Huang Yimeng: TapTap's plans and outlook for 2020

On July 29th, the 2020 TapTap Developer workshop was held in Shanghai. Over 200 producers, core developers, and professional game media were invited to share their thoughts. Mr. Huang Yimeng, CEO of X.D. Network, delivered a keynote speech on ‘TapTap's plans and outlook for 2020', introducing a series of major feature upgrades and plans for both the B- and C-ends of TapTap, stating that X.D. Network will always remember its purpose and be dedicated to serving the gaming industry.

At the C-end level, gamers will immediately notice the updates to TapTap's launch graphics, brand's theme color, product layouts, and other elements. They will experience a younger, sharper, more playful design, and product interactions.

Community is one of TapTap's key assets. According to Huang, the new version of TapTap will present information that used to scatter across various sections in a new 'Moments' function via social media streams, which will provide players with a better mechanism for distributing and discussing quality content from three sources: developers, KOLs and social network.

For vendors and developers in the B-end, Huang Yimeng announced that TapTap will provide 'TapTap Developer Services' (TDS) to reduce the burden on developers, enhance the game experience, and keep improving the environment of the industry to benefit both developers and players. As a platform, X.D. Network believes that work itself is truly the core value, and therefore it will do everything possible to reduce the cost and difficulty of game development so that more superb games can be available on the TapTap platform.

He said that TDS is a critical part of the company's strategy and that the service will be a continuation of the original vision of TapTap; it will remain free and open and never force developers to access the SDK like traditional channels.

'We want developers to help TDS to keep growing. We also look forward to TapTap continuing to grow with all game developers, Huang Yimeng said.

Other major guests included Yang Yang, Producer of Pascal's Wager; Hai Mao， Producer of Arknights; Yao Runhao, CEO of Papergames; and Bao Weiwei, CEO of Coconut Island.

The following is the transcript of Huang Yimeng's speech.

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It's been another year since China Joy, and we're happy to be back with so many old friends.

It was four years ago at China Joy that we first started to officially promote TapTap to the public and talk about our expectations and vision for TapTap. One of the two events that I remember the most from China Joy that year was an internal sharing session organized by Wang Xinwen at Lilith. It was the first time that I introduced TapTap to others. I talked for so long that it almost turned into a TapTap press conference. In the end, it took too long and Wang Xinwen had to stop me. That's why Lilith stopped calling me for their China Joy events for the next four years.

The second one was an indie game party hosted by Wesley and Simon, and I also introduced TapTap on stage that day. And on the same night, at the same time, there was another gaming party where I told everyone that I'd rather work with people who make indie games because I believed the future belonged to the people who loved games.

Four years have passed and a lot of changes have happened in our game industry: some have settled, some have left, some have gotten rich, some have gone out of business. TapTap has grown from an obscure product to a platform with over 20 million active users each month over the past 4 years. Of course, the rating itself is facing a lot of challenges and needs our constant attention and attempts to optimize.

But here today, I'm not to brag to you about how awesome TapTap is, so you can come and sing hooray. On the contrary, it must be emphasized here today that TapTap is not a traditional channel, is not an authority. It was not, is not, and never will be. Because in our minds, the game and developers are the most important. Without games, there would be no platform. Users follow the games, not the platform. Excellent games and developers are the pillars of TapTap. So we will continue to uphold the same philosophy that we had back then, with developers and games being the core. Not splitting the revenue with developers is not a short-term commercial strategy for a new platform, nor is it a marketing tool to attract developers. Rather, it stems from our inner understanding of the game industry and our respect for creators.

Not only does TapTap not share revenue with developers, but we want to do more for developers and the industry.

So today, we'd like to take the opportunity of the TapTap Developer workshop to share with you the adjustments TapTap has planned for 2020, as well as its outlook for the future.

TapTap Branding and Design Upgrades

First, let’s talk about the upgrades we plan to make to TapTap's branding and design this year.

TapTap's launch graphics, brand theme color, product layouts, and other elements have not undergone major changes since its first appearance. This year, along with a series of overall adjustments and optimizations to our product, we are preparing to update TapTap with a younger, sharper, more playful design and product. New 'Moments' Function

In terms of TapTap product upgrades that correspond to the new design upgrades, our focus this year will be on the TapTap community. The most important of these is the 'Moments' feature that we've already updated and started testing in the last few releases.

('Moments' function illustration)

We intend to take all the information that has been scattered across sections in TapTap, such as game reviews, game videos, official game posts, forum posts, discussions, and present it in 'Moments' through social media information streaming.

In the environment of 'Moments', we hope that players can get their information of interest from three sources.

The first source is vendors and developers.

At TapTap, developers can easily get hundreds of thousands or even millions of pre-registrations for their games. And now, we want 'Moments' to be the product that connects developers and users even closer. For every message, image, or video that developer posts on TapTap, players who pre-register of follow the game will receive a little red dot on TapTap. They are then able to directly discuss, repost, or interact with our players under this content.

