Losing Money to Become a Tycoon: Starting with Games
Chapter 507: A Lesson in Failure
Sunday, May 1
Pei Qian arrived once again at the café near the university.
Today, he was meeting another game producer.
Of the 1.8 million yuan the system had allocated for tuition expenses, he had only spent 1 million, leaving 800,000 yuan unused.
So earlier, Pei Qian had asked Assistant Xin to find a designer who had worked on several failed projects but still possessed a respectable reputation. He wanted to learn from that person's failures.
The reason he specifically wanted someone who was both well-known and unsuccessful was to eliminate the influence of personal incompetence as much as possible.
If a producer was simply terrible at making games, then on the one hand, the system probably wouldn't approve such an expensive tuition fee for them.
On the other hand, their failures wouldn't stand out clearly enough to be worth studying.
If someone was bad at everything, then what exactly should he learn from them?
What if he ended up learning some irrelevant flaw?
That would just be a waste of time.
Instead, he needed to find designers who were genuinely capable and had achieved success before.
That way, the factors that had caused their failures would stand out like they had been highlighted in bright colors, making them much easier to identify and study.
He An had mainly explained why Tengda Group's projects succeeded.
Today's guest, on the other hand, would mainly be talking about his own failures.
To Pei Qian, that was the equivalent of having an official answer key.
If he combined what He An had taught him with what today's producer would teach him, wouldn't that be perfect?
Better yet, by inviting two industry veterans to lecture him, he could legitimately spend the full 1.8 million yuan while also learning professional game development knowledge.
If he could pass the system's assessment at settlement, and then use what he had learned to create games that lost money, wouldn't that be an incredible deal?
Compared with He An's approach of explaining "wrong answers," today's producer would be directly teaching the correct answers.
Naturally, Pei Qian felt that the knowledge about how to lose money would be much easier to absorb this way.
As a result, he was looking forward to today's meeting immensely.
Not long after Pei Qian arrived at the café, the game producer showed up.
"Hello, President Ma! I'm Qiu Hong."
The man, who looked to be in his thirties with long flowing hair, warmly shook Pei Qian's hand.
Before the meeting, Pei Qian had already reviewed Qiu Hong's résumé.
Unlike He An—an industry legend with a brilliant career—Qiu Hong's journey in game development had been full of twists, setbacks, and disappointment.
His career could almost be considered the standard template for the current generation of Chinese game developers.
Around 2001, he entered the gaming industry.
His first job was as a game balance designer at a major domestic game company, where he helped develop a successful xianxia-themed PC MMORPG.
Of course, it was also a heavily pay-to-win game.
Two years later, thanks to that successful project, he moved to another game company.
There, as the lead designer, he developed a Western fantasy MMORPG.
The project was a complete failure.
Development lasted an entire year, but the closed beta produced terrible results, and the project was ultimately canceled.
Afterward, he switched to yet another company.
Still serving as lead designer, he worked on another heavily monetized online game centered around large-scale national warfare.
This time, it was a tremendous success.
The game reached the impressive milestone of over 100 million yuan in monthly revenue.
Although its earnings began declining after about six months, the game remained in operation for another three years, earning Qiu Hong considerable prestige within the industry.
Leveraging the reputation he had built from that success, Qiu Hong eventually decided to strike out on his own.
He secured investment, founded his own game studio, and began developing a pay-to-win mobile game.
It failed.
Now that his latest project had collapsed, Qiu Hong was feeling somewhat discouraged.
He happened to be in a period of unemployment, hoping to relax and clear his mind.
So when he heard that someone was willing to pay 100,000 yuan just to listen to him teach a class, he happily accepted and traveled to Jingzhou.
Pei Qian was extremely satisfied with Qiu Hong's résumé.
To summarize it in one sentence:
He had climbed high enough... and fallen hard enough.
This was clearly someone who specialized in China's pay-to-win game industry.
Five or six years earlier, he had already achieved monthly revenue exceeding 100 million yuan as a lead designer.
That was an accomplishment anyone would be proud of.
More importantly, neither of Qiu Hong's two major failures appeared to have been caused by a lack of funding.
The first failure occurred after he joined a wealthy company that had been prepared to spend enormous sums creating what, at the time, was considered a blockbuster title.
Money had never been an issue.
The second failure came after he had secured ample investment before founding his own company.
Again, funding wasn't the problem.
And yet, despite his successful track record and years of industry experience, Qiu Hong's startup still failed.
Huge investments had been made.
The losses were devastating.
More than ten million yuan had vanished without producing results.
This was exactly the kind of case Pei Qian had hoped to study.
He was convinced that somewhere within Qiu Hong's experiences lay valuable lessons he could learn from.
The waiter brought over their coffee.
As they sipped their drinks, the two began to chat.
Qiu Hong briefly introduced his career history. From his attitude alone, the difference between him and He An was immediately obvious.
He An was clearly one of the industry's true veterans—a highly successful figure whose credentials surpassed those of ninety-nine percent of game designers. He taught purely out of personal interest, and there was an unmistakable pride about him.
Even if "President Ma" offered him 200,000 yuan per lesson, He An would still insist on teaching exactly what he wanted to teach.
Listen if you want. If not, I'll simply leave.
