Simulation is conquering everything.
In the past half a month on the topic of "Phantom Beast Palu", the author once saw a very interesting player discussion - is the base gameplay of "Phantom Beast Palu" survival construction or simulation management?
Frankly speaking, it is difficult to draw a conclusion on this question if it is forced to be black and white, because the long-standing gameplay of simulation management seems to have been playing the role of a "universal blender" in various types of games, to connect and adjust the various types of gameplay in the game. For example, the home system in MMORPG, the infrastructure gameplay in various two-dimensional games, and the allocation and development of territorial resources in 4X SLG can all be summarized as simulated business gameplay, and "Diver Dave", which exploded last year, also combines diving exploration with simulated management.
Focusing on the field of mobile games, small and medium-sized manufacturers are often more fond of simulated business categories, with low development costs and user understanding thresholds, and there is no absolute head product on the market.
As the competition in other subdivisions becomes more and more fierce, there are also well-performing products such as "Jiangnan Hundred Scenes" and "This City Has Good Fields" in the simulation business track, and the head manufacturers have also begun to lay out this track, such as NetEase's "Poetry of the Four Directions" that has been reviewed not long ago and the "Ice Steam Age" mobile game that is being tested overseas.
These products are mainly based on simulated management, or combined with other gameplay as sub-gameplay, in order to create explosive models in the field of simulated management +.
What is it to play Simulation Business?
When it comes to the reasons for being optimistic about simulation management, it is natural to start from the market demand, that is, the needs of players. What kind of unique experience does simulation bring to players?
When it comes to simulation management games, most Chinese players are probably most familiar with running a farm, after all, growing vegetables has always been a heritage in the bones of Chinese, and "stealing vegetables" has once become a popular word throughout China.
The main line of almost all simulation management games is the process of players rationally allocating resources and continuously developing and expanding their business premises, and the game generally sets a series of phased goals for players to guide players to understand, learn and play in depth.
Just as most management simulation games emphasize a slow-paced gaming experience, the positive feedback it brings to the player is also more backward, and the player will only get a great sense of accomplishment when he has completed a phased goal, unlike action or FPS games that can quickly get positive feedback in a single engagement.
In other words, players need to collect and allocate resources for a long period of time in order to achieve a phased goal, which is easy to repeat, and the moment the goal is achieved and the new productivity tools unlocked can reward the player's efforts and invest in resource production more efficiently.
In order to fill the relatively bland game experience in the process of waiting for the accumulation of simulation management, as early as 30 years ago, the 4X design concept of "Civilization" (Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Conquer) introduced external factors to exert influence on the player's simulation process, so as to bring players a stronger sense of urgency and purpose. In the process of conquering, players can also get positive and negative feedback that is different from the simulation management gameplay.
For long-term operation simulation games, in order to ensure the retention of players, some mold products will also intensively design phased goals in the early stage to keep players busy in order to quickly get through the emotional change process of "suppression-release".
This emotion not only includes success and loss, but also in common, players tend to look for a sense of immersion or belonging in the game, and most simulation games are set to let players run their own farms, restaurants, and cities, and players are naturally given the identity of "owners", and the player's "control" of all development can make players gain a sense of belonging faster. Especially in the middle and late stages of the game, players find that they have invested a lot of time, money, and emotional costs, and they are less likely to give up the game.
Now let's go back to the question at the beginning: why is it so difficult to define the type of gameplay in Palu? On the surface, most of the resource collection and technology point unlocking in "Phantom Beast Palu" are directly used to catch pets, rather than reproduction, such as making more advanced **, equipment, and Palu balls, and a few are used to improve the speed and production efficiency of resource collection, strictly speaking, it can only be regarded as a little simulation business element. However, the act of grasping Palu will eventually have an impact on resource collection, and this kind of goal guidance is more indirect and long-term, and the design of each system constitutes a nested and prioritized relationship.
As a result, the advantages and disadvantages of simulation management gameplay are also obvious: compared with more popular competitive games, simulation management games are more slow to heat, and the player's sense of immediate feedback is not strong, and it lacks competitiveness; The advantage is that simulation management includes two common elements of the game: resource allocation and unlocking and upgrading, which is very suitable for becoming a lubricant and linker for various types of gameplay to meet the diverse experience needs of players. This is indeed a good development direction for the game industry that is in the midst of the general trend of gameplay integration.
