Joy chen photography ban

If the photon is compared to a person, it should be a game technology control full of love and nonstop.

Two days ago, Tencent Photostudio Group announced the latest brand upgrade plan. This studio group, which started as an end-tour, experienced the changes in the era of page tour and mobile game, witnessed the growth of a product, officially upgraded the global brand to "LIGHTSPEEDSTUDIOS", and at the same time, they also updated their brand identity, image, concept and vision.

Photon new visual concept map

From fighting god of war, happy landlord, happy mahjong and peaceful elite to PUBGMOBILE and League of Legends jointly built with excellent overseas R&D partners? Travel and ApexLegendsMobile, it seems that in every era, you will see photon games printed in the player's memory.

Photon is committed to the self-research of the game, broadening the boundaries of the game field and actively innovating in the original game category. On the basis of tactical competitive mobile games, we will create a subdivided military competitive experience mobile game, create a global explosion "Peace Elite", and combine the open world with survival games to create a new category of open world survival mobile game "Dawn Awakening".

Constantly explore more expression space for games, and at the same time provide new inheritance forms for richer and more diverse cultures. For example, during the Winter Olympics, the peaceful elite took advantage of digital products and really pushed the ice and snow sports culture to "most people". Give full play to the characteristics of different game products, increase exploration in the fields of educational cognition, cultural inheritance and rural revitalization, and create more ways to practice social responsibility. Tourism is the leading industry in Pengshui County, which was impacted by the COVID-19 epidemic. With the idea of "games+cultural tourism+e-commerce to help the poor", Photon Studio Group restores Pengshui cultural tourism scenes and Miao costumes in its various games, so that users can feel the local cultural tourism scenes. At the same time, the design competition of "Beautiful Mountains and Seas, Innovative Culture and Light" was held, and IP co-branded cultural and creative products were launched to show the charm of local Miao culture in a diversified way.

In GameLook's view, this persistence may stem from their love for the game, or from their sense of mission of "building the future game ecology and serving the global players wholeheartedly".

In order to find the answer, GameLook had the honor to interview joy chen, the president of photonics, when the brand of photonics was upgraded. This is our first communication with him. In addition to the reasons behind the brand upgrade of photonics, it also talks about the past, present and future of photonics.

As the person in charge of photonics, joy chen showed the developer's pragmatism and rationality in the interview. He has a clear and profound understanding of the industry and photonics itself, and at the same time let GameLook feel his pride in photonics status and his love for the game as a player. At the beginning, we mentioned the feeling of photons. To some extent, this feeling may be composed of joy chen and even everyone is a photon.

When asked, "What's your first reaction when people mention photons?" Joy chen said frankly, "I hope that if someone mentions photons in the future, we will be defined as the world's top R&D studio, even more than just a game studio."

On the basis of loving the game, let's go and see what the future of the game is.

Joy chen summarized the growth process of photons into three stages:

The first stage: "Be able to withstand loneliness when doing research and development"

Time came in 2008, when the mobile 3G network was just popularized, and PC was the only way for most people in China to get in touch with games at that time, which belonged to the golden age of PC-side games in China.

Also in this year, joy chen participated in the establishment of Quantum Studio with more than 100 people, which is one of many game development teams in the domestic game industry. Joy chen admitted that in the first stage of photon development, he was more concerned about how to make the project, because it was still very difficult for the team at that time.

The early products of photons were mainly 2D. When it smelled the 3D trend of games in the industry, it began to invest in 3D games and related technologies, such as "War of God" based on the self-developed era engine. This IP is still deeply impressed by many players, including game products such as "QQ Xianxia Biography", which took seven years to develop, indicating that Photon has made great progress in self-developed engines and other technologies.

Relying on this stage's technical experience in engine technology, 3D game development and the cooperation of the world's top institutions, the photonic team can seize the opportunity in the upcoming mobile game era. In the torrent of China's game industry turning to mobile platforms, photon light speed studios came into being. Joy chen hopes to attach importance to product quality and quickly grasp the dividend in the era of stopping broadcasting.

The second stage: "Technology is the foundation, but I think the contacts in the game industry are also very important."

At this stage, the team began to try the research and development of mobile games. For Chen Yu, what he is considering is no longer how to make this project, but how to make this project a head explosion. In other words, at this time, joy chen pays more attention to the market and seizes potential opportunities.

So we should take the initiative to meet the wave of mobile games. In the early days, Photon transplanted some classic PC games and gameplay to the mobile phone platform, such as "National Aircraft Wars" and "National Assault". Later, Photon cooperated with other top manufacturers to transplant the world's top game IP from the mainframe and PC to the mobile platform, and launched works including ApexLegendsMobile.

