“Off the record, if your game got featured in Apple, it means everything here, but its not the same in China,” Michael Zhang explains during his session at Casual Connect USA 2014.
Michael Zhang is the CEO of ZQGame, Inc., the US subsidiary of the China-based mobile game company, ZQGame. He is also the president of ZQGame overseas, with more than 3000 employees and over 30 studios, and oversees global operations, as well as M&A game licensing outside of China. He founded the company’s US, Korean, and Taiwanese branches, going through major trials and tribulations along the way. But three years later, the team is now three times as large and their focus is clear. He maintains, “The gaming industry is in a mobile renaissance and ZQGame is right in the thick of it.”
Massive Game Experience
Prior to coming to ZQGame, Inc. in 2008, Zhang co-founded and became CEO of Ray Flame Entertainment, Inc, an MMO browser/SNS game publisher and developer in Los Angeles. Before that, he was General Manager of THS Entertainment International, Inc., the world’s largest MMORPG virtual currency provider, and he was US General Manager of VestGame Entertainment, an online game publisher. He has also worked outside the games industry, holding positions in government, Fortune 500 companies, and various consulting firms and startups.
Zhang believes the rapid growth of mobile will have a tremendous impact on the industry, with more people becoming “gamers” who may never have picked up a controller before. But because the growth is so rapid, he expects it to reach a saturation point, forcing developers to be more creative in their design and approach. He says, “I think we’ll see some fun games come out of these experimentations, including some genre mash-ups, all of which we hope to find and deliver to our global audiences.”
Battling Goliath
He feels it will be especially interesting to see how the “big guys” adapt; they are already facing serious competition from indie developers and studios with smaller budgets. He emphasizes that viability in the mobile market will need to go beyond ports and clones and clones of clones. He believes, “Game creativity will be pushed to a whole new level, and with the widespread adoption of mobile in our society, it will be very exciting to see what will stick.”
ZQGame, Inc. plans to respond by continuing to develop relationships with studios that have talented developers who can design fully engaging games and who are willing to be flexible with technological advancements like Amazon’s Fire Phone and its Dynamic Perspective.
As CEO of a mobile game company, everything he is playing these days is on his tablet or his iPhone. They have an office competition called “Game of the Week”; they choose a game and do everything they can to oust each other for a prize. Recently, they played Injustice: God’s Among Us, and the prize was an Amazon gift card for $50. The competition is both fun and educational, and, according to Zhang, gives them a clearer understanding of what makes a popular game tick.
Because Zhang is in an F2P business, he tries not to make any purchases since he has a publishers perspective on monetization and how it works in certain F2P games. He says, “It can become a one-sided war sometimes between the personal desire to make in-game purchases and the tricks of F2P game design. We want to avoid being that kind of unbalanced F2P publisher.” But sometimes he tries to pretend he is an ordinary gamer who is not working in the field so he can think as a gamer, not a publisher.
As a family man, Zhang enjoys spending most of his free time with his children. He has a Wii U for nostalgic reasons; Mario is iconic, and it is fun to share something he enjoyed in his youth with his children. They are in love with Mario Kart, and his daughter just unlocked Mario Metal!
But when he has time to himself, his activities of choice are watching sports and playing basketball. And his company has a culture of going out to play basketball at least three times a week. He also loves reading, anything from industry papers to novels.
At Casual Connect USA, Zhang announced that their card battle RPG game Pocket Knights will be one of the first games playable for the Amazon Fire phone.
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