Text |Hayashi Fujiko.
The 2024 Spring Festival mobile game market ushered in a double harvest. According to Diandian data, from February 9th to February 17th, 11 games, including "Honor of Kings", "Peace Elite", "Egg Boy Party" and "Genshin Impact", exceeded 100 million yuan, and the total turnover of the mobile game market was preliminarily estimated at about 5 billion yuan. At the same time, the volume of iOS also increased by 32% year-on-year86%, among which "Against the Cold" and "Yuan Dream Star" performed outstandingly.
However, judging from previous years, the good results of the Spring Festival will not have a huge impact on the market scale. According to QuestMobile data, the number of active users in January, when the Spring Festival falls in 2023, rose to 6500 million, but fell back to 5 in February800 million, and the number of active mobile game users will remain at about 600 million in 2023; In the whole year, the addition of new games only affected the proportion of users of various game types, but could not bring much positive contribution to the market, and mobile games have become a reality in the era of stock competition.
The benefit of the stock market is to stimulate the quality of the entire industry, and the high-profile games to be launched this year, including "Condor Shooting", "Singing Tide", "Delta Action", "Jeopardy Zero", "Sword Network Three Unbounded", etc., all have high-quality guarantees, but for manufacturers, after the high quality of the game has changed from a selling point to an admission ticket, in this stock market, it is necessary to find a new breakthrough for the stability of the existing user pool and the increase in mining.
From the point of view of the Spring Festival party game track war, Tencent's "Yuan Dream Star" has been held high in terms of purchase volume and publicity, and has achieved a wide range of dissemination and penetration of the game volume in a short period of time, while NetEase's "Egg Boy Party" has completed the user's social precipitation through long-term publicity, and once again consolidated the loyalty of users during the Spring Festival.
It can be said that long-term refined marketing for segmented users has become the second battlefield for game manufacturers in addition to content development, and when game reputation has an increasing impact on players' decision-making, establishing, maintaining, and enhancing brand reputation in the minds of users through marketing actions has become the key to the breakthrough of today's long-term game operations.
At present, young users are more and more susceptible to the overflow value of goods, and the success of the blind box lies in providing double happiness in collecting x random, and on the game side, in addition to the fun of the game itself, the additional emotional value provided by brand marketing is also becoming the key direction of current manufacturers.
The operation of the mobile game "Against the Cold" on the official account is a good reflection of this. Send an open beta notification SMS to complain that the boss is an "old thing", because players voted and took the initiative to shout at the competitor "Glory of Kings" on Weibo, in the unexpected copywriting again and again, "Against the Cold" has confirmed the "crazy" character design, not only often has topics rushed to the hot search, but no one cares about the information blog posts will have thousands of comments under the "crazy" operation, and the player's liking for the "crazy" official blog can be imagined.
Previously, most games only used Weibo as an information window, but the mobile game "Against the Cold" continued the ancestral skills, made full use of the stranger's social attributes of Weibo, and used interesting copywriting to arouse players' desire to interact, turning the official blog into an interesting and personalized surfing partner. After having their own "crazy" character, not only do players have a higher desire to interact on super talk, but players also have a stronger impression of the "Against the Cold" represented by the official blog, which truly realizes the equal communication between the game side and young players on the platform.
For "sticking users", in addition to increasing the goodwill of players with interesting content, the manufacturer's initiative to "show goodwill" often has a miraculous effect. miHoYo is good at applying this kind of "understanding users" to the level of content promotion, and has won low-cost breakthrough communication for itself.
Previously, miHoYo officially paid attention to the fact that a Japanese artist "Genshin Impact" guessed the original painting of the character** was welcomed by players, so he took the initiative to find an artist to promote cooperation, and more ** of the same series not only allowed gamers to see fresh and good-looking content, but also made players empathize with "he really understands me" because the manufacturer was willing to spend money to "urge the change".
With the blessing of the strong two-dimensional atmosphere of station B itself, the number of ** has reached nearly one million**, forming a positive effect at the communication level. It can be said that the return exceeds expectations in one fell swoop, precisely because miHoYo has done a good job of insight and intimate feedback on user groups.
In addition, the desire of young users to express themselves, their sensitivity to brand reputation, and their pickiness have increased at the same time, which is also inspiring company executives or game producers in various fields to pay more attention to communication with users. From Lao Luo's sharp evaluation for his own eye-catching, to Xiaomi's car-making Lei Jun's continuous Weibo campaign, it has verified the influence of high-level lower-profile on the market, and this trend has now been learned by game manufacturers.
In order to build momentum for "Sword Network III: Unbounded", Yu Yuxian, the game producer of "Sword Network III", has interacted with players on Weibo from the past three times a week to almost every day, maintaining close contact with players and actively acting as a game information window and "customer service", not only releasing the sincerity of the production team with the help of users' active daily social channels, strengthening the brand's social reputation, but also providing players with a "peace of mind" through the real-time dialogue between decision-makers and players, and enhancing users' trust and recognition of the game brand.
In the face of the hot search on the player's ridicule, Yu Yuxian took the initiative to participate and respond positively.
