Kunpeng Project
New Entropy Original
Author丨Bai Qi Editor丨See you in the month
On December 15, 2022, at Tencent's internal staff meeting, Ma Huateng angrily denounced the company's internal problems: "Don't tell me to buy volume in the future, I don't believe in this anymore, let others do this thing, and we won't do anything about buying volume in the future." ”
On December 15, 2023, Tencent's game "Yuanmeng Star" bought up the traffic of the entire Internet.
In the game comment area of Station B's "Yuan Dream Star", the hot comment reads: "QQ pop-ups several times a day, it's you on station B, it's you on WeChat, it's you on the circle of friends, it's you on the app store, and you have an input method." ”
From "never buy volume" to "true fragrance", there is only one reason, "Yuan Dream Star" is the successor of "Glory of Kings", Tencent's "new crown prince", which determines whether Tencent can sit in the absolute hegemony of the domestic mobile game market in the future.
When the world's largest gaming company throws all its weight into a product, how terrifying energy will it explode?
Judging from the performance on the first day, "Yuan Dream Star" did not live up to Tencent's full publicity.
Qimai data shows that as of 18:00 on December 15, "Yuan Dream Star", "Egg Boy Party" and "Douyin Speed Edition" have won the top three free applications in the domestic App Store.
From the perspective of ratings, the evaluation of "Yuan Dream Star" quickly fell into polarization, at station B, the average evaluation of 10,000 people for this game is, the vast majority of which are five-star praise and one-star negative reviews, of which the praise is mainly in praise of the game's picture and gameplay, and the negative reviews are criticizing Tencent's swiping screen publicity for infringing on personal space.
In Weibo, Douyin, Station B, Xiaohongshu, Douyu, Huya, Kuaishou and other platforms, users can see the publicity materials or implanted content of Tencent's "Yuanmeng Star", and some users complain that the short** platform has even reached the point of "brushing to a Yuanmeng Star in three steps". A Zhihu user wrote: "Give (Tencent) a game, he can play more than ten pop-up windows in QQ a day, and if you don't pay attention, you can enter the advertisement and make an appointment to open the service wifi automatically** in one go." ”
Not to mention Tencent's products, WeChat, which has always been low-key, pasted the game slogan on the discovery page in large font; QQ is the core of the opening screen advertisement**, which scared a lot of old users to the point that their scalps were numb: "QQ rarely lets go of screen ads, and this time one suddenly jumped out and danced at me." ”
Even in the A** field, a number of related concept stocks have "soared" one after another. The subsidiary of CITS United is responsible for the online promotion of the game, and it has been subject to a daily limit; Alpha Entertainment obtained the IP derivatives authorization of "Yuanmeng Star" and obtained the daily limit.
The development of "Yuanmeng Star" is Tencent TiMi Studio, Tencent's most capable team, and the representative work is "Glory of Kings", the world's most profitable mobile game.
Tencent has won a series of co-branding for "Yuan Dream Star", "Yuan Dream Star" has obtained the authorization of a number of heavyweight IPs such as "Glory of Kings", "Kung Fu Panda", "Human Defeat", etc., players can use the Glory of Kings character in the game, walk on the "Crossfire" map, and also see Tencent** content.
Tencent Games has invested 1.4 billion yuan in the construction of the product ecology of "Yuanmeng Star", and the money will be distributed to game map creators and game creators, and provide them with professional support. In addition, this money will also be used to buy traffic on the entire network content platform, create games and e-sports events, and so on. As for the publicity and distribution cost of the game's open beta, it is even more astronomical.
In a word, in order to win the new star, Tencent bet all the bets in its hand, only success, not failure.
The reason for such a strong investment is that Tencent urgently needs a successor to "Honor of Kings".
At the beginning of this year, Appmagic announced last year's global mobile game revenue list, and the top two were all from Tencent, and "Honor of Kings" won 22The annual revenue of 200 million US dollars has dominated the list for the sixth consecutive year, and the second place "PUBG Mobile" (including the national server "Peace Elite") is 17$300 million, miHoYo's "Genshin Impact" with 15$600 million in third place.
But both gold-absorbing behemoths face the pressures of time and aging. "Honor of Kings" was released in 2016, and "Peace Elite" was released in 2018. "Honor of Kings" is a MOBA game, "Peace Elite" is an FPS game, in these two tracks, Tencent basically monopolized the domestic mobile game market, but then came the fatigue of players. Since their release, the core gameplay of the two games has not changed significantly.