Why can photons monopolize these well-known head IP? In joy chen's view, "on the one hand, the team technology should be excellent, on the other hand, the team should also grasp every cooperative relationship."

In fact, technical strength has become one of the labels of photon games. In other words, this is also one of the most valuable labels for domestic leading manufacturers. In this plan to enhance the brand of photonics, technical input and innovation are also the main strategies for joy chen and his team to realize their new vision.

Joy chen said that in the end tour era, Photon's R&D team was strong, while in the mobile tour era, with the "middle platform" strategy that Photon has always adhered to, the technology and experience accumulated through live ammunition over the years have also settled down.

At the same time, Photon has always maintained good cooperative relations with top companies and institutions in the world. For these reasons, Photon is in a leading position in technology, especially its specialized realistic painting style of the next generation games. For the future, joy chen said that the main track of photonics will continue to focus on reality and will continue to exert its strength in this direction.

Is it worth it? I mentioned, light? EpicGames from unreal engine? Often smooth cooperation and friendship, out of recognition and trust for the partners, EpicGames provided the beta version of unreal engine 5 to Photon's new game project for trial very early. Joy chen believes that Photon is one of the few R&D teams in the world that use unreal engine on a large scale, and has accumulated a lot of valuable experience in the process.

Open world engine effect slicing

However, to GameLook's surprise, today, when everyone emphasizes technology, joy chen is not complacent about the achievements of photonics, but pragmatically calls the core technology "foundation".

In his view, photons have gone through the most difficult stage in the early stage, and the subsequent process is from 1 to 100.

"When did we compete with others? On the same track, how to beat other races through creativity? And can be accepted by users around the world? Pluralism like League of Legends and ApexLegends? Can our team design this from scratch for integrated strong IP game products? "

These two questions not only express joy chen's inner worries, but also represent the direction for Photon to redouble its efforts in the global market environment. Fortunately, joy chen had a clear understanding of these two issues.

As early as the end-game era, Photon has started to cooperate with top teams in different fields around the world. For example, in the research and development stage of "God Wars", Photon once cooperated with the rendering team of "Avatar" in CG, which caused great repercussions among the industry and players at that time.

It was this experience that made joy chen realize the value of cooperation, and the contacts he accumulated when he was in charge of distribution business at Tencent in the early days made it possible for Photon to cooperate with excellent global R&D teams.

And around 20 19~2020, with a number of star projects going out to sea one after another, can photon research and development technology? When you get more exercise. Last year, Photon's team members were close to 4,000, and the scale of the R&D team was considerable. Compared with peers, the scale of R&D team of this magnitude has exceeded the employees of many domestic TOP 10 listed game companies.

With the steady and rapid growth of overseas users and market share of photonics, joy chen said in an interview that he would spend more time, even more than half of his time, to find opportunities for overseas teams and markets, including establishing overseas game studios.

Years of cooperation with foreign companies also made joy chen realize that compared with foreign teams, China's R&D team's storytelling ability is still relatively weak, which may be because the domestic game industry pays more attention to gameplay and business model design.

When working with top overseas teams such as League of Legends, Photon found that China's R&D team needed to learn from the world outlook construction, game narration and IP's expanding ability in music, animation and other fields.

With the continuous progress of the game industry to high-quality products and the intensification of competition in the global game industry, light? I am well aware of the need to strengthen my originality and artistic expression ability, and openly learn from excellent partners in the global market. This also explains why Photon launched the "Photon Universe" and promoted it as the core strategy to realize the brand vision.

Leap to the third stage _ "The project should be done from generation to generation, and the result will not be known until it is done"

In joy chen's view, overseas markets provide more space for the development and growth of photonics, and it is also an important business direction of photonics at present. After the first two stages of tempering, Photon has the ability and reason to base itself on China, expand overseas markets and make a larger overseas layout. This is why his team chose to upgrade Photon to "LIGHTSPEEDSTUDIOS" at this time and put forward the brand vision of "Photon Universe".

For Photon, who has held many global explosion games, the more important goal now is how to make players around the world remember the brand Photon. In GameLook's view, Photon certainly hopes to establish the brand impression that "Photon products must be excellent" in the minds of players all over the world, which is exactly the goal that every leading China game manufacturer wants to achieve.

But how to achieve this goal, joy chen is also very clear, can only rely on higher quality game products to achieve, which also means the upgrading of the whole brand, in fact, it is also a new challenge to hard power such as photon technology and creativity.

