Tianmei’s “Top Secret” has been exposed, is ZPLAN the “Moon Landing Project” of Tencent?

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GameLook report/Recently, Tencent’s Tianmei studio group recruited a number of positions for the new project “ZPLAN”, involving three major categories of technology, design, and products, with work locations covering Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. There are reports that the project focuses on social + games, and the team has more than 1,000 people.

Based on the current recruitment information, “ZPLAN” is likely to be a 3D open world game developed using UE4, with cloud game services, and open platform functions, and at least a mobile game version, which may be for the global market.

Taking into account that Tencent has registered a number of product-related Metaverse trademarks, and after a new round of reorganization of Tencent’s platform and content business group (PCG) in April this year, Yao Xiaoguang, president of Tencent’s IEG Tianmei studio group, is concurrently the head of PCG’s social platform business and head of QQ , It is rumored that Yao Xiaoguang will lead Tencent off the game in person, and explore Metaverse simultaneously from both social and gaming directions. So is ZPLAN a Metavesre-weight game?

Unreal development, target Z generation group

The recruitment map published by Tencent’s Interactive Recruitment WeChat official account shows a more trendy design language. The project vision is defined as “creating trend aesthetics”, and the “Z” of “ZPLAN” is likely to mean “Generation Z”.

In terms of the main visual aspect, the center of the picture is a silhouette of a character with animal ears. The figure has a three-headed body ratio, which is obviously non-realistic and has the charm of the Avatar system. The front of the character is the entrance formed by multiple funnel-shaped gates, which means entering the new world. The eye-catching “Z” letter is suspended above the virtual city’s tall buildings, indicating its youthful and trendy positioning.

At the bottom right of the “ZPLAN” LOGO, the words “TOP SECRET” and “RECRUITING” are written respectively. Needless to say, the latter is not mentioned. Since the former has been exposed, it is difficult to be called “confidential.” In highlighting the importance of the project, as well as highlight the personalization of product positioning.

Image source: pexels

GameLook believes that “ZPLAN” is a product with a large amount of R&D resources and potential for Metaverse. The reason lies in the comprehensive judgment of the requirements listed in the recruitment positions of the project.

According to Tencent’s recruitment practice, each project will have a specific recruitment code. The project code for “ZPLAN” in Tencent’s recruitment is “48377”. There are currently 97 open recruitment positions under 48377, and 1 position recruits 1 team. It will be over a hundred. Obviously, the R&D team of this project is very large.

After looking through the recruitment requirements of each position, GameLook has basically figured out the R&D requirements of the project. For example, the main beauty (NR1) position requires candidates to “have excellent international aesthetics and game art appreciation capabilities, and be highly sensitive to art style trends”, and be familiar with Unreal Engine. This probably means that “ZPLAN” will be developed with Unreal Engine, and the target users are the Z generation group. Of course, there are also positions such as “Senior Game Client R&D Engineer” who need to be familiar with the two engines of Unreal and Unity3D at the same time, so it is not yet fully inferred.

“Senior Cloud Native Development Engineer” requires “understanding the development guidelines and best practices of the cloud native environment”, and “love the game industry, and fight game players first”; while “Advanced System Planning” will “RPG games” and “actions”. The design experience of games or shooting games, “sandbox games”, and “Soc games” are listed as priority items; “Casual Game Planning” directly writes the gameplay on the job title.

There is everything for fighting together and an open world. Is ZPLAN a Metaverse?

SOC is the abbreviation of Survival, Open World, and Crafting. It is not difficult to see that the specific gameplay of “ZPLAN” may be very complicated, such as leisure, fighting together, party, action, shooting, survival, sandbox , The open world has everything.

In particular, Tianmei is still recruiting positions in platform operation, platform commercial operation, and platform operation-developer community. These positions put forward requirements for candidates’ UGC, social and e-commerce platform experience, as well as being familiar with developer resources and having KOL resources. Similarly, platform commercial operation and platform operation-the developer community directly requires candidates to be familiar with Generation Z culture and social language.