The second source is active players in the community with KOL.

Over the past 4 years, TapTap has attracted many high-level gamers, reviewers, curators, and authors of game videos. In the past, their works were scattered around in reviews, videos, or forums under the game. Now, with the 'Moments' feature, 'following' these gamers and KOLs starts to become more important, as users can see directly what they are playing, discussing, and recommending. And for these authors, with the new community system and more followers, they will also get more positive feedback for their quality content.

A third source would be friends, the real relationships that truly belongs to the players.

But where do TapTap's ‘Friends’ come from?

TapTap has added the feature of following each other's to become friends for a long time, but it's still a long way from actually forming a social relationship. This problem is universal. Except for Tencent, many face a similar dilemma when it comes to socializing. The biggest reason for this is that, with the exception of communication software, for most apps, adding friends and interacting with friends is not actually essential demand by users.

But there is one exception and that is the game.

For PUBG, we need friends in Steam; for Monster Hunter, we need friends in PSN; for Animal Crossing, we need friends in NSO, even if the system is less sophisticated by other SNS products.

So we strongly believe that no one can dominate the real friendships of players. Social relationships follow the user, and whether a product can keep the socializing function depends on how much social demand the users have for the app. And games, especially games with strong social attributes, are the main carrier of social demand.

So we'll start with our own games to stabilize TapTap's socializing functions.

Connecting the  X.D. Network Game Account to the TapTap Account System

We currently operate and are preparing to release Sausage Man, Human: Fall Flat and Terraria online, all of which are big DAU games with strong socializing needs. We intend to fully integrate the account and social system of Sausage Man with TapTap. In the future, we will merge all the accounts of X.D. Networks Games into the TapTap account system.

Of course, the integration of Sausage Man and TapTap isn't just about friend merging. TapTap will also introduce a new set of features that will provide games with an in-game friend and community services based on the relationship as friends.

('Sausage Man' in-game friends' section)

TapTap has actually rolled out an embedded forum feature before, and it has been tested in some games. But this time, after TapTap's community features are more integrated with the game's own account system, it can provide a completely different upgrade to the experience. In the past, the only way to interact with in-game friends was to team up and play together and seeing a grey string of offline friends every time you went online was a very depressing experience. We hope that through the in-game friend product, we can provide more chances of offline interaction between friends so that they share their shining moments or trash about the update with each other. Like other daily social media, when you want to make new friends, you can get to know them by looking into their home page.

This in-game friend system is actually fully integrated with TapTap's community product, with the data shared between the two sides. The only difference is that in-game players will only see the information related to their game.

Therefore, players will only see information about the game they're playing, so not only will they see information from their friends, but they'll also see information from the game's official team, its KOLs, and its top rankers. All kinds of information from game officials, release announcements, daily activities, highlight moments, game strategies, etc. will be important content for the game's friends.

We are preparing for the launch of 'Terraria' and 'Human: Fall Flat' afterward, which will go even further than 'Sausage Man'. In addition to log in directly with a TapTap account, using TapTap's corporation system, and TapTap's in-game friendships, all the parts related to the game's web service, including matchmaking, rooming, cloud archiving, and more, will be done by TapTap.

(TDS Interface of 'Terraria' and 'Human: Fall Flat' )

It's also important to note that all of our services are connected to TapTap, so all of this information in the game, whether it's like or reply from friends, group invitations or official game announcements and new version details, all of this information will be able to break through the game and be delivered to players outside of the game via TapTap.

With all of the above-mentioned features, when X.D. Network's own game completes the access process and is successfully tested, our goal is to make it completely open for all developers to use.

New& Free "TapTap Developer Services" 

The ‘Friends' will not be TapTap's private property but belongs to the player and to all games. With authorized user consent, all games will receive the same player social connections as X.D. Network. For a single game, it might not be active enough, but we're going to settle our social relationships little by being open and using a cumulative approach that we hope will eventually benefit all game developers and all players.

That's why we're also going to formalize TapTap's services for developers to develop a product we're calling TDS, short for TapTap Developer Services.

In addition to the features just mentioned, TDS also includes data analytics deeply tied to TapTap. We have previously launched a separate statistical analysis service TapDB, and this year we plan to fully merge TapDB into TapTap's Developer Center to become the core service of TapTap's Developer Center, which will open up all user behavior and tagging data to developers without compromising users’ privacy.

Games can also use TDS' TapTap account login service directly to target and invite different types of users to participate in in-game testing and view different types of user feedback in the backend of the data analytics.

(Developer Center backend data schematic)

I would like to thank miHoYo for their trust and support. In the first half of this year's 'Genshin Impacts' test, we try to use this strategy for the first time. Unlike the traditional tests that issued codes, we targeted at almost 10,000 different types of TapTap users and sent them invitations to the test. On the day of the test, users can directly see the recommendation of the 'Genshin Impact' test version on their homepage, and they were able to download the game and use their TapTap account to log in to the Genshin Impact for the test.

