Zihan Wang's GDC 2017 Post

Post date: Mar 17, 2017 4:49:31 AM

It was my first time attend to the GDC.  I was really excited about it because what I was looking for from the GDC is the resources that may helps me in the future.  I was born in China.  It is a great country with a lot of opportunities.  China has been developed incredibly fast in the past decades, and it is still keep growing up quickly.  Obviously, the Chinese game market is becoming a hot topic.  Based on the large amount of population, the income of the whole Chinese game industry was approximately 25 billion USD in the past year, which is a huge amount of money.

Based all information I got, in general, I think that I will still have a big chance to become successful if I work in China.  So, I want to invest my money to establish my own game studio with my partners in China.  For achieving this goal, I was looking for partners and a group of people who has good skill and technology to make games, and meanwhile, they will need to cooperate perfectly.  Getting people together is a very challenge thing to do.  Fortunately, I had some good news  last year.  It is not easy to run a game company in China today, especially for a brand new company.  Although, some big Chinese amusement companies, such as Tencent (one of Chinese company participated GDC), ,NetEase, etc.  are all strong competitors, but opportunities are always prepared for people who have a dream.  This is also why I was trying to go to GDC this year.

I left on Wednesday, and arrived in San Francisco on Thursday afternoon.  After I got out of the Airport, I went to the GDC directly.  I was very surprised that I saw a lot of people who were walking on the street in downtown area are all with an expo pass of GDC.  People are talking about the games, and GDC in different languages while they were smoking or eating.  Finally, I went into the first section of GDC with my expo pass.

Day1:

The Showroom is separated to two parts.  I went to the first section, and I walked around.  I was a little upset because there were not many companies or brand that I am familiar with, except Tencent.  As what I mentioned above.  Tencent is a Chinese investment holding company whose subsidiaries provide media, entertainment, internet and mobile phone value-added services and operate online advertising services in China.  Tencent used to offer many multiplayer, online games which are all called QQ games.  All these multiplayer online games also includes Call of Duty Online, Dungeon Fight Online, CrossFire, etc.

I was kind of surprised that the boots of Tencent is not super big. However, I can see that it is a company that interested many people.  I talked to one of leader of Tencent’s at the boots.  The chat helped me to understand the Chinese game market more.  Tencent had been invested more money on mobile games in the past couple years.  There are some reasons why Tencent decided to do so.  A lot of Chinese Mobile phone manufactures are making cheap phones, which are selling for approximately 100USD to 300 USD.  It increases the population of phone users.  In other words, which means that there are more and more people will have chance to play mobile games.  Unlike console games, mobile games has less limit for players.  Size of the phones are small, so people can carry them everywhere.  Certainly, people are able to play games on phone wherever they want. Today, almost a half amount of Chinese Game industry income are from mobile games.  Obviously, The decision Tencent made was incredibly successful.

Day2:

After I had lunch, I went to GDC again.  I met some of my classmates and some people from other majors.  We had some conversations about the GDC, and their own experiences.  Everyone enjoyed GDC.  I walked around the whole area.  I visited the companies that interested my most, such as Unreal, Unity, Blizzard, Substance, etc.  The tutorial from Unreal was great.  It introduced new functions for materials in the new version.  

Ringling’s boots took a really nice spot at GDC, and a lot of people were interested.  They looked at the trailers and short videos that made by students.  Some people played games created by students.  That was awesome!  I stayed at the Ringling College Boots for a while in the afternoon.  When I was about to leave, there is a Chinese guy who is also interested in Ringling College.  We had a really long talk.

The guy I talked named ZiWei,  the CEO of Dawa (official website of the company http://www.dawaedu.com/), an educational company established in Beijing, China.  The company is actually like a school that teaches people how to make games with Unreal 4 Engine, and VR.  Based on the conversation we had, I knew that none of any Chinese college or university have a game major now.  Most of people who are making games are usually from animation major.  In other words, people do not really know how to design a game, especially in art aspects.  They do not know how to build the bridge between the concept artists, modeler and programmer because good concept artist who are good at drawing do not know how to model, people who know how to model do not know how to make it connects to the game play.  This is why a lot of Chinese game companies are hiring people from all over the place.  These were also the reasons why he came to GDC.  He was also looking for people and resources that may help him and his company.

Based on our conversation, there are a lot of Chinese who are good at programing, so they are not really having troubles with teaching people how to use C++ and Blueprint to program in UE4.  It also reminds me that I do not have to worry about that I cannot find good programmer works for my company in the future.  After we talked, he was very interested about how I get educated in Ringling.  He wanted me to help him to figure out the ways to educate people, which I am also very interested in, too.  So, we exchanged the contact information.  It can be a good opportunity for an intern.  Our conversation ended until the GDC was closed.

Day3:

The last day was kind of relax.  However, I still visited couple companies which are all helpful.  The first company I visited was Perforce.  I talked to one of manager of Perforce.  I told him that we are using perforce now.  It is a awesome software that helps saving files.  I asked the manager that if I am going to have my own company, whether they are going to charge me. How they are going to charge me.  I got a very clear answer that they usually do not charge small studios with less than five people.  However, if the studio or company that has more than five users.  Perforce will charge.  

ProudNet (Official website http://proudnet.com/en/multiplayer-game-server-architecture) is the second company that I visited that day.  It is an interesting company. ProudNet creates server and network engine for high quality realtime multiplayer games.  The High performance server is one of their selling point.  If you let ProudNet based server run in multithreaded mode, it can use all CPU core in one server process.  ProudNet can handle over 10,000 concurrent players in one server process. Touch Monsters by Netmarble is running ProudNet based servers where each server process over 50,000 concurrent chatting players.  ProudNet is serving in over 19 countries (China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, U.S.A., Singapore, Brazil and Netherlands) with over 200 customers, and about 70 active services.  It supports Both PC and Mobile.  They also served AAA games, such as Seven Knights, and Vindictus.

In my opinion, ProudNet is a reliable company that can cooperate with.  I was trying to get more advantaged from it.  So, I kept talk with the manager.  Eventually, they promised me that they can give free services when I am make the prototype of the game in the future.  I think that I really learned a lot, and gained a lot from GDC.