Recently, the official game of "Master of Mystery" released a preview of the actual scene on the birthday of the male protagonist Klein Moretti, which appeared on the Weibo hot search list, and also rushed to the third place in the whole site list of station B. Such a high popularity, on the one hand, stems from the addition of IP influence, and on the other hand, thanks to the fact that the texture of the actual game scene is really remarkable.
In the past few years, IP adapted games have appeared on the stage, but from "Dragon Fantasy" to "Under One Man", IP adapted games have frequently exploded, players have constantly passively lowered their expectations, and the market has also regarded IP adaptation as a cancer. In the final analysis, it is not that IP adaptation is undesirable, in the extensive historical process of the game industry, the quality rate of IP adapted games is almost the same as that of the entire industry.
In the past one or two years, the texture of IP adapted games such as "Town Soul Street: Born to be King", "Legend of Mortal Immortals: Human World", "Douluo Continent: Shrek Academy" and other IP adaptation games has been significantly improved compared with the earlier batch of products of the same type, but after the game industry has entered a period of high-quality products, their progress is still not fast enough.
As for whether Kuaishou Games' self-developed "Master of Mystery" can revive the glory of IP adaptation games, it still depends on whether its comprehensive quality during the open beta can catch up with the speed of continuous high-quality products in the game industry.
The self-developed stepping stone of Kuaishou games
In February 2023, when the concept PV of "Master of Mystery" first exploded, the original author, a squid who loves diving, Zeng Dao, said that the game is similar to "Genshin Impact", and at present, the similarity between the two is that they are both multi-terminal interoperable games and RPG types. There is no need to repeat the multi-terminal interoperability, in the past one or two years, "three-terminal interoperability" has been the standard configuration of key projects of major game manufacturers, and in terms of game types, the RPG that focuses on "playing" and "plot experience" is indeed the most suitable type for the temperament of "Master of Mystery".
In terms of game style, "Master of Mystery" is completely different from "Genshin Impact", the latter has a brighter painting style**, and the former continues the weirdness and darkness of the original**, which can be seen from the art style of scenes such as Black Thorn Security Company and Chanis Gate in the actual trailer. The original setting of "Master of Mystery" is based on the Victorian era of 19th century England, and it blends Cthulhu style with steampunk worldview, which also makes the differentiation of the IP adaptation game quite significant.
As a new label, the game development team behind "Master of Mystery" is not well-known in the universe, it is a self-developed game label launched by Kuaishou Games in 2022, and it is also a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kuaishou, and "Master of Mystery" is the label's first self-developed game. It may seem strange that China Literature Group handed over the heavyweight IP of "Master of Mystery" to a new label, but it is also reasonable in terms of capital relations and the seniority of the team members of the Snap Universe.
In 2019, Tencent and Kuaishou had planned to establish a joint venture to focus on the game business, and although this joint venture did not come to fruition, in May 2022, Tencent and Kuaishou entered into a 2022 game cooperation framework agreement, under which the two parties agreed to carry out a number of cooperation and other marketing and promotion service framework agreements for games, as well as to provide certain new marketing and promotion services.
Tencent's stake in Kuaishou and the in-depth cooperation between the two sides in the game business are a major background. On the other hand, although the snap universe is a new label, the team members have a lot of industry qualifications.
In 2021, when Kuaishou underwent a new round of organizational restructuring and upgraded the game business department to the Kuaishou Game Division, the helm of Kuaishou's game business also changed from Tang Yuyu, the wife of Kuaishou founder Su Hua, to Xu Jie, the former director of NetEase Lei Huo Zhurong Studio, and Xu Jie is the founder of the snap universe.
After joining NetEase in 2007, Xu Jie has participated in the R&D and production of many game projects such as "The World II", "A Chinese Ghost Story" and "Against the Cold". When the squid who loves diving promoted "The Master of Mystery", he also revealed that many people in the Snap Universe team were dug from Dachang, and there are precedents for successful works, and they have all read "The Master of Mystery" ** and like it very much.