To this end, they proposed to build a "photon universe" platform. At present, the popular "universe" in the game circle is divided into two categories, one is represented by the meta-universe, which means the ultimate exploration of cutting-edge technology; The other, represented by Marvel Universe, forms a grand content matrix through endless stylized narration.

By building a "photon universe", photons seem to paint a bigger blueprint and want to do more things. Joy chen expects this brand concept to inherit and continue the story of Photonic brand, and hopes that the team will grasp the basic rules of the game in the next decade and build a rich and diverse game world.

In the specific planning and layout, photonics pays more attention to the content expansion from single platform to multi-platform. In the future, photonic products will strengthen cross-terminal and cross-platform research and development capabilities, and finally realize the leap-forward development of products.

It is not only a game, but also a "photon universe" platform to connect global players and game ecology.

Although China's mobile games have become popular in the global market, on the matter of "what to do next", based on calm analysis and thinking, joy chen gave a photon answer-focusing on the main track. In this tempting market environment, concentration also means giving up to some extent, and giving up means losing potential market opportunities. Therefore, it is not easy to choose "concentration" itself.

But in joy chen's view, the size of photon today is more suitable for frontal group battles and tough battles, and less suitable for guerrilla warfare. As the saying goes, "Good steel is used on the blade". Even though the products of Photon have involved more than ten categories, Photon will still focus on large market categories in the future, such as chess and cards, shooting, MMO and MOBA.

In addition to globalization, photons also need to face challenges from the future. In fact, this brand upgrade is equivalent to a new exploration of the next generation of wave games in the future.

On this basis, in the past, Photons may be more focused on the game products themselves, but with the continuous evolution of the game industry, Chen Yuhe's team also saw the future development trend of multi-content forms with IP as the core.

Joy chen told GameLook with anticipation that Photon is currently exploring scalable IP forms such as movies, television and animation, and will set up content studios in related fields and launch phantom image sub-brands. All-photon IP Cosmos Project will also explore new forms of content expression on the basis of original IP and technical capabilities.

"Why can Hollywood have such a wide influence in the world? Why can a work like Avatar be deeply rooted in people's hearts? " Chen Yu asked GameLook first, and then gave his answer.

In joy chen's view, on the one hand, values are emphasized, on the other hand, ideas are emphasized. Let people like it from the heart through exquisite design, then become its fans, and then support this cultural content, that is, organically combine different businesses within the overall situation: some expand the scale of users, some pay attention to commercial returns, and more hope to shape cultural content that can impress users and be welcomed by users. This is also the place where the photonic IP universe needs to be improved in the future.

In the planning of joy chen, the products of photonics in the future will be based on original IP, and some original projects facing the world will be made, which will be polished continuously in a few years and with more patience. "The market we are facing has changed from China to the whole world. The capital and research and development capabilities we have accumulated in the past are enough for us to reach a higher dimension in the next generation of projects. "

Obviously, whether in-game or out-of-game, the photon universe pursues a global narrative for global players. To achieve this goal, the globalization of R&D talents is an indispensable part.

"Studio firmly takes the road of globalization"

Looking back on the news about domestic manufacturers going to sea in the past two years, in addition to the endless explosion of products, recruiting overseas talents and establishing overseas studios is undoubtedly another high-frequency concern of the domestic game industry.

In this respect, from the establishment of LightSpeedLA to UncappedGames, and then based in China, Photon has been at the forefront of domestic counterparts in many countries and regions such as the United States, Singapore, Canada, Britain, France, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and United Arab Emirates. Joy chen even told GameLook that Photon would become a "studio firmly following the road of globalization".

Photon north America studio LightSpeedLA moving shed

But it must be pointed out that talent is also the scarcest resource in the industry at present. In this regard, joy chen did not shy away. His attitude was not to worry or complain, but to show his confidence and pride in the photonic team.

In his view, thanks to the mentoring system adopted in the early days of photonics, the whole team members not only have strong personal connections, but also improve the ability of the team and employees together with the improvement of technology.

However, in the face of this new stage of the global market, joy chen also stressed that although China's R&D team has been keeping up with the global technology trends and constantly catching up with progress, there is still room for learning and upgrading in terms of composite capabilities. This requires photonics to continuously attract overseas high-quality talents.

But on the whole, joy chen still thinks that the whole photonics team is in a good state, whether in technical strength or other aspects. If there is anything missing, it should be systematic 3A pipeline and cross-platform adaptation and R&D capability.

