Author |Kehan (Shanghai).
The paper-stacking game at the bottom of the valley looks like it's slowly climbing.
Last month, the second test of Papergames' surreal 3D immersive love mobile game "Love and Deep Space" came to an end. The progress in technology, gameplay and other aspects is visible to the naked eye, and has received many praises. After that, the sixth anniversary celebration of the masterpiece "Love and the Producer" began in full swing, and the discussion remained hot, with many players commenting that it was their "most serious game" and "longest persistence" game.
In the past two years, Papergames, one of the "Four Little Dragons of Games" in Shanghai, has encountered many difficulties. A number of projects were cut, a large proportion of employees were laid off, and shares were pledged. Not only is the gap with Mihoyou, Lilith, and Eagle Horn, who are also the four little dragons, getting farther and farther away, but it even looks a little shaky.
Even so, in the view of "You Yi", this former big brother of Guoyi still has a chance to turn the tables at any time.
Initial upswing to fill the gap in the market
Yao Runhao, the founder of Papergames, was born in 1988, he liked games since he was a child, studied in Suzhou Middle School, the most famous Suzhou middle school in Suzhou, and graduated from Waseda University in Japan in 2011 with a major in economics, and then continued to study finance.
This period coincided with the launch of Apple's iPhone series of mobile phones and the rise of mobile games. iPhone, Japan, love of games, these keywords made him and a few fellow villagers make a women's dress-up game "Nuan Nuan Dress Up Story" during college, which seems logical.
This game was a great success, and won the first place in the "puzzle game" and "word game" categories in the App Store in many countries and regions, becoming the starting point of the "Nuan Nuan" series, the benchmark for domestic dress-up games in the future.
In 2013, Yao Runhao returned to Suzhou and established a paperstacking company with only 7 people with a registered capital of 500,000 yuan, and soon launched "Warm Around the World", which was also a great success. From this point on, Yao Runhao and Stacked Paper seemed to be hanging, although there were some small bumps, but the overall journey was smooth and grew rapidly.
In January 2014, Papergames received investment from IDG Capital to raise millions of dollars. In the same year, Papergames moved to Shanghai, and the team expanded to 15 people.
A year later, the third generation of the Nuan Nuan series, "Miracle Nuan Nuan", came out in May 2015 and was published and operated by Tencent**. On the first day of launch, it topped the iOS free chart and remained there for a week. Five months later, Paperstack completed the second financing, led by Oriental Xinghui, a subsidiary of Oriental **, with an amount of 1500 million RMB.
Miracle Warm Warm" new set promotional screen.
Next, "Miracle Nuannuan" entered overseas and was launched in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and other places, bringing continuous revenue. During the same period, the registered capital (paid-in) of Papergames increased to 60 million in October 2016.
The success of the early stage of Paperfold was largely due to the luck of stepping on it.
First of all, the gaming needs of female users have been unmet for a long time, and they often can only choose some casual match-3 business games. The Nuan Nuan series, which is simple to play and beautifully costumed, fills this gap.
At the same time, the rapid popularity of smartphones, 2013-2014 coincided with the explosive growth of the mobile game market. In the past two years, other types of games have also developed rapidly: the first domestic mobile game "My Name is MT", which set a record of 50 million turnover in a single month, has been launched, Tencent's "Cool Running Every Day" and other daily casual mobile games have considerable traffic, and big IPs of terminal games have entered mobile games.
Taking advantage of this shareholder trend, Papergames successfully ushered in another benchmark for domestic women-oriented games, "Love and the Producer", as well as its own outbreak.
Over-expansion, frequent problems
In December 2017, the love management game "Love and the Producer" was officially launched, bringing the otome game, which was still relatively unfamiliar in China at that time, into the public eye.
As soon as the game was launched, it became popular all over the market, with a turnover of nearly 300 million in the next month. Aurora big data shows that after more than half a year, the cumulative number of registered users has exceeded 65 million, and the total number of topics read by the four male protagonists on Sina Weibo has exceeded 4 billion.
"Love and the Producer" can get such a big response, on the one hand, it specializes in the theme of love, which has a sense of freshness, and on the other hand, it is well-designed, all-round service for players, and has a good experience.
