With the slowdown in the growth of the total number of players, the demographic dividend is gradually disappearing, and the entire game market has entered the stock stage. The number of products is gradually increasing, the difficulty of product acquisition is also gradually increasing, and the intensification of market competition will become more prominent in 2021.
In order to compete for users in the stock market, the industry has tried many methods in recent years, such as differentiation - through better game quality, content to establish market competition barriers. In addition to differentiation, deep ploughing the game community is also an effective means to solve the problem of acquisition.
In the stock era, the game community is breaking the siege of products
The game community is a platform that provides players with game-related information content, and also provides players with game communication and discussion.
Blizzard has attributed its success to years of hard work on the Battle.com platform since 1996, and fists can make League of Legends the world's most popular e-sports project, and its community ecology that has spent ten years operating can be described as indispensable. Looking at these successful global products/companies, the common feature is that they have realized the importance of the game community to their long-term operations.
In China, the role of the game community has also been reflected early. The earliest gaming community is generally considered to be the cat poker founded in 1997. Since then, a number of early game communities such as BBS, NGA, and Tieba have begun to appear, becoming a concentration of players on the Internet.
After entering the era of mobile Internet in 2014, the popularity of mobile devices has ushered in the transformation of the game community, and many communities such as BBS and Tieba have begun to concentrate from PCs to mobile devices, and many vertical game community APP have emerged.
In the process, the game community has shown two significant changes in two dimensions: horizontally, the number of communities has increased, and the access methods have become more and more convenient; vertically, the community content has gradually become subdivided, providing more interest space for players with different preferences.
There is a growing trend between the game community and player interests, and the role and value of the game community itself are constantly iterating.
From "useful" to "interesting", the social value of the gaming community has become more and more prominent
The essence of community is the gathering of people, and the game community is no exception. But since its inception, the role of the game community for players has not been static, but has undergone changes in the tools of 1.0, the community to 2.0, and then to the interest community of 3.0.
Stage 1.0: The core role of the game community is often focused on the functional level of viewing version content, raiders, and gossip information, etc., and only plays the role of fragmented entertainment of "use up and go". For the game side, the game community is more like a content tool that condenses traffic outside the game than a community.
Stage 2.0: The game community is really moving towards the community, paying more attention to connecting content with players, and actively using PGC, KOL, etc. to strengthen the stickiness of players to the game, so as to precipitate the game ecology. Considering the impact of the product life cycle and the disappearance of the demographic dividend at the environmental level, the game community has also become the key to the accurate distribution of game products and the establishment of a moat.
Stage 3.0: The core of the game community is no longer limited to the connection between content and people, but to segment the content by exploring user interests, strengthening communication between people, and ultimately forming a community based on interests.
Compared with the previous two stages, the value presented by the 3.0 community is mainly manifested in two aspects: one is to significantly strengthen the player's sense of identity with the community and form a rich small circle culture; the other is to promote the birth and development of UGC content and bring more possibilities to the game.
It is not difficult to find that from 1.0 to 3.0, the game community has undergone a round of transformation from "useful" to "interesting", while strengthening the product content attributes, the social attributes have been more and more amplified, behind which reflects that the game market for users has gone from traffic to time, it is particularly important to build a community for the game and do a good job in refined operation.
Can deepening content and community become the next point of strength?
Despite the importance of the game community, many developers still see the game community as an afterthought.
The reason is that, on the one hand, some successful game communities on the market usually appear in the form of independent apps, and many developers are unable to develop the APP alone due to financial pressure; on the other hand, even if the funds are not a problem, many developers miss the opportunity to establish sharing and socializing with players due to unfamiliarity with community-related operations.
In the face of the above problems, Huawei Game Center, which has earlier changed from distribution-driven to content-driven, has a good set of solutions. This set of solutions precisely matches the characteristics of the game community in the 3.0 era: one is to meet the needs of users through diversified content; the second is to pay attention to the connection between products and users; the third is to focus on social interaction between people and revitalize the user ecology for products.
First of all, from the perspective of diversified content columns.
In order to provide players with a diversified content experience, Huawei Game Center has set up a number of original columns such as the number one breaking news station, CG connoisseurs, and planning without defense. The content of these columns not only covers all aspects related to the game to meet the needs of segmented users, but also can be exposed according to the characteristics of the game.
For example, "Planning Without Defense" focuses on digging deep into the story behind the game through interviews to provide players with another way to understand the game; "Number One Breaking News Station" is a column for professional evaluation and analysis of different new products, aiming to help players quickly discover new and interesting games.
From the content level, in addition to the wide coverage of the column, the content quality is also very good, because these contents are produced by the official professional team, reflecting the official emphasis on the content ecology.
In order to better present content to users, Huawei Game Center has also cut the display position of game distribution on the UI and instead provided more display windows for player-created content. Typical content such as human creation and game tasting does not lose the official content on the display page. For excellent creators, the official will also provide corresponding certification as a recognition of creators.
Secondly, from the overall point of view, Huawei Game Center is committed to complementing each other with PGC and PUGC content and building a comprehensive content matrix. By satisfying users' content consumption, it promotes communication between users, and then builds a communication bridge between users and developers.
Take NetEase's new tour "Mission Zero" as an example. Before the first exposure, the game cooperated with the Huawei Game Center's "Number One Breaking News Station" to communicate the direction of the article content and the node promotion of the first launch for potential players of the game.