Qiu Hong, however, was completely different.
Although he had experienced success before, he knew perfectly well that he wasn't considered one of the industry's elite game producers.
So he was extremely accommodating.
Whatever "President Ma" wanted to hear, he was willing to talk about.
After all, Qiu Hong had worked as a balance designer and specialized entirely in Chinese pay-to-win games.
Designers of that type tended to share one defining characteristic:
They never argued with money.
In Qiu Hong's eyes, since "President Ma" was paying 100,000 yuan per lesson—while also covering round-trip airfare, transportation, and every other expense—he was no different from one of the wealthy whales who spent huge amounts on his games.
In other words, an absolute breadwinner.
Naturally, he wanted to satisfy every one of President Ma's requests.
So when President Ma said he wanted to hear about his failures, Qiu Hong wasn't offended at all, he simply confirmed the request and readily agreed.
"Very well."
"If that's what you'd like to hear, I'll talk about it."
"But there's one thing I'd like to clarify first."
"If I were discussing successful projects, I'd need to spend quite a bit of time preparing."
"Every successful game is the result of countless successful decisions working together. I'd have to carefully analyze every contributing factor before I could accurately reconstruct the whole picture."
"But talking about failures is much easier."
"I don't really need to prepare."
"As the saying goes, 'A thousand-mile dike can collapse because of a single ant hole.'"
"Very often, you can make ninety-nine correct decisions, but one single mistake is still enough to doom the entire project."
"When analyzing failure, all you really need to do is identify the one critical factor that caused everything to fall apart."
As he sipped his coffee, Qiu Hong explained the structure of his lessons to "President Ma."
His attitude was obvious.
He wanted to make sure his student approved of the teaching plan.
Pei Qian was delighted.
"Wonderful!"
"That's exactly what I want to learn—the kinds of mistakes that cause the entire dam to collapse. Please go into as much detail as possible."
Qiu Hong nodded.
"Good."
"Then, in each lesson from now on, I'll focus on one key factor that can cause a project to fail."
"I'm sure that, with President Ma's intelligence, you'll be able either to avoid those mistakes or come up with effective solutions."
Pei Qian smiled.
"I'm certain of it."
Qiu Hong took another sip of coffee and gathered his thoughts.
"So, for today's first lesson..."
"I'd like to begin with something rather fundamental, yet also one of the most frequently overlooked aspects."
"Project management."
"The biggest difference between industries like game development, filmmaking, and animation, compared with things like novels or independent online content creation, is that they require close collaboration among many different specialists."
"In other words, it doesn't matter how talented you are individually, if all your coworkers are slacking off and simply coasting through their jobs, then even the greatest idea will never become a great product."
"Even a genius game producer needs a strong development team to turn his vision into a successful game."
"And people are naturally lazy."
"Many employees on a game project simply treat their jobs as a way to earn a fixed salary and support their families."
"They don't regard it as a career they're passionate about."
"So, in most cases, their enthusiasm remains suppressed."
"That's why project management becomes absolutely critical."
"One major reason I was able to produce successful games while working for other companies—but failed after starting my own studio—was my lack of project management ability."
"The consequence was obvious."
"When I worked at my previous company, development schedules were almost always completed on time, or at worst delayed by about a week."
"But after founding my own company, our schedules slipped over and over again."
"Even after repeated delays, the finished game still failed to meet my own expectations."
"Every department always had one excuse or another for passing responsibility to someone else."
"On the surface, everyone seemed to have completed the tasks assigned to them, but if you looked carefully, you'd realize that nobody was actually pushing the project forward."
"Each person delayed things just a little, and before long, the entire development schedule completely fell apart."
Pei Qian listened silently.
A look of longing gradually appeared on his face.
I'm... so jealous.
Look at this man's employees.
The boss doesn't even have to tell them anything—they slack off all by themselves!
Meanwhile, what about Tengda Group?
I'm desperately encouraging everyone to take it easy and slack off, yet every single one of them keeps finding new excuses to work overtime!
Still...
Apart from feeling envious, Pei Qian hadn't actually learned any practical way to apply this valuable lesson about failure.
According to Qiu Hong, poor project management turns a company into a disorganized mess. No matter how brilliant the designer is, without the team's cooperation, the game simply can't be made.
But this immediately raised a question for Pei Qian.
The thing is...
I've never done any project management at all.
So why haven't my employees turned into a disorganized mess?
Instead, they've become a solid block of steel!
I can't even find a single weak point to exploit!
Everything Qiu Hong described sounded incredibly appealing to Pei Qian.
Yet no matter how much he listened, he still had no idea what he was actually supposed to do.
According to Qiu Hong, his failure stemmed from not doing enough—he hadn't managed the project aggressively enough, hadn't done enough to motivate his employees, or to supervise those who slacked off.
But Pei Qian thought about it carefully.
Qiu Hong had merely not done enough.
As for himself...
He had done absolutely nothing.
Not only had he not supervised his employees in the normal sense, he had even gone out of his way to supervise them in reverse, driving all the workaholics home whenever they tried to stay late!
By all logic, he should have overachieved at creating a lax workplace.
So why had it produced the exact opposite result?
Was there something wrong with him, or was there something wrong with his employees?
Just thinking about it was enough to make his head hurt.