From bringing "fun" to players to perceiving that the game "understands me" and "peace of mind", it is by providing users with more emotional value and forming emotional resonance with the game brand, and this positive user feedback will be transmitted to the game's word-of-mouth, which is conducive to maintaining users' long-term love and loyalty to the game.
If there is anything else that can attract users outside the circle for the game, "national style" should be the king. From the early national tide fever to the more subdivided "new Chinese" trend last year, the form of national style in the young user group is still extending and evolving.
The game field has naturally taken this express train, "Glory of Kings" and Dunhuang jointly launched a series**, "Egg Boy Party" allows players to visit the Forbidden City in the game and collect cultural relics, "Genshin Impact" and Sanxingdui Museum lead players to understand the historical ...... of cultural relicsThese actions of game manufacturers are not only in response to players' love for Chinese culture, but also through the cultural precipitation of games, the cultural identity of young users is transferred to the brand identity and value identity of games.
At the same time, cross-circle use of cultural labels can also tap new increments of communication. In this regard, games that include graphics, costume design, ** and other forms have natural content advantages, but to maximize this advantage, in addition to paying attention to how games and culture collide with new sparks, it is also necessary to find a suitable carrying channel in addition to the game.
For example, the Dong Dage electronic music battle song in the national style area "Xianzhou" in "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" can harvest 352 at station B40,000** volume, it is the integration of Eastern and Western cultures on it, which has been released at station B with its own national style content soil, and such fresh** content has also attracted many non-player groups to the game.
And "Glory of Kings" invited Professor Ge Jianxiong as an academic consultant for a specific version, and launched a sci-fi series with Liu Cixin**, which can rush to the hot search on Weibo, and it is precisely because of the long-term activity of many historians and big Vs on Weibo that the aggregation of historical and science fiction users has been formed.
After the volume quality, the volume culture precipitation may be the next stage of the game industry's general trend. After all, the current game needs to have more content worth digging into while providing entertainment, and games with cultural precipitation can always bring more surprises to players, and the user identity brought by various cultures is more solid and durable than simply playing happiness in terms of narrowing the distance between players and games.
Making the game out of the circle is one of the long-term pursuits of manufacturers, in the past, celebrity endorsement was the most mainstream choice, and shooting dozens of seconds or even just making a picture can give full play to the star effect to make the game go to the mass market. However, in the era of segmentation, "stars" are also imprisoned in the circle, so we see more and more games adding to endorsement marketing, trying to penetrate more people with the superposition of voice.
For example, Tencent's "Yuanmeng Star" during the Spring Festival to break the circle strategy, it adopted multi-dimensional voice aggregation and superposition. found many young traffic endorsements, and with the help of star effects, the game "brushed its face" in the mass entertainment industry; At the same time, the head up master of the game of station B and the KOL of Douyin anchor are invited to release content to form a communication matrix for game users. These two steps have contributed to the full coverage of vertical users and pan-game users, and there is a superposition of the volume of communication at the user circle.
In addition, Zhang Daxian's Douyin live broadcast also added to the topic of the game. Tencent's historic handshake on Douyin has brought cross-platform flow of traffic, and the lifting of platform restrictions has allowed big anchors to rush to Douyin, a high-traffic platform, with "Yuanmeng Star". Zhang Daxian's live broadcast "Yuan Dream Star" won the game anchor championship in Douyin station, and also sent "Yuan Dream Star" to the first place on the Douyin brand game list.
On the whole, the final exit of "Yuanmeng Star" during the Spring Festival is the explosive result of the re-aggregation of multi-user circles and multi-dimensional topics, and with the help of the traffic hub of Weibo hot search, the popularity of the game will be spread again, which will further increase the circle-breaking reach of "Yuanmeng"-related content, and complete the first wave of KPIs for the establishment of awareness and the opening of the whole network.
It can be said that in the context of user circle stratification and attention distraction, finding game up and pan-game KOLs to form a communication matrix can still generate a certain amount of heat in the game circle, but by gluing multi-dimensional topics to form a cross-platform and cross-circle voice superposition, it will obviously have stronger communication potential than simple buying volume and regular celebrity KOL endorsement live broadcasts.
However, the good news is that the diversity of user concerns also means that there are more dimensions of topics and popularity that can be extracted, and if you collect those elements that can be 1+1>2, you will have the opportunity to make the game's word-of-mouth continue to consolidate among existing users with the advancement of marketing, and become a source of curiosity among potential users.
End. In the era of game stock, if ensuring the quality of content is the basis for manufacturers to "go to the table", then establishing, improving, and spreading brand reputation is the key to determining whether a game can be based on the market for a long time. The continuous operation of word-of-mouth is still based on "user-oriented" and close to the actual needs of current users.
Whether it's providing additional emotional value, promoting cultural identity, identity, or allowing users to personally participate in driving the popularity of the game, they are creating more dimensions of social experience for users, and social is also a lifestyle that young people, the main audience of games, love and excel at. The problem of finding increments in the stock still needs to be explored by the industry in many aspects, but at least at the level of game marketing, the giants have begun to move in the direction of leveraging the user's lifestyle.
Original article, ** must indicate the source.