There is not much time left for the Yuanmeng Star

Text|Stinging Research Institute Xiao Dong.

Relevant data shows that after only maintaining a week of rapid growth, its core data such as ** volume and estimated revenue have fallen off a cliff.

And when the heel of the heavyweight new product has not yet gained a foothold, Tencent Games' "old hero" "Honor of Kings" has lost the Iron Throne again: Sensor Tower's global mobile game revenue list for December 2023 shows that "Honor of Kings", which has topped the list for 22 consecutive months, has retreated to No. 2.

Interestingly, at the beginning of the launch of "Yuan Dream Star", it was regarded as a "work of hope" that succeeded "Glory of Kings" and opened up a new situation for Tencent Games, and even had the title of "New Prince of Goose Factory". Now the cliff decline after the peak of the first performance has undoubtedly pushed Tencent Games into a particularly embarrassing situation.

The king "lost the crown", and "Yuan Dream Star" "woke up" in a week, leaving little time for Tencent Games.

01 The party was cold, and Yuan Dream Star became a "weekly throw" productFrankly speaking, backed by Tencent Games' mature experience and resources accumulated in the domestic market, it is difficult for "Yuan Dream Star", a key product of the year, to become popular. And the data performance of the first month of the launch of "Yuan Dream Star" does show the strength of Tencent Games.

Qimai data shows that the number of iPhones of "Yuanmeng Star" has experienced 10 from the first day of launch within a month after it was officially launched60,000 to 21The 40,000 peak skyrocketed. Especially in the week from January 1st to January 7th, the number of iPhones of "Yuanmeng Star" remained above 210,000 for 7 consecutive days.

However, since January 8, the volume of "Yuan Dream Star" has not only dropped back to about 110,000, but even dropped to less than 80,000 on January 26.

Another noteworthy data performance is that in the more than a month after the launch of "Yuan Dream Star", the average daily ** volume of its iPhone side was 1260,000, but only 8 days of ** amount is at or above this average. This means that a considerable part of the more than 6 million** data created by the iPhone side of "Yuanmeng Star" in the past 40 days has been completed in 8 of them. The core reason why "Yuan Dream Star" has this kind of "surprise supplement" type of growth data is because of Tencent Games' new set of inherent play methods on products.

When "Dream Star" was launched, Tencent announced that it would invest 1.4 billion yuan in the first phase of ecological incentives for ecological construction. At the same time, more than 600 celebrities were invited to help promote the product. According to ** report, "Yuan Dream Star" only voted 270,000 sets.

However, the actual data shows that the short-term large-scale investment did not support the strong growth momentum of "Yuanmeng Star" after the publicity period. And at the moment when party games are hot, "Yuan Dream Star" did not cut a large market share as quickly as Tencent expected.

Tencent's investment is not insignificant. In addition to the large budget invested in buying volume, Tencent's 1.4 billion yuan for ecological construction is also real money**: according to the plan, 100 million yuan of the 1.4 billion yuan will be used to build mass e-sports events, and 300 million yuan will be used to jointly launch the "Dream Partner" content ecological incentive plan with nine content platforms. The remaining 1 billion yuan will be invested in ordinary players, and ordinary users who are interested in the creation of game maps will be supported in an all-round way.

But with Tencent's investment, the performance of "Yuanmeng Star" may be the product itself.

In fact, judging from Tencent's ecological construction plan, "Yuan Dream Star" has grasped the UGC core of party games. But when the project team has money, is willing to spend money, and has already spent money, "Yuan Dream Star" still does not meet the ideal expectations. This shows that there is a bias in the understanding of users and the market from the beginning.

As one of the most popular new categories in the current market, party games have shown great market potential in the past period. However, due to the UGC mechanism and social attributes of the party game itself, the user stickiness of the existing products on the market is stronger, and the first-mover advantage of the product will be more obvious.

In this market context, as a latecomer, "Yuan Dream Star" still follows the past market strategy of "product imitation + large investment", trying to use money to smash a way from the existing market, and the effect will naturally be greatly reduced. Another key problem that has been ignored is that "Dream Star" not only failed to catch up with the boom of party games, but also reflected to a certain extent the decoupling of Tencent's old marketing thinking from the current emerging market segments, and the previous "sharp weapon" has become a "blunt weapon", which is also the embarrassing situation that Tencent Games is currently facing.

02 Vigorously failed to produce a miracle, Tencent's model "failed" In the past, Tencent relied on the market strategy of "product imitation + large-scale investment" to seize the opportunity in many tracks. One of the classic cases is "Peace Elite", which has a similar online background to "Dream Star".

In March 2017, PUBG, a tactical competitive shooter sandbox game developed by South Korea's Krafton studio, became an instant hit. In just half a year, some domestic game manufacturers have shifted the "chicken game" model to the mobile game market, and it has attracted unprecedented attention from players.

However, Tencent Games later proved that the time gap seems to be shortened with "money ability".

According to ** report, Tencent first invested 70 billion won in the South Korean developer of "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" before launching product research and development, so as to obtain the domestic copyright of the game. Since then, the Tencent Games team has worked overtime to develop Peace Elite, and in February 2018, it began continuous free testing.

With the original IP licensing and a huge traffic pool built by ace social products such as WeChat and QQ, Peace Elite quickly surpassed other competitors in the market, and eventually grew into the world's highest-grossing shooter today.

