[MAKEOT.COM] In the gaming industry, Liang Qiwei, the founder of Lingyoufang, has recently faced a challenge of reputation reversal. In the past, he was always the one painting grand visions for his team, but now he needs to manage expectations from all sides. Behind this phenomenon lies the high risk and low success rate of the single-player game market.
According to statistics, a large number of mobile games are canceled during development, and even those that successfully launch often struggle to sustain long-term operations. “Shadow Blade Zero,” which Lingyoufang is currently developing, faces an especially grim market outlook as a buy-to-play single-player game. In China’s vast gaming market, single-player games account for a negligible proportion.
Liang Qiwei emphasizes that, rather than dreaming about market ceilings, he is more focused on how to sustainably operate single-player games commercially. He points out that the impatient mindset in the mobile game industry leads to a surge of projects being quickly launched, often resulting in failure.
In Liang Qiwei’s view, there is a fundamental difference between service-oriented games and content-oriented games. The former resemble internet products, while the latter are closer to works like movies and novels.
Service-oriented games far surpass content-oriented games in profitability. Even if “Black Myth” sells 20 million copies, its revenue would still be dwarfed by that of “Honor of Kings” in just one quarter.