What is that game that has Taiwan’s middle and high school student so obsessed lately? Heads bowed, they are focused on their smartphones, sometimes showing excitement, sometimes frustration, with the tension written clearly on their faces. They are playing the hottest Q&A game of 2015: QuiThink. It has had 5 million downloads, has been ranked at the top of the educational games category at Google Play for eight months, is in the top 10 among brain teaser games at the App Store, and brings in over NT$10 million (US$300,000) in revenue per month.
When veteran gamers see QT for the first time, the most common reaction is: “Should this really be called a game?”
QT is a competitive game for two players. The interface is very simple: It looks more like an ordinary information app rather than a game. There are no special effects, there is no animation and there is no scrolling backstory. Players do not need to train their hand-eye coordination or figure out how colored balls are going to move around. In contrast to most of the popular games of the past—with high levels of technical sophistication, visual and audio special effects, some kind of narrative framework and roles for the players—QT departs from the mainstream emphasis on sensory stimulation.
Four years of work, four keys to success
QT was developed by the Brave Knight Workshop, established in 2011. The team at BKW had previously come out with the games Ghost Soldier and Pirate and Treasure, but neither drew much attention in the marketplace and were withdrawn.
BKW founder S.C. Chen offers the following analysis of these failures: “Smartphones have created a giant group of novice players in the gaming market. These are people who rarely play, or perhaps even never have played, an online game. Mainstream games for hardcore players are too complicated for them and have no appeal at all.”
Therefore BKW hit the reset button, and beginning in the middle of 2013 trained their sights on the market composed of novice, casual players. They decided that Q&A games offered them their best opportunity, and—taking the well-known English language smartphone game QuizUp as a foundation—they developed a Taiwan version. After 16 months of work and more than a dozen major overhauls, QT was released on Google Play at the end of 2014.
As hoped, this laid-back and technically undemanding type of game hit a bull’s-eye with the target market. In its first week, QT leaped to top spot among educational games, started to attract attention among secondary school students and went viral on Instagram. Downloads soared, surpassing 100,000 the first month, 500,000 the second, and 1 million the third, eventually reaching 5 million. Eight months after its release, QT continued to maintain over 200,000 active users. In short, it was the hottest smartphone game of 2015.
What is the secret to QT’s success? There have been four critical factors: an interesting game format, a troika-style development partnership, adept marketing, and creation of a self-sustaining and self-growing ecology.
In terms of the game format, its core elements include using names of cities as the barriers separating levels, categorizing questions by level of difficulty, and allowing players to get gold coins for breaking through to the next level. These all add fun and interest. Most important is that the game employs time-sensitive match-ups. The system keeps a record of similar questions previously answered by the player, and arranges challenges based on the players’ respective levels. One play at any time one pleases and enjoy the thrill that only comes in a contest against a human opponent.
“The game format is not 100 percent innovative, but it brings together very successfully the key elements of many other successful games, so that it offers a new approach to how Q&A games are played,” said Luke Hsu, director of Taiwan Game Development Cooperation Association.
Three partners in development, zero spent on marketing
BKW, which at the time numbered two staffers, had two partners in the development of the game. One was Net Publishing Co., which provided capital and publishing services. The other was Z9 Digital Communication Corp., which assisted in editing the game’s database of questions and undertook content marketing. Working cooperatively, they each brought their own strengths to the development process, and they have shared the profits.
“Brave Knight has a unique approach to games, they don’t follow the herd, and they don’t make products just for the money. They are testimony that there are still game-makers in Taiwan with ideas of their own,” said Benjamin Tseng, chairman of Net Publishing. QT has been an inspiration and lesson for independent game developers in Taiwan, proving that the whole model is viable—original and creative product, joint development, and subject suited to global publication.
As for marketing, it was handled by S.C. Chen. Independent game developers have very few resources, and QT at first had a marketing budget of zero. BKW took the initiative to promote the game on major gaming forums, and also recommended it to bloggers, with the express purpose of getting user evaluations on Google Play right from the start. Also, whenever Chen had free time, he would ride the metro and circulate throughout Taipei, hitting all the big stores selling information technology products. He would get on the display phones the stores leave out for trial use, download QT and then go to Google Play to give a top-grade evaluation. He said with a laugh, “On just one trip around Taipei I could get myself over a dozen evaluations.”
Z9’s Marcia Chiu, who does planning for the firm, confirms that advertising outlays for QT have been very small, and that it has spread almost entirely by word of mouth. “S.C. Chen showed a lot of courage to turn over the question database, which is to say part of the product itself, over to us, when we had no previous experience with this kind of thing at all.” Chen said: “I don’t think courage is the right word. Most of the time this approach would never work, but because we had nothing, we had nothing to lose, so there were no limitations about what we could or couldn’t do.”
Associate professor Yang Chih-chieh of the Department of Multimedia and Entertainment Science at the Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology observes, “Like indie music production or indie film-making, independent game development represents a certain spirit of not wanting to be bound by existing frameworks. QT proves that independent game development is a feasible option in Taiwan. It requires only a few employees and a small budget, and if you can just find that niche, then you have a chance.”
A self-sustaining ecology, a database of 50,000 questions
At present, the QT database has 50,000 questions, provided by over 100 cooperating partners. For example, the website TripNotice provides queries related to travel and tourism, while the website Aotter Girls provides lifestyle-related puzzlers. Even some ROC government agencies are in the on the game. For example, the National Tax Administration contributes questions about taxes, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare adds queries on subjects connected to public health.
The diversity of the questions makes the game more fun for players, raises the visibility of partner firms providing questions and promotes QT. This creates a win-win-win situation for players, partners and QT, and has created a virtuous cycle that has allowed the game to grow at high speed.
“I feel certain that we have finally found the Holy Grail,” S.C. Chen said. Now 42, he has over 10 years experience in corporate software development. Chen has always had an idealistic dream of game development because he himself loves to play them. But the initial failures experienced at BKW made him start to think that maybe he was in the wrong line of work.
“At that time, every single day I wanted to walk away, and I often wondered to myself whether doing this kind of thing made me a genius or an idiot. After failing with the first two games, I assumed the answer was idiot. But I could never shake the idea that the mobile Internet was the right direction, and each time I felt like I had been just a hair away from success. Each time I felt that if I could just do a little bit more, a little bit better, then I would have a breakthrough.”
It is no secret that starting a company is tough challenge. But it is even worse when that company’s purpose is independent online game development. So much so, in fact, that BKW suffered a lot of attrition in its workforce, and even its current staff of five—all of whom, except for Chen, who graduated from the Department of Information Management at National Sun Yat-sen University, are graduates of National Taiwan University.
Still in their 20s, the staffers have all had a hard time persuading their families that this line of business is a real job. They have simply had to grit their teeth and persist in following their dreams. As for those who have left, Chen cannot help but admit that it was sheer torture: “When people left, invariably it was because they felt hopeless, that there was no future in what they were doing. They had lost their self-respect and I felt like I had done them wrong.”
QT has hit the plateau stage in the Taiwan market, so now, employing the overseas resources of Net Publishing, they are advancing into the Southeast Asian market. They will open their first front in Thailand, where they will soon go online. The goal is to reproduce the model they have built in Taiwan, and to create a pattern that others can follow in exporting games from Taiwan. [By Sandy Lo / tr. by Phil Newell]