80%-90% of the up owners of station B have received business orders from "Yuan Dream Star", including house dancers, pet owners, and beauty makeup, but no one is looking for me, and I feel very shameless. Bilibili (referred to as "Station B"), the well-known game UP master Ghost Uncle Huang said to his 1.88 million fans in a **. **After the release, he soon received "Cha Fan" invitations from "Egg Boy Party" and "Yuan Dream Star", and the latter offered 10 times more **than the former.
Uncle Ghost's experience is just a microcosm of this year-end marketing "war". "Dream Star" and "Egg Boy Party".One is a new game launched on December 15, 2023 by Tencent's TiMi Studio, and the other is NetEase's game with the highest DAU (number of daily active users) in history. There are many similarities between the two in terms of category, gameplay, and operation, such as both are "party games" that are more casual, less competitive, and have the best painting style, and both emphasize social networking and pay attention to the creation of UGC (user-made content) in the game, which is a typical competitor on the same track.
From buying volume, channels, endorsements, linkages, live broadcasts to inviting "water army" and KOLs to help, the battle between the two sides covers almost all areas of game marketing. Taking the purchase volume as an example, according to the analysis of the digital content marketing platform Data Eye, the material delivery of "Egg Boy Party" has soared in the past three months, and on the day of the launch of "Yuan Dream Star", "Egg Boy Party" has targeted 240,000 sets of "terrifying" materials.
Some netizens joked that if you haven't swiped the promotion of "Yuan Dream Star" or "Egg Boy Party" recently, maybe you should "reflect" on whether you still belong to the young people in the algorithm positioning. Behind the huge investment, Tencent and NetEase, two leading players in the game industry, are interested in the new generation of game users - especiallyThe battle for the post-00s
Yuan Dream Star".Find the next big dau game
Tencent and NetEase have been wrestling with each other in the gaming field for a long time, and since the rise of China's mobile game market, Tencent and NetEase have always occupied the first and second places in the domestic market share. Specifically, Tencent accounts for about half of the entire market, NetEase accounts for a quarter, and the rest of the game companies share the remaining quarter.
However, they are not the same tracks. At least before the advent of "Egg Boy Party", due to the differences in the gameplay focus and operation direction of the two companies, they also formed different target player groups.
It is generally believed that Tencent, which owns the two major social platforms of WeChat and QQ, is better at big DAU games, and as a typical representative, the number of daily active users of "Honor of Kings" has reached an astonishing 100 million in 2020. This kind of game often relies on the chain of social relationships, the threshold for getting started is moderate, and the social attributes behind the game are sometimes greater than the game attributes. In terms of business model, although the amount of krypton gold of a single player is limited, a large enough user disk can ensure small profits and long-term profits.
NetEase, on the other hand, is better at games with a low to medium user base and high ARPU (average revenue per user). The number of players in this type of game cannot compete with the big DAU category, but a single player has a strong willingness to kryptonite, such as NetEase's classic IP "Fantasy Journey to the West" and "Onmyoji". Although "Onmyoji" once overshadowed "Glory of Kings" in terms of volume, even at the peak of 2016-2017, the DAU of "Onmyoji" was only 10 million.
However, this difference is not intentional on NetEase's part, it is more due to the passive situation that Tencent has finally formed after actively squeezing out the market. Why doesn't NetEase want to launch a big DAU game?
In 2017, the terminal game "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" developed by South Korea's Blue Hole Studio set off a global craze, and the development of mobile games with the theme of "eating chicken" was regarded by the industry as the biggest outlet after MOBA games. NetEase was the first to react and launched two "chicken" mobile games, "Wilderness Action" and "Terminator 2". Tencent is not far behind, and just 3 months later, its TiMi and Photon Studios launched "All Army Attack" and "Exciting Battlefield" respectively. The final result is clear at a glance, NetEase loses, and Tencent wins.