The game takes card drawing as the core gameplay, and until now, it still has a dominant position with a strong sense of love companionship and immersion that other otome mobile games can't match. In addition to the easy-to-get**, text messages, and daily circle of friends, it has even launched functions such as male protagonists accompanying players to memorize words, 100-day check-in, and secure calls when taking a taxi late at night.
The male protagonist of "Love and the Producer" accompanies the function of memorizing words.
Initially, Papergames didn't expect "Love and the Producer" to become so popular. They just think that since the Nuan Nuan series is in a better situation, they can try some other categories. On the other side of the explosion, the team is overwhelmed and problems arise one after another.
At the end of the month when the game was launched, close to the Spring Festival, the number of ** people soared, the server crashed frequently, and the server could not be opened for a long time. The operation is understaffed, and players are dissatisfied with customer service. Papergames can only temporarily modify the algorithm of the underlying logic of the server, and then compensate the player in-game.
Not long after the server crash, a new crisis occurred. During the Spring Festival in 2018, "Love and the Producer" released three promotional advertisements portraying players as fantasies-addicted and unattractive "leftover women", igniting the anger of a large number of players. The official urgently removed the advertisement and issued an apology statement, saying that due to lax control in the production and delivery of the advertisement, the content did not match the theme of "companionship" that it wanted to express.
Then, in May 2018, the Dream Lake incident occurred. In the "Dream Heart Lake" event, the probability of falling from the card pool was questioned, and finally, under the pressure of players, the official admitted that there was a problem with the probability algorithm of the event, announced the closure of the event in advance, and all the diamonds consumed by the card draw during the event were returned.
The Dream Lake incident was officially handled.
After several accidents, Papergames published a long article in August 2018 titled "To Every Producer: This Is Our Beginning, This Is Our Story", showing players the birth process of the game and responding to some previous doubts.
The article statesPaperstack did fall into disorientation after the explosion of "Love and the Producer", and expanded too quickly beyond its own capabilities. For example, during the Spring Festival, it was due to "insufficient manpower but insisting on doing things beyond ability, and a team of four people connected with more than a dozen external companies", that a number of unaudited or unaudited advertisements appeared.
In early 2018, an anonymous executive of Papergames mentioned in an interview with Entertainment Capital that "the company has only 220 people;There are only four people in the marketing department, two of whom are fresh graduatesThere are only 30 people in the "Love and the Producer" project team."
It may be that they have had enough of the suffering of few people, and the scale of Stacked Paper has expanded rapidly. In 2019, the number of team members increased to 600, and then a new work of the Nuan Nuan series was launched, which was also the first 3D work "Shine Nuan Nuan", which reached 400 million turnover within a month of its launch, ranking first on the iOS best-selling list.
With the blessing of another phenomenal work, in 2020, the number of paperfolds has increased to nearly 1,000. In 2021, the subsidiary Shanghai Nuandie alone had more than 1,000 employees, and a year later it grew to 1,742 people.
Bottoming out, but still hopefully rising
Since last year, there has been a rumor that "Paperfold has fallen behind among the Four Little Dragons". In September this year, Suzhou Paperstack had an equity pledge. Wu Yunfang, a natural person (rumored to be Yao Runhao's mother) pledged 6 million shares to miHoYo's wholly-owned subsidiary, accounting for about 10% of Paperstack's equity.
Papergames explained that this was a personal act of shareholders. But the industry generally believes that it is a lack of money. In addition, industrial and commercial information shows that Yao Runhao also pledged 5 million pieces of paperstacked equity to China Merchants Bank in September 2021.
Several projects have also been adjusted. Last year, someone broke the news that the X9 project laid off 75% of its staff and returned to the demo periodx2 item was chopped;The X5 project has undergone major personnel adjustments, and the original producer has been laid off. At the beginning of this year, it was revealed that Papergames held a staff meeting internally to strictly pay attention to attendance.
Overall, the past two years have not been smooth. From a popular mobile game to today's difficulties, why did Papergames fall into such a crisis?
In the view of "Youyi", on the one hand, it is because the project and team are expanding rapidly, the management cannot keep up, and the financial pressure has increased sharply. At the same time, the market has turned from hot to cold, competition has intensified sharply, and the performance of cash cow projects has fallen short of expectations.