The old team of the new label has undoubtedly reassured players, after all, the gamification of "Master of Mystery" is easy to say, and difficult to say. It is easy because the world view is mature and grand, and the size setting is extremely complete, which provides rich content support for the development and continuous operation of the game, and the difficulty is because the 22 sequences in the ** must be landed in the RPG type, and maintain the fullness of the plot, the uniqueness of the career design, and the numerical balance of the combat gameplay, which is quite a test of the strength of the production team.
As a popular IP, there are many reasons why the game development of "Master of Mystery" is "easy to do but difficult to do", such as how to meet the demands of the original party as much as possible, while attracting a more general player base. It can be seen that after entering the development stage, the game production team attaches great importance to feedback from the outside world, and the official blog of the game will openly solicit "ideal "Master of Mystery" gameplay from the outside world as early as the beginning of 2023.
The final success of the blockbuster IP of "Master of Mystery" is not only related to whether Kuaishou Games can be a blockbuster in self-development, but also affects the confidence of the outside world in IP adapted games.
Labor pains in the transition
The "hardware configuration" of the new label of the Snap Universe, as well as the high quality of the game's actual scene and the restoration of the art style, are the reasons why the outside world has high expectations for the game "Master of Mystery". Although the final market competitiveness of a game still needs to wait for the testing stage to be combined with a comprehensive evaluation of the plot and gameplay, at least in terms of "drawing cakes", the "Master of Mysteries" game does look big and round.
In the past few years, the results of IP adaptation of games have not been ideal. "Dragons", which was born before "The Master of Mystery", received many negative reviews such as "ruining the original work", "forcing krypton" and "poor optimization" before the open beta, and it quickly declined after the public beta, and the famous "Gattuso Scattered Rice" incident became the fuse for the game to go downhill, but in the final analysis, it was still "liver and krypton" that was too dissuading and the game itself was not fun.
"Dragon Fantasy" is not an exception, in recent years, whether it is adapted from the domestic IP of "Under One Man" and "Fox Demon Little Red Lady", or adapted from the overseas IP of "Magic ** Catalog" and "Harry Potter: Magic Awakening", most of them are at the peak of the service, and soon after that, the popularity and reviews have declined sharply, and many of the games have now been suspended. Among these IP adaptation games, "Harry Potter: Magic Awakening", which has a relatively good texture and reputation, is still in operation, but it has never been rejuvenated due to problems such as "liver" and "forced socialization".
It can be said that the emotions of domestic players about IP adapted games are quite complex, on the one hand, they expect their favorite IP to be gamified, but when IP really enters the game development process, it will turn to "miserable adaptation". It's no wonder that players are fickle, after all, there are very few successful IPs that have been gamified earlier, and there is only one "Naruto" that carries the beat, and in 2023, "Naruto" will enter the top five ranks of two-dimensional games many times in a single month.
The reasons for the failure of many IP-adapted games in the past few years cannot be generalized, but they also have commonalities, which need to be viewed in the context of the development of the game industry. Before 2015, the mobile game market stayed in the light era, and the representative products of this period, such as "Fishing Master 2" and "My Name is MT", were all lightweight products, after 2015, with the iteration of mobile devices and the acceleration of 4G networks, the era of heavy games arrived, and during this period, MMORPG and ARPG games such as "Fantasy Journey to the West" and "Tai Chi Panda" began to occupy the mainstream position.
At the same time, with the drastic changes in the mobile era and the release of dividends in the mobile game market, traditional terminal game manufacturers and web game manufacturers have begun to turn the ship around and accelerate the layout of games on the mobile terminal. At this point, "heavy games" and "terminal page games changing hands trend" began to jointly affect a number of game products born in the extensive development stage of mobile games, such as "Dragon Fantasy" "liver and krypton", "Under One Man", "Fox Demon Little Red Lady" and other games mixed with a variety of terminal games and mobile games, are the embodiment of this influence.
Over time, IP-adapted games have also been called "poison", but objectively speaking, in the general cycle of worrying about the quality rate of the entire game industry and facing innovation bottlenecks, IP-adapted games are at best just a microcosm of the industry ecology. Nowadays, after a whole cycle of rise, explosion and cooling of the mobile game market, it has entered the era of high-quality products from the extensive development stage, and IP-adapted games are naturally in this big wave.
