Author |Kehan (Shanghai).
Some time ago, "It's Over!I'm surrounded by beautiful women!exploded and set off a wave of discussions about live-action interactive video games.
In fact, in the field of live-action interactive video games, players are most familiar with "** Guardian", which broke the circle on Steam in 2019, followed by "Flying Over Room 13", which was released at the beginning of this year. Both games are based on the works of Orange Light Games, with the former being adapted from The Latent Red Path and the latter being adapted from The Secret Story of Fence Village.
Orange Light now positions itself as an "interactive reading community", butIt is still the largest word adventure game platform in China, and in particular, it has almost single-handedly opened up the female word game market。In the context of the resurgence of interactive video games, does Orange Light have a chance to become the next source of IP?
How the UGC model opens up the market for women
In June 2005, Liu Xiaoyu, a student at Tsinghua University, established a 66RPG original PC game production exchange station. It is a grassroots community for like-minded people to communicate with each other, and "everything is given because of love and dreams".
In May 2013, the 66RPG was officially renamed Orange Light. Ten years later, as of 2023, Orange has more than 8,000 contracted authors and more than 80 million active users.
Behind such a fast growth rate,It is Orange Light's low-threshold production with a UGC model, allowing users to realize creativity and content through tools
Orange Light is known as the "Everyman's Gaming Dream Factory". The game maker is simple to operate and easy to use, and the barrier to entry for making an orange light game is much lower than that of an indie game that is difficult to make and has a long cycle. In the author area of the platform alone, there are very detailed beginner tutorials and a massive material library, which ensures the "making games for ordinary players" envisioned by Liu Xiaoyu to the greatest extent.
In the public perception, Orange Light Games has a more significant feature: it is dominated by female-oriented works.
Targeting female players wasn't Orange Light's intention. Initially, they wanted to be a galgame loved by male players, but gradually formed a situation where 85% of users were women, and there were various factors behind it.
On the one hand, it is the result of market choices.
In 2013, when "The Legend of Zhen Huan" was still on the air, "the ancestor of the Orange Light Palace Fighting Game" - Qing Palace Strategy" was born. Millions of female gamers poured into the platform to contribute clicks. After that, a large number of women's favorite themes such as palace fighting and entertainment circles came into being in Orange Light. A considerable number of players attracted by these works have become new female-oriented game creators with the help of Orangelight's simple tools, creating a situation where players and authors promote each other.
Orange Light's famous palace fighting game: "Three Thousand People in the Harem".
On the other hand, it is the nature of the wordplay itself that comes into play.
The biggest highlight of the word game is the narrative text, not the competitive gameplay。Its storyline is wonderful and the emotional expression is delicate, making it an excellent carrier of love plots. In the current game market, compared with male players who pay more attention to gameplay and confrontation, a considerable number of female gamers are converted from users who love romance and pay more attention to the plot of the game.
Through word games, Orange Light Games has long attracted groups of players, who are willing to spend a lot of time and money on it.
High-quality story and immersive engagement
The Orange Home page has a variety of divisions and channels that are categorized according to the theme of the work. Under the large divisions such as "modern" and "ancient", there are several subdivisions. Players who want to experience modern life have options such as campus, workplace, and entertainment industryPlayers who have a soft spot for ancient customs can also accurately adjust their preferences to the royal power court, palace mansions, martial arts rivers and lakes and other stages. In addition, there are more niche divisions such as suspense crime reality, film and television star fandom, and historical masterpieces and intangible cultural heritage.
Orange light classification and channel interface.
The rich genres meet the diverse needs of users, and players can shuttle between different worldviews at will to get a novel experience.
The gameplay of Orange Light is that the player constantly makes choices at a certain point in the story, causing events to change and produce different outcomes. An inconspicuous small option in the early stage may affect the overall direction of the long line in the later stage, just like a butterfly wing flapping kinetic energy can cause a hurricane.
This narrative feature is supported by rich plot texts and has multiple branches, thus bringing players a reading experience full of unknowns, which is where word games are different from traditional **, film and television dramas and other entertainment works.
