After trying QQ Farm, my conclusion is pretty simple: it’s a lot more complicated than Renren’s old farm game.
I wanted to go steal some vegetables, but then I found out the friends I had added on QQ had apparently deleted me. Maybe. I tested more than ten different systems, and every single one kept saying I wasn’t on the other person’s friends list. I even tried people I was sure were still friends, and it still didn’t work. What a strange setup.
The whole thing feels weak on interaction. With this kind of design, it’s hard to see how it could attract a large player base. My current rank is 215 in the QQ social circle.
I had already seen some comments from Chi Jianqiang saying QQ had become this and that, and after actually using it, it really does feel like a discarded leftover.
QQ Games on desktop is also kind of rough. It reminds me of the HaoFang battle platform from many years ago. Normally, a PC version should be better, since desktop machines usually have more power than phones. Of course, there are always exceptions like laptops with integrated graphics or other weak hardware.
I once used a 2011 Dell laptop to play WeChat’s Duole Dou Dizhu, and it even warned me that I wasn’t on a 4G network, saying the speed wasn’t good enough. To be fair, that machine really was underpowered: an AMD 4000 dual-core at 1.9GHz, running Windows 7.
But the bigger complaint is still the way modern games are built around spending money. It feels like everything costs money now: picking a character costs money, choosing a skill costs money, selecting a seed costs money, getting a bee costs money, and if you want to level up faster, that costs money too. Basically, everything ends up pushing you to pay.
I still prefer buy-to-play games. Things like StarCraft II, Ring of Empires on Steam, Stardew Valley, Terraria—those feel much better to me.
My guess is that QQ’s gaming platform doesn’t bring in much revenue, so fewer resources get put into it. That may also be why there are fewer card-game players there.
The ranking system in QQ Games isn’t great either. You can’t see rankings among friends; what you get instead are regional rankings and all-server rankings, which don’t mean much. WeChat games, on the other hand, are basically just ranked inside WeChat.