However, at this point, can the IP adapted mobile game stand up and say "it was before, and now it is now"? The answer is that it's not yet time, and although IP adapted games have made progress today, they are still not fast enough.
Revive the glory of IP adaptation games
Since the end of 2022, the public beta of "Town Soul Street: Born to be King", "The Legend of Mortal Immortals: The Human World", "Douluo Continent: Shrek Academy", etc., has improved a lot compared with the early IP adaptation games, and the current App Store scores of the three games are all 4Above 5 points, "Douluo Continent: Shrek Academy" is also the highest-rated existence in the "Douluo Continent" series of games. Judging from the score alone, the boutique rate of IP-adapted games does have **.
In addition, these games have also learned the lessons of many IP adapted games in the past to a certain extent, such as "Soul Street: Born to be King", which has no hard requirements for liver and krypton, and is more in line with the lightweight game needs of current players. "The Legend of Mortal Immortals: The Human World" and "Douluo Continent: Shrek Academy" are both MMORPG genres, and the krypton level is much higher than that of "Town Soul Street: Born to be King", and the liver degree is at the same level as most MMORPG games on the current market.
However, the above is only a vertical comparison of the same type of products in the past few years, and a comparison of the head game products of the same period from a horizontal perspective, the quality of these IP adaptation games is still not optimistic enough, and each of them also has obvious shortcomings, such as the low modeling accuracy of "Douluo Continent: Shrek Academy", the lack of freedom in "The Legend of Mortal Immortals: The Human World", and the lack of impact and action in "Town Soul Street: Born to be King", etc., so there is no shortage of complaints in the player group.
IP adapted games are indeed improving, but the current competition in the mobile game market is more fierce than ever before, and in the context of extremely crowded vertical tracks, players occupy the active position and choose the best ones to play, while game products and manufacturers are in a passive position, and the hierarchy is very clear: the "hexagonal warriors" with no shortcomings in all aspects are in the first echelon, the products with unipolar advantages are in the second echelon, and the games that lack outstanding highlights but obvious shortcomings are at the bottom.
Substituting the specific vertical genre, it is also an action game, and "Soul Street: Born to Be King" will inevitably be compared by players with other games of the same type, such as "Honkai Impact III", "Battle Double Pamish", "Crystal Nucleus", etc., which are outstanding in action gameplay. There is a contrast, there is naturally "damage", after the launch of "Crystal Nucleus" and out of the circle, many players of "Soul Street: Born to be King" switched to "Crystal Nucleus".
In the film and television roaming linkage development of the same IP, the game is undoubtedly the existence with the highest threshold for the release of the IP effect, and the active players of "Dragon Fantasy" reached 10 million that year, and it was still "cool when you say it's cool". The threshold essentially depends on the level of the audience's input cost, and the cost of paying for online articles, comics, dramas and other content forms is not up to about 100 yuan, but the game is different, it is a long-term operation product, which requires continuous investment from the audience, and the input cost is not at the same level as that of online articles, comics, dramas, etc., which cannot be supported by feelings alone.
After mobile games entered the era of content as king, the threshold for the release of IP effects has obviously been further improved, which is also the reason why games such as "Soul Street: Born to be King", "Legend of Mortal Immortals: Human World", "Douluo Continent: Shrek Academy" and other games have a decent reputation, but their performance is mediocre in terms of out of the circle. It can be said that in the current game market, the gap between the starting point of IP adapted games and original games is narrowing infinitely, and many high-quality original games can quickly break through the circle with the help of word-of-mouth advantages even if they lack IP bonuses.
Returning to "The Master of Mystery", the requirements of the industry environment for this game are clearly visible, that is, compared with "Soul Street: Born to be King", "The Legend of Mortal Immortals: The Human World", "Douluo Continent: Shrek Academy", etc., it must have "absolute highlights", so that it is possible to revive the glory of IP adaptation games.