qian was very satisfied with Qiu Hong’s background.
Simply put: he had reached great heights and fallen hard!
This man had focused on the domestic pay-to-win game sector and had achieved monthly revenues exceeding 100 million yuan as a lead designer five or six years ago, which was quite admirable.
Moreover, Qiu Hong’s two failed experiences didn’t seem to be failures due to a lack of money.
For his first failure, the company he joined had deep pockets and was prepared to spend lavishly to create what would have been considered a masterpiece at that time—they certainly weren’t short on money.
For his second failure, he had also secured enough funding from investors before starting his business, again, not lacking money.
But even so, Qiu Hong, with successful game experience and rich accumulation in the gaming industry, still failed in his entrepreneurship.
Massive investment, heavy losses, tens of millions directly down the drain—this exactly met Pei Qian’s expectations!
Pei Qian firmly believed that, in Qiu Hong’s experience, there must be valuable lessons for him to learn and reference!
The waiter brought coffee, and the two chatted while drinking.
Qiu Hong briefly introduced his background, and his attitude was very different from He An’s.
He An was an industry giant, a successful figure whose experience crushed 99.9% of designers in the industry. He gave lectures purely out of interest, with the old man carrying an inherent arrogance.
Even though “Ma Yang” offered to pay 200,000 yuan per lecture, He An would firmly stick to what he wanted to teach. Like it or not, if you don’t like it, I’ll leave.
Qiu Hong was completely different. Although he had successful experiences, he knew that he wasn’t considered a top game producer in the industry, so he was very polite. Whatever this “Mr. Ma” wanted to hear, he was willing to talk about.
After all, Qiu Hong was a numerical designer who only made domestic pay-to-win games. Most designers of this type had a significant characteristic: they wouldn’t refuse money.
Qiu Hong felt that since this “Mr. Ma” was paying 100,000 yuan per lecture, and also covering expenses such as round-trip tickets and transportation, their relationship was just like that between a paying VIP player and himself—an absolute meal ticket.
He must do everything possible to meet “Mr. Ma’s” needs.
So, when he heard “Mr. Ma” wanted to hear about his failure experiences, Qiu Hong wasn’t angry. He just confirmed once, then readily agreed.
“Very well, since Mr. Ma wants to hear it, I’ll talk about it.”
“But there’s one thing I want to clarify in advance.”
“If I were to talk about successful experiences, I would need to spend some time preparing, because every successful case is a combination of countless successful factors. I would need to clarify each successful factor to restore the full picture of the successful game.”
“But failure experiences are much easier to talk about, and I don’t need to spend time preparing.”
“As the saying goes, ‘A thousand-mile dike can collapse from an ant hole.’ Many times, you might make 99 correct choices, but just one wrong choice can still lead to failure.”
“To analyze the causes of failure, you just need to find the most critical failure factor in the failed project.”
Qiu Hong drank his coffee while explaining his teaching approach to “Mr. Ma,” with a very clear attitude of trying to get “Mr. Ma’s” approval.
Pei Qian was delighted: “Excellent! I want to learn about the lesson of ‘collapsing from an ant hole.’ Please be sure to explain thoroughly!”
Qiu Hong nodded: “Good. Then in the following courses, each session I’ll talk about a key factor that leads to project failure. I believe with Mr. Ma’s intelligence, you’ll certainly be able to avoid these or come up with solutions.”
Pei Qian smiled: “Definitely.”
Qiu Hong took a sip of coffee and organized his thoughts a bit: “So for today’s first lesson, I want to start with something relatively basic but often overlooked.”
“Project management.”
“The biggest difference between industries like games, films, animations, compared to novels, self-media, etc., is that they require close collaboration and division of labor.”
“That is to say, no matter how good you are on your own, it’s useless if your colleagues are all slackers who just go through the motions. Even the best ideas can’t be implemented.”
“Even a genius game producer needs a strong production team to turn their designs into successful game projects.”
“And people are inherently lazy. Many employees in game projects simply treat their positions as jobs to earn a steady salary and make a living, rather than as careers they strive for. So most of the time, their work enthusiasm is suppressed by themselves.”
“At this point, project management methods become crucial.”
“One major reason why I once made successful projects but failed in my venture is that my project management skills were lacking.”
“The consequence was that the development plans I set in my original company could always be completed smoothly, with delays of at most a week; but in my own company, the development plans were constantly delayed, and even with multiple extensions, the game produced still couldn’t meet my expectations.”
“Each department always had various excuses to pass the buck. It seemed that everyone had completed their assigned work, but upon closer inspection, you’d find that none of them seemed to be pushing the entire project forward. Each person delayed a little bit of time, and the project development schedule completely collapsed…”
Pei Qian listened silently, his face showing a yearning expression.
So… so envious!
Look at those employees, the boss doesn’t need to say anything, and they slack off on their own!
And what about Tenda’s employees? The boss is desperately encouraging everyone to slack off, but they’re all finding ways to work overtime!
However, besides envy, Pei Qian didn’t learn any actionable methods from this valuable failure experience.
According to Qiu Hong, failed project management would turn a company into a disorganized individuals. No matter how brilliant the design, without cooperation, nothing could be accomplished.
But this is where Pei Qian had questions.
I’ve never done any project management at all, have I?
So why haven’t my employees fallen apart? Instead, they’ve become a solid unit!
Impenetrable by needles or water, I can’t even find a breakthrough point!
What Qiu Hong was talking about, Pei Qian found very desirable, but after listening, he still didn’t know what he should do.
According to Qiu Hong, his failure was that he didn’t do enough, failing to effectively use project management to motivate employees, or rather, failing to effectively supervise lazy employees.
But Pei Qian thought, Qiu Hong just didn’t do enough, while he did nothing at all!
Not only had he not positively supervised employees, but he had done the opposite, sending all the overtime workers home!
By all accounts, he had exceeded his tasks, so why did it have the opposite effect?
Was the problem with him, or with his employees?
It made his head go bald…