Station B Game: We want to take off the title of two-dimensional mobile cemetery

The two-dimensional game market has exploded, but where is the B station?

At the end of November, Lilith announced that her "Apocalypse of Eden" opened the first unbilled deletion test, which is a two-dimensional sci-fi 3D turn-based mobile game.

At this point, Lilith, who is known as the "Shanghai Four Little Dragons" by netizens, has also officially entered the two-dimensional track, while the other three Miha Games, Eagle Corner, and Folded Paper have been in the two-dimensional game market for many years.

Not only these new giants, Perfect World's "Magic Tower" is about to be officially launched on December 16, NetEase and Tencent have also been in the quadratic layout for many years, and veteran game manufacturers are also intensively impacting the quadratic game market.

Whether the two-dimensional game market is a niche market or not, and how big this market is, it does not matter, what is important is that manufacturers feel that this is a market full of potential and opportunities, which has been more and more affirmed after the outbreak of "Original God".

Under such a large background, as the B station that originally cultivated China's two-dimensional game market and even the concept of two-dimensional, it was labeled as a "two-dimensional mobile game cemetery".

On November 24th, the long-standing tree full platform of the B station game, the product developed by the light flame network invested by the B station, quickly became a "popular" product after it was launched.

Due to its constant bugs that affect the game experience and the lack of experience and preparation for the official face of bugs, the Tree of The Long is quickly out of the circle among the two-dimensional player group, and is jokingly called "Tree Treasure" by players (specifically, you can recall the previous article "The Tree of Axiology is the Most "Conscientious" Operation I Have Ever Seen" but I Am Ready to Retire).

The Long Tree incident did not take long, on December 9, B station game unique generation of another two-dimensional product "The Final Oath" public beta, this time is not a BUG, but a fried service, from the day of the public beta began at 11:00, to our release before the publication, the explosion of the problem, still not solved, has been close to 6 days of time, a record! (Specifically, you can recall the previous article of the theory of value, "The Final Oath: We Blew Up for Two Days and Cut the Promised Compensation in Half")

It's so rare for a game to explode for so long that the game, developed by NetDragon, seems to have encountered huge technical problems.

Behind these two products is actually the epitome of the B station game in recent years, "two-dimensional mobile game cemetery" is not a good title, and the B station has also begun to actively change, want to take this title down.

Will the game business change from the front of the car to the rear of the car?

According to the financial report released by Bilibili, in the first three quarters of this year, the revenue of Bilibili games was 3.8952 billion yuan, compared with the first three quarters of last year, an increase of 6% year-on-year.

Behind the negligible growth, Bilibili Games even had a slight year-on-year decline in Q2 this year, and the proportion of its game business in the group's overall revenue further fell to 26.73% in Q3 this year.

Behind the decline in the proportion, on the one hand, it can be said that B station has made breakthrough progress in diversified business, and its value-added business, advertising business, and e-commerce business are growing rapidly, such as last year's Q4 surpassed the game to become the first value-added business in B station revenue, and the year-on-year growth rate in Q3 this year still reached 95%.

But on the other hand, this also shows that the overall development of B station games is not ideal, compared with the rising performance of other businesses, B station games have stagnated.

If there is no accident, the B station game is surpassed by the advertising value-added business is already expected, in this year's Q3 its advertising business revenue reached 1.172 billion yuan, compared with the game business gap of only 200 million yuan, compared with the game this year's Q3 only 9% year-on-year growth, advertising business year-on-year growth of 110%.

Even a little more extreme by the e-commerce business is possible to happen, according to the relevant information, the recent B station is preparing to launch the "little yellow car" function in the live broadcast room, so that users can watch and buy in the live broadcast room.

That is to say, the B station game is likely to become the last of the four major commercial sectors of the B station, and it should be known that the B station was able to be successfully listed, and the revenue provided by the game was the most important link, and only one "Destiny - Crown Designation" (FGO) product accounted for 70% of the total revenue of the B station.

Obviously, while other businesses are keeping up with the development of the main station, only the game business is absent.

We briefly checked some data of Station B in recent years, in the third quarter of 2018, which was just listed, the revenue of Station B was 1.0788 billion yuan, the monthly active was 92.7 million, and the average monthly paid users were 3.5 million. Among them, the revenue of the game business was 744 million yuan, accounting for 70%.

