Title Image|Visual China.
The Spring Festival, the most important festival for Chinese, is becoming a "social asura field" for many young Chinese. In the face of a group of relatives who most of them meet no more than twice a year, they say slightly embarrassing New Year's greetings, they can't smoke cigarettes, they can't drink alcohol, and they don't have one of the three mahjong pokers, and they call you that you say that the New Year's flavor of some virtual worlds is stronger now. In short, the two sides have always been a little unable to talk together.
In fact, there is no need for the parents' generation to try to understand or change this phenomenon, because this is the "social cycle law" of modern humans. Young people struggling in the fast-paced modern life of 996 and Big and Small Weeks are gradually losing time to take care of intimate relationships. It is an indisputable fact that the "offline social physical strength" of contemporary young people has been weakened, and the phenomenon of the reduction of the social radius has become an indisputable fact.
As a result, they shifted their social focus to online, hoping to break the traditional social restrictions, choose their own social methods and people, and achieve a burden-free "zero-sugar social" (just like a can of zero-sugar Coke, get the emotional support and emotional satisfaction brought by socializing without burden). According to a survey by the Just So Soul Institute, 45% of young people use online to expand their social networks and have fun. They aspire to build their own social world on a highly integrated, low-barrier platform, build intimacy through joint activities, and get emotional feedback. However, this flexible social model is often difficult to achieve in the real world.
In the past, countries such as Europe, the United States and Japan used "party culture" as a connection point, and broke the intergenerational barriers through party games such as "Monopoly" and "Mario Party", so that different forms of social relationships can be easily connected together through games, so as to promote the further cohesion of family and friendship. According to statistics from game platforms such as Steam & Switch, well-known overseas party games such as "Super Mario Party" and "Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout" have exceeded 10 million sales, of which young players account for nearly 70%, which shows the huge audience size of party games.
For the Chinese market, major festivals such as the Spring Festival may become Chinese's own party, but can we have a platform similar to "party games" to break the boundaries of space and tradition, and invite family and friends to participate in common festival activities to build a real "family fun"?
It's not just a "party game".
Two months ago, when Tencent launched "Yuan Dream Star" with an all-in trend, the entire industry was surprised by Tencent's investment in this product, after all, the industry generally believed that this was just a new product of the "Goose Factory" in the social party game track.
But in fact, Tencent wants more than just a party game. According to the report of the interface, at Tencent's 2023 annual meeting, Ma Huateng personally explained why Tencent attaches so much importance to "Yuanmeng Star":
"Dream Star" is not only a game, but also has a social component, which is Tencent's base camp, and it is necessary to go all out, combine all businesses, and explore common development. ”
Starting from this basic idea, "Yuanmeng Star" has not only been promoted to a strategic level, but also mobilized the relevant resources of the entire Tencent ecosystem, which also makes it have the potential to connect various ecological platforms. What is this like? In the past, if you want to watch a movie with a friend or object, you have to find the major **apps first, and at the same time, you have to use other software to hang the voice, even if there is also a software that can watch movies while playing voice, but once you don't want to watch a movie, you want to play games together, then you have to cut another app.
At the beginning of the design of "Yuanmeng Star", Tencent Games wanted to break the boundaries of the platform of vertical scenes, and reconstruct all the mainstream gameplay, content, and people's needs that have not been well solved on the market through a platform like "Yuanmeng Star". As the original R&D intention of the R&D team of "Dream Star" disclosed in the open letter, "I hope to create a small metaverse for every 'Star Treasure' and provide a stage for every interesting soul to bloom." ”
Therefore, don't think of "Dream Star" as simple, and think of it as a party game, so the competition pattern is too small. One of the important battlegrounds of "Yuanmeng Star" is socialization, which is not a conclusion that Tencent has only recently thought about. According to Sohu News, "Yuan Dream Star" has been tested many times before the official **, and the time point is even earlier than the domestic mobile game products with the same theme. After the official version of "Yuan Dream Star" was launched, it also directly opened up the WeChat QQ relationship chain, and the purpose was also to better integrate socially.
"Yuanmeng Star" has also continued to strengthen social functions recently, including updating a new feature: "scan code" based on QQ and WeChat to play together, and "face-to-face" scanning code PK during the Spring Festival party is an ideal use scenario for the new feature, which can also help "Yuanmeng Star" reach new users on a large scale.
Through the application of new technologies and social relationship chains, "Yuan Dream Star" is reconstructing the experience and habits of online social games for mass users, such as "everything in the dream" in the mouth of players, users can drop a "star partner" in the game anytime and anywhere to play together, and with the support of Tencent resources, from games, film and television, animation to **, user needs can always be met.
In the upcoming Spring Festival scene, pull your family together to dance the dragon or fly the dragon in the square, send red envelopes to each other with friends, and grab profits in the rain of red envelopes in Dream Square. This is indeed the prototype of Chinese party culture, and people are looking forward to what new ways users can develop, which is another reason why Yuanmengxing can't be simply defined by games: strong UGC capabilities, allowing users to define their own world, and even their own "Spring Festival", which is an unprecedented product model.
Illustration: Yuanmeng Star UGC map "Dragon Teng Cyber to New Year").
As a future-oriented strategic product that explores new social networking and new entertainment platforms, only by putting "Yuanmeng Star" into the entire Internet technology and intergenerational evolution to observe, can we see the upper limit of the development of "Yuanmeng Star". With the efforts of Tencent Games, "Dream Star" also got a start of more than 80 million registered users in the first month of its launch, which is a good start, and it also allows the industry to continue to pay attention to its progress in the social party game track.
Can "Yuan Dream Star" win a ticket for Tencent to win the metaverse ticket?
Although ten years have passed, the most exciting discussion on crossing the technology cycle is probably Ma Huateng's ticket theory ten years ago: in the last mobile Internet cycle, Tencent "broke out in a cold sweat" to grab the "standing ticket" of WeChat.
At the 2023 annual meeting, Ma Huateng once again put forward Tencent's sense of urgency to go through the cycle: "As Tencent's current daily activity and the strongest platform in the entire ecosystem, WeChat has a history of 12 years, and QQ is looking forward to the next transformation for 12 years".
How Tencent Games sprouts is also a problem. Tencent's game business needs to understand the development direction of new technologies and the social needs of the new generation of users, and scenarios such as the Spring Festival have naturally become the best entry point and time for experimentation.
Therefore, in this Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon and the new version, we do see that "Yuanmeng Star" is trying to diversify as many actions as possible, and even many of them are experimental attempts: through gameplay expansion, UGC ecological construction, IP linkage, BD cooperation, star anchor cooperation and other platform construction to create and connect more online and offline social entertainment scenes, and at the same time, the Spring Festival customs are also reproduced in the metaverse, for example, there are fireworks shows in Yuanmeng Square, lantern flights, dragon dances, square dances and other lively activities, Let players feel the strong flavor of the New Year in the virtual world.
In general, many of the attempts of "Yuan Dream Star" in the Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon are long-term and are future-oriented to accumulate experience. At the key node of the Spring Festival, which is also the peak of Chinese social interaction behavior, the attempt of "Yuan Dream Star" to create a "small meta-universe for family carnival" is providing a new social scene for young people and has become an important exploration for Tencent's future.
As the Internet continues to grow, the way we access content, entertainment, and socialize continues to change. And the social mode of "Yuan Dream Star" is also worth looking forward to in the Spring Festival, an important node of natural Chinese family reunion and door-to-door socialization.