Back in 2020. The epidemic has caused people to spend more time on entertainment, and mobile games have ushered in the trend. In the Spring Festival of 2020, the turnover and DAU of many top mobile games have increased significantly. Against this backdrop, game companies are mostly optimistic about expanding significantly and starting a big leap forward. For example, in 2022, miHoYo will simultaneously promote 4 projects of "Kocher Frontline", "Honkai Impact 4: Galaxy", "Honkai: Star Railway" and "Jeopardy Zero", and expand the number of employees to more than 4,000.
Although there is a gap between the volume of Papergames and miHoYo, it has also promoted 4 projects: "Love and Deep Space", "Backlight Infiltration", "A Thousand Faces" and "Infinite Warmth", the latter two are still open-world games. In addition, Tipworks, the production team of Pascal's Pact, which was acquired, is also working on a triple-A project.
Screenshot of the promotional video of "A Thousand Faces".
In addition to games, Papergames has also expanded in various fields such as animation and derivation, establishing or acquiring a number of subsidiaries.
In July 2020, the animation "Love and the Producer", jointly produced by Papergames and MAPPA, a well-known Japanese animation production company, was launched, but the quality was rough and the response was mediocre. Last year, at the 10th anniversary of Nuan Nuan**, Papergames announced the pilot of the animated movie "Nuan Nuan and the Dream God", revealing the idea of long-term operation of Nuan Nuan's IP.
With more projects, more diverse content forms, more new people coming in, intensified competition, and a downturn in the market, it is not surprising that the challenges faced by the team can be imagined. For example, miHoYo, which is the head of Shanghai's Four Little Dragons and has stronger comprehensive strength in all aspects, has also encountered similar difficulties. So we saw that the "Project SH" project team directly led by the founder Cai Haoyu was disbanded, and CEO Liu Wei initiated a downsizing action internally.
But after all, the latter has a stronger foundation in all aspects, and it is also supported by higher-income staple games. The user base of female games is relatively narrow, the market tends to be saturated, and the other three games of the "Big Four B" are not ideal today.
In a way, Papergames has almost touched the current ceiling of the track, and it is difficult to attract newcomers from the limited number of players. Perhaps because of this, Papergames has always wanted to make general-oriented games such as "A Thousand Faces", which is truly for the public.
In addition to the project itself, the direction of capital investment in Paperstack is also unreasonable. Yao Runhao advocates technology first, that is, seeking technological breakthroughs before planning and art put forward needs, and has established a research and development center for this purpose. However, there are many routes to technology research and development, and it is likely that the results made by repeated investment are not needed in the actual project. Often, only large companies have the funds to support this lower-level research, which is probably not needed in the end.
In short, under the rapid expansion, the smooth paper stacking has been invested in all directions, but in the end it has not been transformed into production capacity, resulting in various load-reducing actions. But despite so many setbacks and various problems for the team, "Youyi" believes that Papergames still has great hope and will turn the tables again.
Yao Runhao is a creative person, and the most important thing is the creation itself, and has repeatedly said on many occasions, "Our success is not based on the understanding of female users, but on our creative ability." ”
After "Miracle Nuan Nuan" became popular in 2015, there were many IPs looking for papergames to cooperate. However, Papergames gave up the opportunity to be more cost-effective, and insisted on doing new creations and upgrading technology, so that there were two popular models, "Love and the Producer" and "Shining Nuan". It is precisely the dedication to these two points that made Yao Runhao choose to make the 3D love game "Love and Deep Space", and at the same time explore two new categories: "Backlight Infiltration" and "Hundred Faces".
Love and Deep Space official wallpaper.
People who love to create always want to make something new, which means a lot of risk and opportunity at the same time. Although there were some setbacks in the new project, more importantly, the core team's long-term development of a passion for games and understanding of the market, as well as a consistent pursuit of creation and technology. These are the core qualities that a good game needs to have.
From this point of view, the difficulties encountered by Paperfold are only temporary. On the basis of the stability of the core team, if Papergames can improve its management capabilities and concentrate on in-depth research on one or two projects, it may be able to make another hit.
In fact, Yao Runhao does not pursue Papergames to become a large-scale company, but only hopes to continue to produce excellent works. From this point of view, there is still an opportunity to fold paper.
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