Before discussing why Sim + is a new track opportunity, it is necessary to explain that since the simulation elements are widely used in various types of games, we will only focus on products that use simulation management gameplay as the primary and secondary gameplay (the proportion is the first or second), such as the development of 4X SLG gameplay is extremely mature, except for some special products, it is not included in the scope of discussion.
The stock era is different from the incremental era, and the user's time and money cost are limited, and competing for users is essentially competing for the user's time. Although simulation management is not as attractive to users as popular categories such as cars, guns and balls, the threshold for understanding the gameplay is lower, and players only need to simply grasp the basic framework before spending a lot of time in it.
For example, the author once played a simulation management game "Pawnshop Life 2", the gameplay is very simple, that is, according to the item valuation to buy low and sell high, the operation method is the same as most simulation management games, and it only needs to click (the shoulder really hurts for a few hours), but the game process and wealth accumulation are very exciting.
As the game enters the middle and late stages, the drawbacks begin to appear, and the wealth that players have accumulated is useless, causing players to gradually lose the motivation to make money. Generally speaking, in traditional simulation games, manufacturers will continue to introduce more productive or repetitive resource collection facilities to consume the accumulated resources of players, but this cycle experience is always repetitive.
Some games will use random events such as "natural disasters" to consume a small amount of accumulated resources accumulated by the player, and this value cannot be set too high to avoid strong negative feedback to the player, so it may be better to introduce external influences or gameplay.
From the perspective of the importance of comprehensive products and gameplay, we can roughly classify the path of "simulated operation +" into three categories:
1.Focusing on simulated management, introducing other gameplay methods to enrich the experience and help consume accumulated resources;
2.Focusing on other gameplay, the simulation management gameplay is introduced to improve part of the experience of the game and enhance the player's sense of belonging to the game.
3.With simulated operation and another way to play as the core, we will build a dual-cycle experience.
The first category of products, such as Tencent's "Chong! Biscuit Man Kingdom", which introduces a relatively light team-RPG gameplay and rich development content, puts the resources of simulation production into character development, and the resources obtained by the character can be put into simulation management again.
Another simulation game that was popular a few years ago, "Frostpunk Age", started from the subject matter, using harsh weather settings to consume player resources and NPC health status, and from the beginning of the game, players accepted this "negative factor design" through intuitive art performance, and players continued to "confront" it in the process of accumulation.
The representative of the second category is Diandian Interactive's last year's hit "Frost Apocalypse", which draws on the simulated management gameplay of "Ice Steam Age", combines its traditional SLG gameplay, and takes the "melting pot" as the goal under the premise of balancing the nested cycle of "resource output, building facilities, expanding scale" and "consuming materials, ensuring the quality of life of residents, improving happiness, and increasing production capacity", and gives this SLG a different "early experience" with simulated management.
Frost Apocalypse simulates business gameplay.
However, most simulation games still tend to be warm-hearted and slow-paced in terms of subject matter, so another type of gameplay that provides positive feedback needs to be added, so that it forms a strong association that promotes each other, which is what we call the dual loop type.
Taking "Diver Dave" as an example, the product that won the best indie game in TGA 2023 is built around the two core gameplay of underwater exploration and simulation management, which is simply "players can obtain resources through underwater exploration, and obtain higher monetization through simulated business gameplay, and use these monetizations to improve players' ability to explore and obtain resources".
Dave The Diver revolves around the gameplay framework of "underwater exploration and management simulation".
From the perspective of the nature of the gameplay of the two, underwater exploration is mainly content-based consumption - the player's exploration of unknown game content, including new regional maps, new fish and material items, etc.; The simulation management is based on repeated experience, and the game refreshes the player's repeated experience by changing the value and quantity of dishes**, the number of dishes and customers, and the number of employees. The differentiated experience brought by the two different nature of gameplay effectively enriches the game content, and the two also play a complementary role in the loop.
On the whole, the process of "allocating resources - developing and growing" of simulation management allows it to take on a core part of the cycle of various types of gameplay (especially cultivation), so as to improve the simple cycle of pure consumption of resources and increase the value of cultivation gameplay, and clearly give players phased feedback on "development".