On the day of launch, Huawei Game Center was exposed through the resource bit of the super big card homepage, and combined with the node of the first launch day, the centralized explosion was carried out, and the content column was effectively pushed to relevant users in combination with the directional push. The column content has gained millions of views on the day of the game's launch, driving a large number of players to book games, and Huawei Game Center has attracted players to understand the new tour information in advance through the content column, stimulated players' interest in games, and played an excellent new effect for game reservations.
The refined operation of Huawei Game Center for the whole life cycle of developers is also reflected in the community, and the biggest feature of the content of the community column is that it covers the pre-, middle and late stages of product research and operation, and the benefit it brings is to liberate the node of game promotion - that is, no matter which stage of the product is in the research and operation, it can ferment the heat through cooperation with Huawei Game Center to achieve the precipitation of the user community.
In order to better integrate content with users, Huawei Game Center has also set up "Blood Research Institute" and "Two-Dimensional Zone" for legends, quadratic and other fields. In each zone, the content is further subdivided into smaller areas such as COS, plot, music, video, spitting, and raider exchange.
Reflected in the community, it is the formation of a small cultural circle based on interests. On the one hand, it can make the game attract users with different interests, on the other hand, it can also bring different derivative content to the product and enrich the form of the product.
Finally, Huawei Game Center does not limit the construction of the game community to the scope of "content and players", but injects social factors into the community and works with game developers to achieve user ecology precipitation.
Judging from the content of the column, whether it is "The Number One Breaking News Station" or "Please! Planning", or "Disobedience to Score", these programs created by professional teams are more suitable for young users in language, and the content also adds a lot of popular meme culture, aiming to create social discussion topics for players by means of dots and faces.
For example, the previously popular "Pokémon Adventure" has just got the version number, and Huawei Game Center has joined hands with NetEase to create an issue of "Please!" Planning", with topics of interest to players - such as "how is pokémon national uniform different", "how to do a good job of localization", etc., successfully built a social topic highland among players. In the end, the number of reads of the article also quickly exceeded one million, successfully helping the game's installation appointments to achieve an explosion, and also forming a circle of interest based on the product.
Considering that Huawei Game Center is currently in a period of transformation, and has 210 million monthly active users behind it, a huge user base and continuous deepening of community content, it is likely to become a traffic gathering place in the downward stage of the buying market. Obviously, the more developers can occupy the position in advance, the more favorable it is to the R&D ecosystem of subsequent products.
From the performance point of view, Huawei Game Center has shown results in building the game community, and the benign UGC ecosystem is constantly feeding back developers and the product itself.
For example, in the "Do You Want to Repair the Truth" section, the game invites players to feedback the game experience suggestions while the new version is updated, and the developer improves the game mechanism through the player's real experience to improve the sense of game experience;
In some columns of PUGC content, Huawei Game Center has also given large-scale exposure support to content creators. Many times, some heavyweight products, such as "League of Legends Mobile Game" and "Magic Tower", even if they have not yet been launched, have hatched a good heat in huawei game center.
In addition, Huawei Game Center will also join hands with KOLs to play the catfish effect by holding planned content such as fan creation competitions, and guide and stimulate pan-users to participate in content discussion and creation.
Among them, "Light Encounter" is a representative example, the game's community section currently has a maximum monthly active of more than 20,000, and the content produced by playerSEC has received more than 1.8 million views and 120,000 player interactions. This shows that the game's gaming community has formed a fairly benign social ecology.
This UGC ecology is rich and diverse for developers, which not only allows products to maintain stickiness with users for a long time, reduces the cost of user reawakening, but also further increases exposure for new and old products, and even enriches IP with the help of fandom.
On the other hand, professional PGC content that acts as a guide can also help developers better examine their products. It represents the understanding of a product by professional players and is a very valuable asset for developers in the process of research and operation.
For Huawei Game Center, the diversified column content and unique understanding of players' needs bring not only the precipitation of game content creation and user social ecology, but also the ideal state of content co-creation in the future. In fact, thinking about it in a larger framework, these contents and achievements are also an important part of Huawei's game center's full-lifecycle services and refined operations for game developers.
epilogue
Essentially, being a good gaming community is like building a bridge that makes communication between players and the game flow more fluid. From content tools to interest communities, the evolution has changed to product experience and content form, and what has not changed is the mining and matching of player needs.
For Huawei Game Center, on the one hand, it is a 210 million monthly active player group with increasingly diverse needs, and on the other hand, developers who want to keep up with the trend. As a channel, providing services throughout the life cycle, and continuously deepening refined operations are not only self-requirements, but also the mission entrusted by the industry. On this basis, establishing a deeper understanding of game products, forming a closer relationship between products, users, and channels, as well as strong support and organic combination, is also the core foundation for Huawei Game Center to build influence in the industry.
We believe that as the player base becomes more and more refined and layered, the cost of obtaining customers in the market will rise, and the importance of refined operation will continue to increase. In this context, the game community, as one of the links in the refined operation, will play a role in retaining and influencing the injection of new traffic in the stock era, and through the iteration and precipitation of the game community content, as well as the positive cycle of building a user ecology through content, to help game distribution, Huawei Game Center will be an important resource for developers that cannot be missed in the game operation process.
After all, the link of "community" is good enough, the two ends of "product" and "user" will be more closely connected, and the game ecology will become more prosperous.
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