For a long period of time, the two major categories of mobile games were dominated by MOBA and shooting games, until NetEase launched "Egg Boy Party", which completely changed this long-solidified reality.
It is true that there is a popular "Fall Guys" on PS, but in the end, it is "Egg Boy Party" that makes the party game a phenomenal and national product in the Chinese market.
On December 15, NetEase Games "Egg Boy Party" announced that the number of registered users exceeded 500 million, and there are only a handful of products in the history of Chinese games that have achieved this achievement.
It is precisely because NetEase opened a door and shaped this track that there were many entrants. Domestic game manufacturers have also aimed at this sweet spot, and large and small manufacturers have released casual party works at different stages, as if they want to turn this track into a new "involution" battle.
The muzzle of the involution war, aimed at the champion in the ring - "Egg Boy Party".
When the monthly active users of a product exceed 100 million, we can say that a popular product is born;When the number of users of a product exceeds 500 million, it means that the mobile Internet has given birth to a national product.
Egg Boy Party has clearly reached the heights of the latter. As a family game, "Egg Boy Party" has ushered in the joyful situation of big friends and children playing together, parents and children going online together, and the players of Egg Boy are larger and more diverse than many people imagine.
The popular hashtag "Egg Pair" on social ** is a perfect example.
Holding up the egg boy who sees the world and accompanying you to go shopping, skiing and riding the Ferris wheel not only constitutes an important part of the game experience, but also brings new possibilities for online and offline social networking. College students and the "egg partner" who have never known each other meet offline, and sometimes they will hit it off at first sight. Migrant workers eat with colleagues and classmates, and it is also fun to bring everyone to a game of "Egg Boy Party" for a few minutes.
In order to find a stable egg partner, some users will also give the game Amway to their real good friends, or parents and other relatives. This almost makes "Egg Boy Party" a new way to maintain relationships in modern society.
Station B game up master @ Ji Lao fell in love with the bear, and shared many fathers and daughters playing "Egg Boy Party" together. First, the girl taught her father to play, and then the two pulled their mother into the pit together, and the family of three accompanied each other in the world of egg boys. Parents have a way to get closer to their children, and their children's childhood has good memories to keep.
Many people shared how this family game has shortened the distance between themselves and their parents, so that parents who are far away from home and children who are studying abroad can meet here again.
As a national game, "Egg Boy Party" enriches and harmonizes the social life of contemporary young people very well. This ability to connect and communicate makes it a good "social lubricant". At the same time, from a family perspective, this game has helped to bridge the generation gap. Let the previous generation and the new generation find the possibility of mutual understanding in the game interaction.
Maybe that's what party games are all about.
This year, the number of UGC maps in Egg Boy Party has crossed the 100 million mark, and in the mouth of users, Egg Boy Party has evolved into a game park that covers all the mainstream gameplay available in the market.
The themes of UGC maps are no longer limited to the game itself, they involve multiple levels such as personal emotional narratives, traditional culture, and social issues. For example, "Paper Completion Sculpture" promotes the traditional art of paper-cutting, "The Last Radiant Sea" awakens the awareness of environmental protection, and "Song of the North" spreads the concept of peace. These maps drive cultural identity and cultural confidence, demonstrating the social value of games.
Only when enough people participate, players have the will, and the tools at their disposal can such a large number of high-quality UGC be bornContent.
The first is the snowball effect of content.
There must always be a group of pioneer creators who are the first to enter this field, create a batch of good works, attract another group of players to consume the content, perceive the fun of UGC creation, and then attract more newcomers to join. There are comings and goings to form a virtuous circle, reaching a prosperous state of a hundred flowers blooming and talents.
The second is that the creators on "Egg Boy Party" already have a mature business model. Generating electricity for love is of course good, but if it allows creators to make money, it must have more power generation power.
"Egg Boy Party" has a good incentive model for creators: hundreds of outstanding creators will officially set up a personal studio to provide opportunities to join NetEase and open their careers;Top creators, through the national creation competition and other event systems, share a huge prize pool, guaranteed signing opportunities and top resource support;Mass creators only need to have more than 10,000 users of the map to get stable cash income and more creative permissions.
