Text | Ray Tech leitech
Casual games this kind of game category I believe everyone has heard, we often played "Tetris", "push box", "pass-off" when we were young are actually casual games, this kind of game that does not need to fight and kill, only need players to use their brains and simple operations to carry out the type of game has always been the best product for urban people to relieve stress.
And just this year, a new concept of casual games quietly appeared, its attraction and addiction is quite strong, many people will be addicted to it as soon as they get started, many of which have become the focus of public discussion, once rushed to several hot searches, and the exquisite gameplay is not bad. That's right, this kind of game is a super casual game.
Although this type of game has created a very high topic of heat and still occupies a very high market share, but recently there is news that the winter of ultra-casual games may come soon. This time may bring a lot of impact to the casual game market, and may even make such games usher in an unprecedented trough.
What is An Ultra Casual Game?
To talk about the winter of ultra-casual games, we must first talk about what is a super-casual game.
The term "hyper-casual game" first came from a series of blogs posted by Johannes Heinze, managing director of APPLOVIN, on PocketGamer.biz. Posted on April 28, 2017. He believes that this type of game has always existed, mainly inherited from the arcade machines of the 70s and 80s, due to the intensification of mobile game competition and the lack of breakthrough points in the industry, it has entered everyone's vision.
To sum up, this type of game has 3 characteristics: fragmentation, addiction, and fast monetization.
"Fragmentation" refers to the short and concise content of the game, which can fully adapt to the short-term play habits and start the game at any time. The game is small, any device can be played, and the cost of playing is extremely low.
"Addictive" is literal, simple gameplay and repetitive processes, but extremely challenging, allowing players to play continuously and repeatedly.
"Fast monetization" is because advertising is simple to implant, and monetization is also extremely simple.
It sounds familiar, yes, those small games in our common WeChat Mini Program are the so-called ultra-casual games. We are familiar with the "Jump a Jump", "Synthetic Big Watermelon" are in this list, these games in the short term has a strong user stickiness, repeated game flow and very challenging gameplay so that more players have a comparison psychology, but also let the game unconsciously become the player wants to click the existence.
The monetization ability of this type of game is far more efficient than ordinary games, because there is no need to open an independent game program or a complex game interface, and the implantation of mobile game advertisements will not feel violated, and players will often choose the most direct method to complete for a simple goal, which makes it logical to see the mechanism of advertising to obtain resurrection opportunities in the game.
The average game will consider how to use the game mechanics to guide the player to think, because the game requires the player to think to complete its process, but the ultra-casual game is the opposite, this type of game is to let the player temporarily give up thinking, in the simple operation to get a sense of achievement, repeated gameplay allows the player not to think about anything, just need to focus on the operation of the game.
The special attributes of ultra-casual games make it the darling of the era of fragmented life, but such attributes also make ultra-casual games usher in its cold winter.
A cold winter period caused by policy
From the previous introduction, I believe that players can summarize one word from the characteristics of ultra-casual games, that is, conciseness.
Such simplicity and simplicity allow ultra-casual games to fully attract players to play in just a few seconds, and use this simple mechanism to insert ads to monetize profits, but it is precisely because of this simplicity that the game's profit model becomes too simple, lacking rich and flexible means of profit, once this profit model is banned, it will cause a huge blow to ultra-casual games.
Therefore, advertising monetization is the general existence of the lifeblood of ultra-casual games, and Apple's IDFA policy adjustment has caused advertising and marketing to receive a huge blow, and the most intuitive impact is the soaring cost of advertising.
This change has increased CPM costs by 83%, in addition, marketing company Consumer Acquisition also revealed that after the introduction of the policy, some mobile game companies' advertising monetization revenue has decreased by an average of 15-20%, and some companies have even reduced advertising revenue by 40%.
This has greatly affected the advertising profit model that ultra-casual games rely on for a living, and a single revenue model can easily be limited, and the gameplay of the game will also be imprisoned.
In September this year, the State Information And Edition Administration issued the "Notice on Further Strict Management and Effectively Preventing Minors from Addicting to Online Games", which made the "strictest in history" limit on the game time of minors, and the game time of underage players was limited to three hours per week.
That is to say, the comprehensive coverage of the real-name system also allows any game to always have one more step before playing, but such a step increase is undoubtedly contrary to the original intention of "ultra-casual", and the ultra-casual mobile game, which originally has a relatively low user retention, is almost like directly "turning the player away" under such requirements.
In addition to the limitations on the player user base, the hammer of advertising and marketing has also been dropped. On September 23 this year, the Game Working Committee, member units and relevant game enterprises, under the guidance of the competent authorities, jointly launched the "Self-Discipline Convention on Anti-Addiction in the Online Game Industry", in addition to focusing on "anti-addiction", this convention also puts forward requirements for business activities such as game distribution, operation, promotion, and publicity, including the explicit requirement that "game advertisements shall not be forced to users".
The restrictions of domestic and foreign policies have made the living environment of ultra-casual games more and more difficult, after all, the monetization ability of casual game categories is general, and now it has greatly restricted advertising promotion, which can be described as a fatal blow to ultra-casual games. Ultra-casual games, whose revenues have continued to plummet as a result, have even been nearly slashed.
And the continuous improvement of the cost of buying has also made the previous gimmicky "HYIP" type of ultra-casual games (that is, play withdrawal) almost silent, according to OpenMediation's "2021 HYIP + Product Market Research Report", from January 2021 to July 2021, the native APP HYIP game DAU fell by 32% overall, of which the leisure HYIP category fell by 67%, the highest of several types of HYIP products.
In the case of rising advertising costs, gradually strict user restrictions, and the tragic ban on advertising channels, can ultra-casual games survive this special winter period?
Adaptability of the game mode
In fact, today's ultra-casual games still have a way to survive the cold winter, and to do this, it is necessary to take advantage of its small but tough characteristics.
Most ultra-casual games, because of their volume problems, generally do not choose to launch a separate APP or independent program for players to download, but will be attached to the current popular APP or program application, as a program that can be opened at will, because this can effectively reduce the player's play cost. For example, the WeChat mini program we are most familiar with at that time, "Jump a Jump", was ignited because of this.
Japanese game developer Playco also launched "Sway Stories" on TikTok, which is also TikTok's first "one-point play" built-in game, and the game content is a text drama game that is more popular with female players in overseas markets. Such a model has good results at home and abroad, and it is also conducive to ultra-casual games to fix the player group, after all, the user stickiness and base of mainstream APP are much higher than the ultra-casual games themselves, and such a cooperative model allows the game to have better display opportunities.
On the other hand, ultra-casual games are small and concise, and a single game individual may be susceptible to influence, but if you want to form a complete product matrix, you may be able to effectively deal with various possible risks and let products and products support each other. Rollic, a hyper-casual game maker that has previously been acquired by Zynga, said in a recent interview that they are currently working together to develop cross-promotion technology, and Zynga also mentioned that one of the benefits of acquiring Rollic is that it can allow more people to enter Zynga's gaming ecosystem and share other games with them.
But in essence, the game to improve is still its own design and quality, the model is only to make up for the problem of profit, interesting product design can fully attract the attention of players, to create their own ultra-casual game IP, the use of heat and traffic for publicity, so that the characteristics of the game to the extreme.
Ultra-casual games may usher in more than one cold winter, but as long as they have a full understanding of themselves and make good use of their own characteristics, this category of games can also survive round after round of setbacks and usher in their own era.