Two-dimensional, pet-catching, match-3 or the biggest beneficiary
From "Dave the Diver" to "Phantom Beast Palu", simulation management seems to have gradually become the standard gameplay component of these small track hits, and some mobile game manufacturers have also begun to try to combine simulation management gameplay into their own categories to further improve the game experience of players.
Frost Apocalypse is a good example of this, and the "Tarkov-like" shooting track, which manufacturers have focused on in recent years, can also be seen as a combination of simulation gameplay (Dave the Diver's underwater exploration is similar to Tarkov). The author believes that among them, the two-dimensional, pet-catching, and match-3 may be the most beneficial tracks.
For example, Eagle Point's "Ark of Tomorrow: The End" uses simulation management as one of the gameplay methods of the game. Of course, strictly speaking, the construction and production assembly line gameplay of the Terminus should be classified as a sandbox gameplay with simulated business attributes, which is somewhat close to "Phantom Beast Palu".
Pipeline gameplay with construction.
According to some players, the infrastructure gameplay of "Ark of Tomorrow: The End" can be regarded as a 3D upgraded version of the infrastructure in "Ark of Tomorrow", with richer construction gameplay and more comprehensive resource output. However, its function is similar, it is actually a package for the resource output of AFK, but due to the player's investment in the base building process, the benefits are also quite significant. The final effect is to dilute the absolute relationship between dungeon-stamina-output in the past two-dimensional games, and further release the player's daily liver degree.
The NetEase "Poetry of the Four Directions" we mentioned at the beginning is also a two-dimensional style simulation management real-time strategy game, which was tested on the Japanese server last year. According to some market news, this product may be from the tenth division of Netease Interactive Entertainment, and the representative products are "The Shore of the Land" and "Endless Lagrange", which are very similar in category, and it is reasonable to try this.
As for miHoYo's new product, there is no more definite news on the market, and there are rumors that it will be a Q version of the ** simulation game similar to "Animal Crossing".
For miHoYo, two-dimensional games are undoubtedly the most important track. Just as Pony emphasized the importance of competitive games at Tencent's annual meeting a few days ago, today's miHoYo also needs to lay out multiple gameplay tracks to defend its two-dimensional "basic disk", such as simulation management, war chess and even the next-generation open world.
In fact, it can be seen from the reversal of the wind review of "Baijing Corridor" at the beginning of the year that on the one hand, two-dimensional gamers also have a high degree of recognition for innovative gameplay, and it is not that they "don't pay attention to gameplay"; On the other hand, the cultivation experience of traditional two-dimensional games has caused players to have aesthetic fatigue, and the introduction of new forms is bound to bring players an extremely differentiated experience.
The low-threshold simulation operation gameplay will not increase the learning cost of players too much, improve the development experience, and enhance the interaction between players and game characters. For example, in the infrastructure of "Ark of Tomorrow", the characters are actually doing the same type of work as Palu in "Phantom Beast Palu", but they are limited by the 2D picture, so they are not as intuitive (nor as pressing) as "Phantom Beast Palu".
If Ark of Tomorrow: The Endland can interact with the various characters who are working on infrastructure construction in future versions, it will undoubtedly greatly deepen the emotional connection of players to the characters and further improve user stickiness.
There are even players who have proposed to make a two-dimensional beautiful girl style "Diver Dave", maybe there will really be some wonderful chemical reactions.
In addition to the two-dimensional game, the most intuitive may be the "Rock Kingdom" mobile game and other pet catching games, "Phantom Beast Palu" not only adds fire to the pet catching mobile game track, but also provides a good "simulation management + pet catching" template, but how to balance the proportion between the simulation management gameplay and the pet hunting gameplay needs to be controlled by the manufacturer in combination with the actual product.
As for the match-3 gameplay, there are already successful match-3 + simulation products on the market, "Dream Home" and "Dream Garden", that is, the match-3 gameplay produces resources to decorate the home, and after a day's decoration, you can get the relevant props of the match-3 gameplay.
Not long ago, the ** Egg Boy IP match-3 game is likely to adopt a similar mature gameplay framework, and add its own unique UGC tools to build a new game ecology.
Simulation management is a classic but very potential and adaptable gameplay, it may not be the "main course" on the table, but a table of banquets also needs other dishes to decorate and change the taste. What other gameplay opportunities can be collided with simulation management? I think this will be a big attraction for the game market in the next two years.