A large number of creators regard drawing in "Egg Boy Party" as their main business, and many excellent creators can achieve a monthly income of 20,000 yuan, which exceeds that of many creators on game and content platforms.
There are also a large number of creators who were originally KOLs of other games, and they transformed into KOLs and creators of "Egg Boy Party" after testing the waters and gaining positive returns. There are also players who earn money on external social media, or by trading components or customizing estates.
In addition, the "Egg Boy Workshop" creation tool of "Egg Boy Party" continues to be optimized to make it UGCThe ecology is more prosperous.
After the popularity, the project team's continuous optimization of the creation tool not only lowered the threshold for creation, but also opened up the space for creators to play, providing underlying support for a steady stream of UGC content.
One example of this is the AI's assistance and "egg code" function. The AIGC function helps creators realize one-click map color change, first-class generation actions, etc., which can promote zero-threshold intelligent creation, reduce repetitive work for creators, and improve quality and efficiency.
In addition, the "Egg Code" function allows creators with no programming foundation to achieve high-end RPG game development functions such as real-time display of boss HP and release tracking skills like building blocks.
In fact, all of this was planted at the beginning of the production of "Egg Boy Party", and its core members came from NetEase's first editor in 2019, "Beaver Project", and the project has accumulated a lot of experience in editors and UGC ecology at the beginning of its establishment, and the map editor has been the core of the game from the beginning, and it can make it easy for a large number of creators to get started. Therefore, a solid production concept of "masters in the folk" was established early in the game.
In our opinion, Egg Boy Party has created a unique game culture and ecosystem with many creators and playersIt forms a key moat for its commercial value and social value.
To a certain extent, "Egg Boy Party" is an innovation that integrates the concepts of game and life, which implants the creative rules of the real society into the game world, reshapes the possibility of "play", and broadens the adaptability of the game to individuals and society.
Of course, after the "involution" battle of the party game started, whether "Egg Boy Party" can be successfully defended has also become the focus.
The current party game has a sense of the six major factions besieging the bright top, but NetEase's "Egg Boy Party" obviously has its core moat.
Egg Boy itself has built a deep moat at multiple levels such as game mechanism, content ecology and IP operation, which is the core competitiveness. This includes: hundreds of millions of active players, massive amounts of high-quality user-generated content, monetization incentives for creators, unique social gaming culture, and more. These are difficult to replicate in a short period of time. In addition to player stickiness, there is also creator stickiness, and the cost of creator migration is very high.
Moreover, the era of relying on traffic strategy to drive user growth is over. The mobile game market and player demand have undergone drastic changes, in the context of the number of games, players are no longer passive consumers of content, and have begun to pursue quality and depth, and the marginal effect of traffic and capital advantage is declining.
The number of users brought about by spending money to buy volume in a short period of time is not equal to quality and core competitiveness. Just like miHoYo, which has no traffic heavy equipment in its hands, has risen, but it may not be able to make a hit with huge distribution capacity, and party games may be the same, and vigorously may not be able to produce miracles.
For latecomers to party games, it may be difficult to follow tactics and traffic play, and new innovative and differentiated play styles are needed. Just like Pinduoduo broke through the ultimate cost-effective strategy to break through e-commerce going overseas, to a large extent, it was a battlefield that other competitors once ignored.
Therefore, the significance of this party competition is not to "roll in" with each other, but to promote the continuous progress and enrichment of the entire game ecology and category. Involution is reflected in high investment and marketing scramble, but this cannot be sustained;The positive effect of content and quality competition will promote more creative teams to grow in this red ocean.
content is the king, and this applies not only to the age of information flow, but also to the eternal content kingdom of games. In the environment of content, users' requirements for game quality, sociality, and detailed experience have been greatly improved, which requires long-term investment and precipitation. The game market is no longer a zero-sum game of capital and traffic. Making the cake bigger is more meaningful than grabbing the cake.
This article was first published in the titanium **app, edited |Li Chengcheng).