But this time it was the family party game that hit Tencent.
Since November last year, the number of NetEase's game "Egg Boy Party" has risen rapidly, and at the beginning of this year, "Egg Boy Party" quickly occupied the top position in the App Store game free list. NetEase wrote in its 2022 annual report:
Egg Boy Party has more than 30 million DAU users, making it the game with the highest number of daily active users in the history of NetEase Games. ”
This game has the following characteristics - multiplayer online gameplay, cute painting style, simple and easy to play, no age restrictions, free gameplay, especially popular with women.
It's worth noting the gameplay part. Egg Boy Party allows players to design the map and decide how they want to play, and players can play car racing, first-person shooters, parkour racing, backgammon and even catching dolls. In a word, the all-encompassing gameplay makes it difficult for players to get tired of Egg Boy Party.
This is also the reason why the party games represented by "Egg Boy Party" can quickly become popular, whether it is "Honor of Kings" or "Peace Elite", their own gameplay is highly fixed, and players with average skills will soon feel huge resistance in the game, exclusion, ridicule and verbal attacks are commonplace in the game, and the relatively fixed game mode also makes players more likely to get tired.
The party game has an unparalleled ability to "kill time", the experience of playing with friends, the experience of trying different maps, and the simple and easy-to-use gameplay can greatly offset the player's fatigue. If Douyin relies on massive entertainment content and unlimited visual and auditory stimulation to become a "time melting pot", then "Egg Boy Party" has become a new "time melting pot" through unlimited fresh game experiences. In September this year, "Egg Boy Party" achieved the achievement of 200 million - the number of monthly active users exceeded 100 million, and the total number of maps exceeded 100 million.
This is also the reason why Tencent feels anxious, "Egg Boy Party" is not only "killing" the time of players, but also "killing" the time of Tencent games.
NetEase Games did not sit idly by and watch Tencent's invasion.
On the same day as the open beta of Tencent's "Dream Star", "Egg Boy Party" is celebrating the "Egg Ride Festival" event and released the co-branded map and appearance of "Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf", all of which are given away for free; The game has launched a 10-day consecutive 10-day lottery event, a 0 yuan purchase event for the collection of blind boxes, and from the 15th to the 21st, it will provide rank protection benefits.
In a word, "Egg Boy Party" hopes to firmly press players into its own game in the most critical first week of the launch of "Yuan Dream Star".
This is not the first time that Tencent and NetEase have fought head-to-head on the same track. As early as November 2017, NetEase launched "Wilderness Action", which preemptively took the market of chicken mobile games in its hands, and quickly dominated the Apple App Store list in China.
At the beginning of 2018, TiMi and Photon successively developed two chicken games, "All Army Attack" and "Exciting Battlefield", betting on the success rate with quantity. As a result, Tencent quickly regained its own market from NetEase, and since then has swept all its rivals in the FPS mobile game track.
In this war, although Tencent is a late striker, it still has an advantage - Tencent's product completion is better than NetEase, and many players complain that the game experience of NetEase's version of chicken is not as good as Tencent; Moreover, Tencent has genuine authorization plus trial and error for both works at the same time, ensuring that players have no reason to refuse.
And in this party game war, Tencent's cards are even worse.
First of all, the core competitiveness of party games is not hardcore indicators such as picture quality and sense of impact, but social and entertaining, which attracts marginal users in the game industry - women, primary and secondary school students, etc. Tencent has super mobile game research and development capabilities, but it is difficult to use R&D technology to eat NetEase like a chicken war. Judging from the current product quality, "Yuan Dream Star" is definitely the top mobile game in the market, but it has not reached the level of crushing similar products, and players feel more familiarity from it.
Secondly, in the chicken war, Tencent has the advantage of genuine licensing, attracting a large number of mobile game players who are eager to experience genuine chicken content. In this party game competition, Tencent also played this card, but the effect could not be compared with that year. As mentioned earlier, party games appeal to light, social-oriented gamers, more about who is more fun than who is more reducible to PC masterpieces.
Finally, compared to the chicken war, party games are not Tencent's previous area of expertise, which also leads to Tencent's slower response and later strike. When "Yuan Dream Star" opened, "Egg Boy Party" was already a highly mature game with 100 million monthly active users and 100 million maps.
Compared with the story of Tencent's "second killing" of NetEase in a short period of time, the party game war is likely to continue for a long time, and the final competition between the two sides is ecological capabilities - who can support the player group to develop more interesting game models, who can more effectively ensure player retention, and who can win the war.