For miHoYo, collaboration with TapTap also provided them with a clearer picture of the actual test data for each type of user in the game. This direct analysis using desensitized user data provided by TapTap, which does not involve user privacy, is more accurate than the conclusions originally drawn through user questionnaires alone.

This kind of data analysis by tagging users is not uncommon, and major companies like Tencent have long used similar methods for game testing and data analysis. But the biggest difference between TapTap and them is that we are completely open to all TapTap developers to help them create better games and provide better service to players.

These are just a few of the many features we have planned for TDS, some of which have already been briefly tested, and some of which are being accessed and developed in our internal projects. All of these features, which we plan to release in the second half of the year, will be available to all developers for free.

(TDS all functions illustrated)

There's more to come for TDS, and it's going to include a lot more. Our first and simplest principle is to provide all the public services that X.D. Network's previous internal platform and middle ground departments provided for our own games, such as text and voice chat, multilingual translation, customer service system, anti-hacking, anti-attack, etc. We hope to open up all these features, not just for  X.D. Network itself, but for the entire game industry. We hope to open up all of these functions, not just for  X.D. Network itself, but for the entire game industry.

The second is to make TapTap's features deeply integrated with the game so that the game's development and operation environment can be infused. For example, the socializing function and Moments section that we've been working on, as well as the messaging system, achievement system, leaderboards, game videos, game updates, game acceleration, and so on. There are a lot of TapTap features that can be integrated into games to serve developers and players.

Why do we need TDS?

Why do we make the TDS, and why do we put so much effort into serving third-party developers? The reasons are actually quite simple.

First of all, a large part of this is what we, as a game company, would have had to do in order to reduce the cost of duplicate development for our own multiple projects. The difference is that we don't see these scaleable development capabilities as a competitive advantage that we hide away and only use for ourselves. Instead, because the opportunity for these services to be used by more people in the future will have a stronger effect, we will be willing to invest more effort and resources into the development of these services.

Secondly, as a platform side, as I mentioned before, we believe that the game and creation is really the core value. So in addition to the fact that we will put all our effort into our own game's self-development, we also hope to accumulate more works and services that will not only help our own game but also help all future developers. Help the developers to do all the hard and dirty work, so that they can concentrate more on creating the core fun of the game. By doing everything we can to reduce the cost and difficulty of game development, we're making more great games available on the TapTap platform.

This is something that has great long-term value to developers, players, and ourselves, and we will continue to do so until we reach our goal.

As TapTap's developer-focused workshop, TDS is actually the most important thing I want to share with you. It's not an easy thing to do. We're just getting started, but behind it is our ambitious goal of connecting game developers and gamers all over the world. This ultimate goal will be the biggest difference between us and the similar services offered by our friends. TDS is a key part of our company's strategy, and in the process of getting closer to our goal, we will not only promote the continuous improvement of the game environment but also benefit developers and players. It will also allow us to play a more important role and bear more responsibility in the entire game industry.

It may take 5 or 10 years to fully realize this goal, and we may encounter many setbacks and difficulties. But as I always say to our game team, we shouldn't look at the launch of a game as a test, a result, a life or death decision. And the same goes for all of TapTap's future features and services, and with a firm commitment to our goals and logic, we will continue to improve and enhance our features and services, stand with developers and players, and collect with serious humility! Feedback from everyone. Always stay true to your original intention and get down to serving the game environment.

The other thing is, don't worry that TapTap will change its mind if it launches the TDS, and that the original, free and open TapTap will require developers to access the SDK just like other traditional channels, or that developers will be forced to connect to our TDS to get more recommendations, or whatever. Don't worry, we will never do that. For us, the TDS team has only one goal, and that is to make our products and services better so that developers can benefit from them. Instead of forcing developers to use our service because we are a platform and forcing them to pay extra development costs to use a lousy service that doesn't work for them or the players, I would like to ask all developers to use TDS voluntarily.

That's why I'm here today to ask for help from all developers, not just to get everyone to use our TDS, but to ask for more help, more suggestions, and to help the TDS continue to grow. We look forward to seeing TapTap's continued growth with all game developers.

Finally, I'd like to say that today is not our launch day, and TDS is actually far from ready to launch, our official homepage, documentation, access process, and so on are not yet completed. Today is just a valuable opportunity to share our plans and thoughts on TapTap's future with all of our partners, and I look forward to getting your feedback. To further encourage our interaction and communication with all of our developers, we have also created a special TapTap Developer Services account, which will be automatically followed by all TapTap-registered developers, and all of our future information will be shared on this account as soon as possible. We welcome everyone to give us feedback in TapTap or any other ways.

That's all I have to say today, thank you for listening. There are many more presentations from great game developers this afternoon, so let's all look forward to what they have to share.