In the third quarter of this year, the revenue of Station B was 5.2 billion yuan, the monthly active income was 267.2 million, and the average monthly paid users were 23.9 million. Among them, the game business revenue was 1.3917 billion yuan, accounting for 26.73%.

In three years, overall revenue increased by 380% year-on-year, monthly active users increased by 190% year-on-year, paid users increased by 580% year-on-year, but the game business increased by 87% year-on-year.

Intermodal business is not good business

What happened to the B station game?

In fact, there are nothing more than two problems, the first is that the products issued by agents are frequently problematic, and the second is that the channel intermodal transport business is shrinking.

First of all, the shrinkage of the channel intermodal transport business, in October 2014, there was a B station financing plan was accidentally leaked, according to the information in the financing plan, the main source of income of the B station is game promotion, B station's intermodal game crash academy to the game week to import an average of 70,000 users, the next day retention rate of 41%, three-day retention rate of 24%.

At that time, the monthly flow of "Crash Academy 2" in station B reached the level of tens of millions, and the data disclosed by Cai Haoyu, CEO of Mihayou, was that more than 50% of the Android revenue of "Crash Academy 2" came from station B, and the core data was 3 to 4 times higher than that of other Android markets, and the core users of station B could almost cover 60%-70% of android core users.

"Crash Academy 2" has achieved Miha tour, and also found an important direction for traffic monetization for Station B, a two-dimensional game.

Since then, the B station game has frequently shot on the intermodal transport, and in 2019, the "Ark of Tomorrow" was transported, and this product flowed 500 million yuan in the first month, directly achieving Eagle Corner, and according to the content of the Q2 earnings call released by the B station in 2019, "As the joint publisher of the domestic Android platform, the B station brought more than 3 million ACG users to the "Ark of Tomorrow".

In a sense, among the so-called Shanghai Four Little Dragons, Station B "incubated" two.

But after "Ark of Tomorrow", the intermodal transport business of Station B has no bright spots, and the "Original God" launched in 2020 has not been able to do it in the context of Mihayou's rejection of all third-party channels such as hardcore alliances.

It is not surprising that such a situation occurs, on the one hand, the emergence of the buying mode allows these manufacturers to find their own publishing model, more importantly, compared to one channel service after another, now the manufacturer is obviously more willing to bring players into the official service, because unlike the channel service, the player's official service can enjoy better service, whether it is in the stability of the game, the game environment, the update speed of the game, and the security of the game account, etc., the official service occupies an advantage, and it is easier to improve the retention rate.

Therefore, the current channel service is more of a game manufacturer to make up for the long-tail traffic model, in 2020 "Original God" public beta, the first to open is their own PC side, mobile phone official service and 0 drawn TapTap service, and B station such channel service, until the PC side opened nearly half a month after the opening.

Agent distribution of natural and man-made disasters

The weakening of the intermodal transport business is the trend of the times, while the agency distribution business is a parallel of natural disasters and man-made disasters.

The problem of the version number is a fatal blow to the agent of the B station game, and the main revenue supporting the B station game for a long time is the two products "FGO" and "Blue Route".

Among them, "FGO" is from Japan, and although "Blue Route" is a domestic mobile game, this mobile game first fed the domestic market after the fire in Japan.

That is to say, the business of B station agency distribution is extremely dependent on the Japanese market, but with the emergence of version number problems, B station is directly stuck in the neck on this road.

In February 2018, "Princess Link Re:Dive", developed by Cygames, was officially tested in Japanese service, and in August of that year, that is, during ChinaJoy in 2018, Station B officially announced that it had obtained the national service agent.

However, the official launch of the product's national service will not wait until April 2020, 2 years later. It took up to 2 years for players to play the national costume.

And "Princess Connection Re: Dive" also has the same encounter is "War Moment Nocturne" and "One Blood Wanjie", this pair of difficult brothers and sisters until the end of the day service to look forward to the version number, and finally can only regret to stop the development, a few years to look forward to the version of the result because the screen is too old to be welcomed by new players, and finally stopped operating on the first anniversary.

And now, in japan's fire can no longer be hot "Horse Racing Lady", B station has also announced that it has won the agency right of the national service, but when this product will be launched, it can only be unknown.