"It is a great challenge and test for photonics to let the photonics teams distributed in different parts of the world jointly develop a project and realize the working mode across time zones and regions, and it will also be the key aspect of photonics' future construction."

In this regard, joy chen also admitted that photons need a process of development, and it is also indispensable to learn from the experience of outstanding peers. For example, in terms of talents and the layout of global studios, joy chen and his team learned from the talents construction experience of 3A teams in Europe and America.

For example, talents in North America, photons will be more inclined to let them focus on the underlying technologies such as engines; Europe, on the other hand, tends to recruit art professionals. In Singapore, Photonics has also established an R&D creativity and cooperation center. On the one hand, it is responsible for the overall planning of photonics in global R&D cooperation and global operation; On the other hand, it is responsible for the exploration of cutting-edge technologies such as AR, VR and cloud games.

In this regard, he gave an image metaphor: "I think Tesla may go faster and lead slightly in some aspects, just like the electric car made in China, but the China team is also very fast and will always catch up."

But in any case, from the management point of view, the global team itself also means a huge challenge-whether it is the time difference at the physical level or the ideological gap brought by culture and language, it will bring obstacles to collaborative work, which is also a problem that photonics must strive to solve.

What's more, at the same time, globalization is also bringing new topics to photons from more aspects, such as "how to better fulfill social responsibilities under the background of globalization".

"I hope that people will mention photons in the future, not just that this is a game studio."

The extensive participation of the game industry in social issues has become a force that cannot be ignored at present. On the one hand, it benefits from the positive demands of the game company to repay the society after its own development and growth, on the other hand, it is closely related to the potential of changing the world contained in the game itself.

With the encouragement and love brought by this game, joy chen and the photonics team are willing to take more and more active social responsibilities, make their ideals shine into reality, and make the value of the game extend beyond the game.

In this regard, joy chen is well known. "Two years ago, through" Peace Elite ",Tencent chess series and Chongqing Peng? Hmong? Family? In the cooperation of governing counties, we will deeply participate in rural revitalization and help the development of the real economy. At the same time, we also attach great importance to the responsibility of social welfare through the centennial cooperation project initiated by the peaceful elite and the national safety education day cooperation project. Recently, we have also begun to try to cooperate with the application of game technology related to culture and medical fields. The reason why we set up the sub-brand "Photon Exploration Lab" is to continue to explore and extend the diversified value of game technology through our technology precipitation. "

Photonic Exploration Laboratory cooperated with Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau and Shaanxi Provincial History Museum to produce photographic scans and digital models of five cultural relics.

He believes that with the deepening of globalization, this social responsibility will still be rooted in the community, and R&D teams will be established in different places to establish positive values, such as helping to reduce carbon emissions in the field of environmental protection. On the other hand, from a macro perspective, can we help solve some social problems in the future through the power of games?

In joy chen's view, the game industry not only directly participates in social issues such as public welfare, but also plays a huge role in promoting the whole society. From the progress of chips to the expansion and application of artificial intelligence, and even to the cultivation of IT talents, the game industry has made outstanding contributions.

"I think if there were no games, the progress and development in some fields would not necessarily be as fast as today. Therefore, I always think that the game itself has great contribution and value to society, but we need to constantly explore and discover. "

Therefore, Photon, standing at a new starting point, takes the social value exploration of games as another important mission. In the next decade, photons want to connect not only users and developers, but also the wider society. Only in this way can we build a sustainable and valuable game ecology and let the game really have the power to change the world.

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At the end of the interview, through the topic of social influence of games, as the old people in the game industry, GameLook and joy chen talked about personal influence who entered the game industry, and joy chen also shared the last time he was proud and satisfied with the game.

"I once went abroad to participate in activities related to PUBGMOBILE. In a university, when we entered the school auditorium, the host introduced us as the development team of the game project, and the scene immediately cheered. Thousands of students called our team's name. At that moment, we felt the real respect and love of the players. "

If we put this story in the development of photons for thirteen years, it is only a small footnote at best. But it is this clip that gives GameLook another dimension to understand the brand upgrade of this photon. After more than ten years of development, today's full-fledged Photon is not only a star studio with frequent explosions, but also a global brand that constantly creates and delivers value to domestic and foreign players through games.

Through in-depth and frank dialogue with joy chen, GameLook also believes that today's photons still have the original intention when they set out. The difference is that Photon has grown into a business card of China's game industry. Under the irreversible trend of globalization, we have reason to place more expectations on the future of Photon, expecting it to make more China sounds on the global stage and truly lead the new exploration of the next generation of games in the future.