Based on the above-mentioned job requirements, GameLook can basically judge that “ZPLAN” is at least an open platform game developed with Unreal Engine. Whether it can grow into a Metaverse depends on the actual performance of the product after its release.

As we all know, Roblox, a typical overseas Metaverse product, is an open platform UGC product that has attracted many developers. Similar to many sandbox products, Roblox provides development tools to all developers, and more importantly, it has built a mature business model so that developers can successfully profit, to ensure content supply and form a user ecosystem.

Using platform games to make Metaverse, Roblox’s route has been proved to be successful by the market. It is tied with “Minecraft” and is two successful products recognized by overseas markets. According to the latest official data, as of August 2021, Roblox’s daily activity has reached 48.2 million, and its monthly income is between 167 million and 170 million US dollars (about 1.1 billion yuan).

In addition to investing in Roblox and successfully acting as an agent, Tencent has actually tried platform games and editor play. As early as 2019, Tianmei launched the “Tiangong” map editor for “Glory of the King”. The first release was connected to Shanghai Yueyu, Shanghai Jianzao, Beijing Huaqing Feiyang, Beijing Hero Mutual Entertainment, Shenzhen Three Zero Two, etc. A group of developers.

Tencent’s “moon landing project” surfaced for the first time?

Before “ZPLAN”, Tencent focused on investment in the Metaverse field and did not personally end. Some time ago, Tencent also competed with ByteDance to acquire VR manufacturer PICO, but in the end PICO was acquired by ByteDance. ByteDance also paid 9 billion yuan for this, becoming the largest domestic VR track this year. invest. In addition, ByteDance has also invested in “Restart the World” developer code Qiankun.

Assuming that ZPLAN’s “thousand-person scale” statement is true, then Tianmei really attaches great importance to “ZPLAN”. Although GameLook believes that the scale of the “ZPLAN” team is unlikely to reach 1,000 people so quickly, 1,000 people may be a mid-to-long-term goal. , But “ZPLAN” is indeed a rare project for Tencent to set up locations in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

From the perspective of job locations, Shenzhen is undoubtedly the base camp of “ZPLAN”. Almost all positions of ZPLAN will be recruited in Shenzhen, while positions in Beijing and Shanghai are concentrated in 3D art, and there are some technical positions in Shanghai. Because there are many large terminal game companies in Beijing and a lot of server talents, Shanghai has born a series of successful two-dimensional enterprises. Obviously, they have a very accurate grasp of the word trend.

“ZPLAN” may be a key link for Tencent to realize the definition of the “super digital scene” of games. During the annual Tencent game conference this year, Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent, told GameLook that games are super digital scenes, and Metaverse is a subset of super digital scenes and is the top of the future game industry structure.

He also revealed that Tencent has launched a mysterious “moon landing project”, with the goal of enabling Tencent to have at least one Metaverse product that ranks among the world’s TOP10 in the future. It now appears that the “ZPLAN” investment seems to be Tencent’s “moon project”, or at least one of them.

Image source: pexels

Tencent’s official entry into the game will give the currently chaotic Metaverse market a “refining the roots”, bringing a batch of products that fish in troubled waters and under the banner of Metaverse to their original form, which is expected to make the definition of Metaverse clearer and standards clearer.

Nick Fajt, CEO of Rec Room, thinks that Metaverse is an upgraded version of the Internet, going further towards materialization, 3Dization, and materialization, and Metaverse is not a company, but a “product of many companies,” namely Roblox and Rec Room. It is a model of opening a shop and attracting many shareholders (developers) to operate together.

Including Tencent, it seems that most game manufacturers are aware of this, but the interesting thing is that every manufacturer hopes that they can become the dominant one.

This Article is curated from Source and we only provide the English version of the Story.

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