In addition to the version number problem, another problem encountered by the B station agent distribution is actually the same as the intermodal transport, that is, the manufacturer is more and more inclined to issue products by themselves, which makes it difficult for the B station to get the product release.

To this end, the strategy of B station is to cast a wide net of investment, with the right to invest in the distribution of products, from 2020 to now, B station has successively invested in nearly 20 game companies, palm technology, Access!, time of the sand, cat day, light flame network, shadow moon, thousand leap network and so on.

The idea of using investment-linked products is not only B station, but also ByteDance and Tencent, compared to these two giant crocodiles, B station does not have any advantages, the only thing that can be taken is the attribute of "two-dimensional focus".

Investment is not enough to help B station get good products, more is such as the long tree of such products, relevant data show that in 2021, Bilibili removed 10 games, including 9 mobile and one PC. Most of these games didn't survive for two years, and some didn't even survive a year.

The situation of the games on the shelves is not optimistic, most of the games on the shelves in 2021 are just short-lived, such as "Empty Box Humanoid", "Mecha Alice" and other games, and now even the top 100 of the best-seller list can not enter.

It is precisely because of this that Station B has gradually been labeled as a "two-dimensional game graveyard".

Of course, the reason is completely attributed to the product is unfair, B station as an agent issuer also has an unavoidable responsibility in this, the bug of the long tree continues, and the record of the fried clothes created by the final vow, which B station is really a "non-stick pan"?

In addition, in terms of agency distribution methods, for a long time, there are only four masterpieces that Station B really attaches importance to in the impression of game value theory, "FGO", "Kangong Riding Crown Sword", "Blue Route", and "Princess Link Re:Dive".

These four products in a certain sense with a large number of off-site publicity resources for promotion, while in addition to other products, the promotion method of B station only relies on the traffic of its own platform to do extremely rough promotion.

Therefore, we see that there are already manufacturers are slowly leaving the B station, last July, the B station game annual new product conference, the announcement of 11 new games, Chengdu gathered the network research and development of the "Final Front: Ino Beta" debut, but in August this year, the B station game release announcement "The Final Front: Ino Beta" The distribution and operation rights will be transferred to the product development side.

Small products have no achievements, the agent release of large product B station games is actually a frequent problem, the most direct results show that the "Kangong Riding Crown Sword", which was just launched in the middle of this year, is currently in the best-seller list between 50-100. And Princess Nexus Re:Dive has begun to hover around 200-300.

The better results are "FGO" and "Blue Route", although they have been around 100-200 for a long time, but with activities such as anniversaries, they can still hit the top 10 of the best-seller list.

Will self-development, change distribution, and diversification be the answer?

Intermodal transport and single generation have both encountered problems, and it is not surprising that the business of B station games has stagnated.

Station B games are also aware of the problem, Station B CEO Chen Rui said in a conference call after the release of the Q2 financial report that Bilibili believes that the game industry is actually lacking supply, and the demand on the user side has always existed, so Bilibili has gradually invested in self-research teams since last year.

On the conference call, Chen Rui also revealed the current size of Bilibili Game's self-development team and expansion to 1,000 people. He said, "The game self-development will be the first priority of our current stage, and I predict that in a few years we should have more than half of the game revenue from self-development... If agency and intermodal transportation are the engines of the growth of B-station games in the past, then there will be a second engine in the future, which is self-research. ”

In August this year, at the bilibili game new product launch conference, Bilibili announced six self-developed game products in one breath, which is enough to see the importance that station b attaches to self-developed games.

In terms of the promotion strategy of the proxy game, Bilibili no longer only carries out on-site publicity, but begins to try to promote from other channels. "Princess Connect Re:Dive" began to start, "Kan Gong Riding Crown Sword" began to exert force, and the game Bilibili advertised a lot from the huge engine and Guangdiantong.

Of course, these are definitely not enough, B station games are still trying to break the circle with the main station, not limited to the second dimension, in the product selection to a more diversified road. At this year's annual press conference, the game category of Station B covered a number of categories, and MOBA and simulated management were also among them.

The game value theory believes that in fact, the B station game should change the most in fact, there is its distribution strategy, in the role of WeChat, hand Q, application treasure these three channels and traffic background, Tencent in the past few years has completely changed the release path that relies on traffic, which may be the B station game should think about at the moment.

Whether Station B can rely on these changes to get rid of the title of "two-dimensional game graveyard" remains to be seen.