In entertainment works represented by **, all plots are completely fixed, and there is only one possibility. No matter how much a reader or viewer loves a character, they can only be "outsiders". Orange Light players always interact with the characters from a first-person perspective, experiencing adventures together, increasing bonds, and greatly increasing the immersion brought by in-person participation.
In orange light games, the story usually revolves around the protagonist played by the player, who is not the life of someone else, but the center of the story himself.
Hope to become an indispensable existence is the spiritual need of young people today to establish their self-worth, and it is also the embodiment of their sense of autonomy. The Orange Light game's save and read mechanism (referred to as SL) makes it convenient for players to quickly read the branches behind all options when playing, and then return to the node to choose their own optimal solution, without worrying about choosing the wrong one and dying, becoming a real "chosen son".
If you yearn for heroic dreams other than the tired life, Orange Light can provide a bizarre little world, where people can temporarily forget about reality and do those things that they can't do on a daily basis.
This kind of plot, which attaches equal importance to quality and coolness, and the sense of participation that distinguishes users from other traditional entertainment works, has become the core attraction of Orange Light Games
Gradually gaining the upper hand to develop a work
It is worth noting that the plot of Orange Light is now declining towards the work as a whole. Instead, there are an endless stream of "high-degree freedom development" works.
On the November 27 "Orange Power List" (a comprehensive ranking based on data such as work collection, updates, and oranges), 5 of the top 6 games are development-oriented. The momentum of cultivation crushes the plot direction, which is already the norm of orange light, and there is no longer the grand occasion of producing many plot-oriented classics in the early years.
On November 27, the "Orange Power List" was ranked.
In the view of "Youyi" (WeChat official account ID: gameplusss), there are several reasons for such a change.
First of all, Orangelight's current platform mechanism has led to a large loss of high-quality content creators.
After August 2016, the copyright of the author's work, including all elements in the game, will be permanently attributed to Orange, and the author only retains the right of authorship. In addition to the fact that the platform can dispose of the works at will, the ordinary author and the platform are 46 shares, and after a certain amount of income, the author only gets 3% of the income.
The flip side of the reduction in the share ratio is thatIn recent years, the cost of making an orange light game has increased significantly. If there is a requirement for the exquisiteness of the game, the market price of a custom vertical painting ranges from thousands to tens of thousands of yuan。Most of the authors' orange light income is not even enough to buy materials, and they often need to generate electricity for love and make games with money.
Compared with the plot-oriented games with high material requirements, the development game has relatively lower requirements for the plot, and the lack of the plot can be made up for with rich system gameplay. As a result, more authors choose to spend their minds on expanding the cultivation system, which in turn leads to fewer and fewer authors who are good at plot content.
For most development games, in order to attract players, beautiful vertical drawings and complex systems have become the core points to attract players, which in turn has led to a surge in game production costs.
Xiao Wei, a well-known author in the orange light cultivation area, released a new work on the theme of family court management this year, "What is the name of the green history". As the patriarch, the player has more than 500 sets of standing paintings alone, and hundreds of random events can be triggered in the game, and even random wives and concubines, children, and clansmen. While arranging the cultivation of clansmen and the development of children, you can also have a variety of free interactions with them to make the characters more flesh and blood. At present, the system is still being improved and updated.
Xiao Lost can do a rich system, a large number of materials, and a storyline, but creators as capable as Xiao Lost are in the minority in Orange Light after all. In order to return on investment,The water-infused plot, flat characters, and ubiquitous kryptonite dots are the standard configuration of the development game
Orange Light's own flower delivery mode also determines that making a cultivation game is more profitable.
Flowers are the currency of Orange Light, and the direct recharge ratio is 1:1, which is used to unlock the plot, purchase attribute perks and costumes, etc.
For plot-oriented works, flowers often only need to be used for unlocking the main story and clearing the numerical dominance, usually a gift package of less than fifty flowers can cover them all, without additional kryptonite points. No matter how well a plot is written to a work, the upper limit generally does not exceed a hundred flowers. Even if you send more flowers to support the author, there will be no major improvement in the game experience except for getting ornaments such as pendants and badges.
The development game is just the opposite, and the flowers cast have positive feedback. The plots and characters experienced by the less and more flowers are very different, and in order to have a good time, coupled with the impact of sunk costs, there are only a lot of flowers. There is no upper limit for high Krypton players, and there are thousands of flowers at every turn.