After this "war", Tencent has gradually established a near-monopoly in the field of big DAU games, and NetEase has not come up with a second game product with a number of users comparable to "Honor of Kings". People are no longer comparing Tencent to NetEase, and have shifted the focus of the discussion to Tencent vs. miHoYo, or Tencent vs. ByteDance.
"Egg Boy Party" without intention"Egg Boy Party", which was officially launched in May 2022, has become the hope of NetEase Games to turn around. It's a casual party game with gameplay that's clearly borrowed from the PC game that was a hit in 2020Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout- Dozens of players compete together to overcome the level, and the player who persevers to the end wins. However, the popularity of "Fall Guys" did not last long, and the imitator "Egg Boy Party" naturally did not receive special care, and was initially just one of the dozens of games that NetEase regularly launches every year.
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
However, "Egg Boy Party" was unexpectedly popular. During the Spring Festival in 2023, the daily active users of "Egg Boy Party" exceeded 30 million, becoming the highest DAU game in NetEase's history. In September, NetEase officially announced that the number of MAU (monthly active users) and the number of maps created by players in the game of "Egg Boy Party" have both exceeded 100 million.
On short ** platforms such as Douyin, a group of "egg boys" with a round appearance lined up in a row, dancing in an orderly manner to the beat of Internet divine comedy such as "Love Like Fire", which was spontaneously created by players, triggered a viral spread. **The creators include teenagers, college girls, and boyfriends of college girls, who make up the majority of players in games like Egg Boy Party, and shape a new social discourse that only understands each other
A short ** made by players in Egg Boy Party.
For example, regular game partners will affectionately call each other"Egg pairing".；In the grocery store on the basement floor of the mall, the periphery of "Egg Boy Party" and "Cornaka: Star Dome Railway" are placed in the most prominent positionFinding an egg to play with has become the most fashionable way to socialize among elementary school students, just like Ultraman card battles.
Young people's business has nothing to do with the amount of purchases, it has the most simple fission logic: what the children in the class play, or what game looks fun, and there are more people playing, they will experience it.
A NetEase Games employee recalled that "Egg Boy Party" was mediocre when it was first launched, and it was only "brought back to life" after the first wave of UGC content on social platforms was produced, "otherwise it may be one of the projects that died internally".
NetEase CEO Ding Lei once said that he hoped that "Egg Boy Party" would "continue to operate for 10 years". At the third quarter of 2023 financial report analyst** meeting, NetEase's senior management continued, "The core products of large DAU are an important direction of the company in the future, and we will summarize the experience of previous successful large DAU products and continue to launch products in a similar direction." At the same time, we will also create more high-quality vertical games. ”
Judging from the financial report for the third quarter of 2023,Although the revenue volume of NetEase's game business is still about half of that of Tencent, its net income increased by 16% year-on-year5%, which is twice the growth rate of Tencent
UGC, a new outlet for the game industry
To understand the reasons for the success of "Egg Boy Party".ugcis a key anchor.
NetEase should really give the bigwigs who make pictures kowtow", when talking about "Egg Boy Party", many players expressed similar feelings on social **. Whether it is "Egg Boy Party" or "Dream Star", the main gameplay of both isIn addition to the officially released maps and levels, a large amount of player-generated content based on the in-game editor has been incorporated
Compared to the seriousness of the official map, the self-created map of young players can be described as imaginative. They will ** the stages of life, death and intimacy in the map, and use the map to reproduce the classic scenes in "Detective Conan", "Zootopia" and "Return of the Joker", or just present the small emotions in their own growth process.
Egg Boy Party player-made map.
Egg Boy Party map creator "Puxi Cola" has 510,000 followers in the game. The maps she creates are like some kind of surrealist "dream core", or a slice of a literary film. Players don't need to figure out how to get to the end as quickly as possible, but they have to immerse themselves in the author's creative purpose.
The teacher's picture seems to remind me of my childhood, when I would imagine myself in bed at the bottom of the sea, with schools of small fish swimming around me, and crying as I played. A player expressed his gratitude to her in the comment area of "Puxi Cola" on Xiaohongshu.