Combined with the birth of "Peace Elite" and "Yuanmeng Star", it is not difficult to find that Tencent Games does not seem to care too much about the timing of the product launch. On the contrary, Tencent Games is very good at observing market trends, and has formed a set of "Tencent models".

Whenever a certain type of product passes the market test and becomes a big hit in the market, Tencent will quickly create a similar product. Although by the time the product is launched, it may have been more than half a year later than other products, as long as the "authentic bloodline" is emphasized in the new user group through the purchase of copyrights, and at the same time the use of its own social ecology and the whole network purchase volume to start the product voice, it can always be put in exchange for the market to achieve "late strike".

But this method has also allowed Tencent to miss rare emerging game outlets, such as the party game market, and further back, the open world category that was missed because of Tencent's "arrogance" is still an after-dinner topic in the game industry.

For example, the successful experience of "Peace Elite" has not been fulfilled again in "Yuan Dream Star". And the "fresh week" experience encountered by "Yuan Dream Star" directly reflects the failure of the "Tencent model".

Just from the market data, it can be seen that "Yuan Dream Star" can "play extraordinarily" as long as it is launched, and it will be quickly beaten back to its original shape if it is not launched. In the current market, the amount of buying is no longer the "panacea" for creating popular models, and the fun of the game itself is the key to success.

In the past ten years, the domestic game industry has embarked on a road of "high-quality products". Major game manufacturers have been spending money on game copyrights, audiovisual experiences, and marketing promotions in order to create "triple-A masterpieces" that can attract Chinese players. However, this industry trend has not continued to have a positive impact on the market, but has led to "heavyweight products" everywhere, and there are not many games that can really impress users.

The main reason behind this is that the competitive strategy with the work as the core needs to invest a lot of manpower and material resources to ensure the successful implementation and launch of the project to the market, and the opportunity cost and trial and error cost are too high. Compared with self-developed innovation, the practice of directly imitating successful cases can obviously save a lot of costs and avoid the risk of trial and error, and only need to focus on marketing to achieve return on investment and profitability.

As a result, domestic game manufacturers began to indulge in "changing skins", using "gacha games" to empty players' wallets, and studying which charging model can stimulate people's desire for krypton. In the end, it ignores the user's gaming experience and even the value of the game itself.

03 What do players really want? After the baptism of high-quality products everywhere and various modes of "648 recharge", the current game market has become more challenging for product content and project teams. Because the budget for advertising is always limited, the game product wants to maintain growth by relying not on continuous marketing actions, but on user retention achieved by the game's high-quality content itself.

What's special about party games is that players not only experience fun during the game, but also satisfy their social needs. Whether it's a popular game streamer or an ordinary gamer, what really values is the gaming experience based on social connections on the Internet.

It is precisely for this reason that the game slices that are widely disseminated on social ** platforms spread the value of the game itself and social value in the form of UGC. Therefore, the long-term growth of party games does not depend on temporary launches, but on the community atmosphere formed spontaneously by users - which is what players are eager to experience in party games.

Perhaps seeing the "failure" of the past strategy in the party game market, "Yuan Dream Star" has now begun to adjust its strategy, weaken the concept of park UGC, and instead integrate more gameplay, and develop in the direction of "QQ game lobby". This has also led to the fact that "Yuanmeng Star" is becoming a "hodgepodge" stitched together by various games such as "Peace Elite", "QQ Speed", "Werewolf Killing" and "Defending the Carrot".

However, without a community foundation, simply adding to the gameplay will not bring the same amount of expansion in the market. Especially when some gameplay has been eliminated by players, "Yuan Dream Star" is enchanted with gameplay integration, which reflects the urgent mentality of Tencent Games to get out of trouble.

Returning to the market value itself, if a game product wants to succeed, "fun" is the most fundamental competitiveness. In other words, the gameplay of the product itself is the "1" that gradually moves from penniless to successful, while the investment budget, IP licensing, and social ecology are only "0". The strategy of stitching the gameplay of "Yuan Dream Star" is obviously also to improve its own playability, but Tencent Games' practice of "imitating itself" still does not solve the flaw of lack of actual market demand and differentiated experience.

In the past, the "Tencent model" solved the problem of how to generate "1" by gaining insight into the market and then replicating. With the help of other "0", the market strategy dominated by "traffic thinking" has achieved the transcendence of competing products of the same type.

But now, the game industry has entered the stage of homogeneous stock competition, and it is becoming more and more difficult to generate "1", and the logic of market operation has also changed. This requires manufacturers to step out of the "traffic thinking", return to the product itself, start from the perspective of user value, and replace the centralized outbreak with long-term operation.

At Tencent's annual meeting held on January 29, Ma Huateng admitted frankly that Tencent's current claim to be the world's largest game company seems to be lying on the credit book of success. In the past year, in the face of the challenges of the new generation of game companies and the transformation from gameplay to content, Tencent was at a loss for a while and launched new products, but they were not as good as expected.

Regarding "Yuanmeng Star", which has just been launched for more than a month, Ma Huateng said: Although it is late, its social component also represents Tencent's base camp. It is definitely necessary to go all out, and it requires all businesses to be combined and explore and develop together.

From this point of view, for a period of time in the future, "Yuanmeng Star" will still be pinned on by Tencent Games, but there is really not much time left for "Yuanmeng Star".