Krypton gold points are everywhere in the game, and attractive accumulation benefits are the most basic, and it is also indispensable to buy vertical paintings, assets, values, etc. At the same time, the works of the entire platform can be paid to play the list for their favorite characters, and some of the playable characters and plots are exclusive to the benefits of high-krypton players, and even after the player casts a certain number of flowers, he can also make a cameo role in the game.
From the perspective of business monetization, this form can stimulate users to vote。Zhao Longxi, co-founder and strategy director of Orange Light, also recognized that China Literature has a business model of 80% and 90% of its revenue coming from content payment, which is in line with the situation of cultivating the popularity of works.
Where is the value of IP?
Liu Xiaoyu said in an interview with "Digital Entertainment Dream Factory" in 2016 that in the next few years, the revenue ratio of the entire IP system will reach 20 30% of Orange Games. In the following years, Orange Light began to work hard in the direction of incubating IP:
In 2015, the ancient love game "Crossing the Marriage Robbery" was adapted and publishedhas also been adapted into **, as well as the ancient fantasy theme "Fairy Cry".
In July 2016, Orange Light staged a stage play called "Hip Hop Bar" at the Beijing Candy Theater. The whole performance will be broadcast live on station B, and the performance will be suspended every time the plot is at a key point, and the audience will vote to decide the direction of the plot.
The entertainment industry game "Counterattack Star Journey Shine", which was out of the circle because of the live situation of the up master and scattered people**, was adapted into the TV series "Counterattack Star Journey Bright", which premiered on Tencent in 2017Another game with a cross-theme theme, "Lustful Daughter", was adapted into the web series "Stunning Daughter", which was broadcast on iQiyi in 2019. The drama "Yulong" in the game "Counterattack: Star Journey Shines" will be broadcast on Tencent** in 2021.
The UP master is free to disperse people's commentary on "Counterattack: Star Journey Shining"** The amount of ** exceeded 35 million.
These IP adaptations derived from Orange Light have a common characteristic: either they did not make a big splash, or the reputation was unsatisfactory. It stands to reason that word games are interactive, and the assistance of sound and ** makes it more concrete, which should be a more advantageous IP form than **. However, the attempt to make Orange Light IP film and television has repeatedly hit a wall, and there has been no movement in recent years.
There are various reasons for this result, perhaps it is the "unsuitability" brought about by the strong saccharin feeling after the film and television of ancient love games;Maybe it's the rough level of production, and the cheap character makeup after entering the third dimension;Perhaps it is the user's change from the first perspective to God's perspective, and the sense of substitution has suddenly weakened, leading to the improvement of requirements in all aspects.
At this point in time, the explosion of interactive video games may be a new opportunity for Orange Light. In 2019, "*Guardian" was born, driving Orange Light out of the circle in one fell swoop;At the beginning of this year, "Flying Over Room 13", adapted from "The Secret Story of Fence Village", also achieved the top six results on the Steam sales chart, plus the recent "Finished!".It seems that interactive video games are ushering in a new round of rise.
But Orange is at risk of not being able to seize this round of opportunities. Liu Xiaoyu once said, "The IP value of Orange Light lies in the quality of word game works. "And the quality of wordplay works boils down to the quality of the plot content. If it can't attract high-quality content creators, Orange will lose its core competitiveness.
After all, in terms of gameplay, special effects, and graphics, orange light can't compare to a triple-A game;In terms of female emotional interaction, Orange Light can't compare to the otome game made by the professional team;In terms of cultivating a high degree of freedom, it is not as cheap as vertical painting and more Yi Dimension pricing.
Orange Light's works that have been out of the circle have excellent story cores, and most of them are reality-oriented themes。In addition to "The Latent Red Road" and "The Secret Story of the Fence Village", there are also "Hengshui Middle School Serial Torture and Killing" that reflects educational issues, "Sapphire Murdered Delusional Girl" which is * human nature and justice, and "The Female Bedroom is Shura Field" that hides the dark side behind the handling of interpersonal relationships.
For interactive video games, it is easier to adapt and be accepted by players. This time, can Orange Light seize the new opportunities of the track again and become a new source of IP?
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