Egg Boy Party player-made map.
And the essence of the idea of game UGC is, in factReduce reliance on game developers and "delegate" the power to create fun to players under established rules, forming a shared narrative。While making up for the production capacity of the game, it caters to the diverse aesthetics of the younger generation with more diverse content, so as to extend the life cycle of the product.
UGC is actually a narrower term after being hyped up by Roblox. An investor focusing on the game industry said that if understood from a broader perspective, as long as the content generated by players under a certain framework is counted as UGC, including "Honor of Kings" PvP games, card battles, and sandbox editors.
If "Dream Star" and "Egg Boy Party" have greater ambitions, then they hope to target not only each other, but also game UGC platform companies that were once known as the "first stock of the metaverse".roblox
In the U.S., the U.K., Spain, and Australia, the most popular app for teens isn't TikTok, it's Roblox. According to a report by parental monitoring program Qustodio, in 2022, children spent an average of up to 3 hours a day on Roblox, more than any other app.
Against the backdrop of the cooling of the metaverse concept and the layoffs of Silicon Valley tech giants, Roblox's stock price and number of employees have maintained rare positive growth. According to the financial report, in the third quarter of 2023, Roblox's revenue increased by 38% year-on-year to 7$1.3 billion, exceeding market expectations. The number of daily active users reached a new high of 70.2 million, a year-on-year increase of 20%. Roblox is growing in popularity.
While Roblox is often misunderstood as a game, it doesn't actually produce content on its own, butA gaming platform。"You can understand the relationship between Roblox and creators as Station B and UP masters. Twin Atlas Operations Director Zhong Hu said that there are a wide selection of games on Roblox, and each game does not need to be separated.
Twin Atlas has only about 50 employees, but the company is one of the largest third-party developers on the Roblox platform. Their games span RPG, MMO, Driving Simulation, and one game, Dragon Adventures, which has amassed nearly 600 million plays in four years.
dragon adventures》
A typical scenario is for several 9-12-year-olds to turn on their computers or tablets after school and squeeze into the same Roblox club for a pleasant 90 minutes under the guidance of a codo host (similar to a board game host). The process is packaged as a paid solution, with official sales pitches such as "improving social and collaboration skills" and "encouraging critical thinking and learning."
In addition to professional creative teams like Twin Atlas, Roblox also has a large number of "gamer-type" creators. Founded in 2006, the platform has accompanied many gamers through adolescence, and as Roblox users have grown older, they have become more capable of using the editor to develop games and create materials, as well as better understand the preferences of the platform's players. Roblox's stable and transparent share ratio, as well as the introduction of virtual currency (Robux), have built a complete incentive mechanism, so as to achieve a cycle of "consuming content, creating content, players acknowledging, getting incentives, creating and consuming more content".
One of the directions that Roblox strives to do is to create an immersive virtual space where users can do anything. Hu Shizhong described his thoughts on Roblox as saying, "Letting people spend some time with friends in the space is something worth trying for game companies in the future." ”
As early as around 2019, a group of domestic game manufacturers aimed at the UGC game field and tried to recreate a Roblox in China. Most of them appear in the form of game editors, providing players and third parties with a platform to easily make games, such as Tencent**'s Roblox national server, "Beaver Project", the predecessor of "Egg Boy Party", Lilith's "Da Vinci" project, and ByteDance's "Reboot World", etc. However, due to various factors such as high compliance risks, large differences in game soil, and the difficulty of making a game that can break the circle is similar to "opening a blind box", many pure game editor projects have died one after another after a short period of popularity.
As a result, game products that rely on mature gameplay and incorporate UGC elements such as editors have become the next target for Tencent and NetEase to compete with each other. UGC is a powerful **, but in the stage of immature development, the core gameplay that the big factory is good at can make it not become a "source of water".
In "Dream Star" and "Egg Boy Party", you can get a glimpse of many roblox shadows. For example, "Yuan Dream Star" is integrated in addition to the basic racing gameplayShootouts, chicken-eating, hide-and-seek, werewolf killingand other popular gameplay, not so much a game, but a platform that integrates a variety of mini-games;Both games have come up with corresponding incentive packages for UGC creators, and it could be:"The first side hustle for young people".；The built-in "Star Home" of "Yuanmeng Star" is also connectedTencent** and Tencent**Players can not only arrange this "physical" space according to their preferences, but also invite their friends' characters to sit on the "seats" to watch movies and listen to ** together, and more importantly, it can also attract the attention of the brand.
The built-in Star Home of Yuan Dream Star can be **Tencent**.
Further, the future of Metadream Star and Egg Boy Party may not just be a game, but a platform disguised as a game to compete for more scarce attention.
Tencent, which can't afford to lose"Tencent doesn't have a two-dimensional gene, so Miho has created a work like "Genshin Impact", and it can accept it, because it knows that it can't do it. But "Egg Boy Party" can't be popular, because the big DAU product was originally Tencent's patent. The above-mentioned NetEase Games employee said.
Right now, there's a more realistic point in the race for the next big DAU game.
Games are essentially a kind of content consumer goods, and during the economic downturn, people will become more cautious in consumption, and the same is true for game krypton. In the first half of 2023, a two-dimensional mobile game called "Back to the Future 1999" caused a controversy during the closed beta phase - players thought that gacha was too expensive. Under the pressure, the game producer had to cancel some of the card pools that needed krypton gold to draw.
Another intriguing example comes from NetEase's mobile game "Against the Cold", which launched in June 2023 and launched a large number of character costumes and hairstyles for only 6 yuan, which was jokingly called "Pinduoduo in the mobile game industry" by netizens. Compared with high-ARPU games that rely heavily on a single player to pay, low-ARPU, high-DAU games can better help game manufacturers survive the winter.
At the same time, the new Measures for the Administration of Online Games (Draft Opinions) also put forward requirements for players' deposit limits. Analysts generally agree that games with high ARPU will be the most affected. In the face of more detailed regulatory methods, game manufacturers can only flexibly adjust their strategies.
Tencent's "can't" is directly reflected in the investment in the promotion and distribution of "Yuanmeng Star". At the beginning of December 2023, "Yuan Dream Star" was officially announced, and the game will be officially launched on the 15th of that month. Also announced along with the launch date is the first phase of 1.4 billion yuan of special investment, of which 100 million yuan will be used to establish mass e-sports events300 million yuan will be used to incentivize the creation of related content, such as game live broadcastsFinally, another 1 billion yuan will be used to support ordinary users to create maps, that is, UGC content. This investment will be long-term and uncapped. In addition, "Yuanmeng Star" also announced a large number of IP co-branding and cross-border cooperation, such as "Crayon Xiaoxin", "Kung Fu Panda", "Human Defeat" and so on.
Although Tencent is tight-lipped about the marketing expenses of "Dream Star", judging from the overwhelming advertising around it, this may be the largest game in Tencent's history. The capital market gave positive feedback, and the stock prices of companies participating in the promotion of "Yuan Dream Star" such as Insai Group, Evergrande High-tech, CITS United, and Aofei Entertainment rose sharply, and were even collectively called"Yuan Dream Star" concept stock
For Tencent, when a certain type of gameplay is verified, it has become a fixed routine to quickly learn and learn from it, take the lead in launching competing products before competitors accumulate a large enough user scale, and finally use strong publishing capabilities to seize the market. "Honor of Kings" and "Exciting Battlefield" are all successful games under this strategy. But unlike in the past, "Egg Boy Party" has gained a firm foothold in this type of game, not only has more than 500 million users and tens of millions of DAUs, but also relies on UGC gameplay to form a highly sticky user ecology.
This time, Tencent attacked NetEase to defend the game, and it is not yet known who will kill the deer.