Compared with 2020, this year's domestic market has paid less attention to casual games, especially small games.
But the pace of development of this market is still considerable. Gamma data shows that in 2021, China's mobile casual game revenue was 34.653 billion yuan, an increase of 17.42% year-on-year. Among them, the advertising monetization revenue was 27.709 billion yuan, which is still the mainstream monetization method of casual games. However, how to achieve further breakthroughs at the level of monetization and how to achieve long-term operation of revenue is a problem that many casual game developers are thinking about this year.
The mobile game found that there was a casual competitive game "Potato Hero" recently, which took the lead in "mixed monetization" to achieve a new breakthrough in the double-ended revenue of "App + Mini Games". It is understood that since the product was officially launched on WeChat Mini Games in June last year, and then launched the App version, it has achieved commercialization in only one year, with a peak of more than 1.5 million daily turnover at both ends and a cumulative turnover of more than 100 million.
How does this casual game do it? After reviewing the case and sharing with the "Potato Hero" team, the mobile game learned that "hybrid monetization" will be one of the key points of the next two-end casual game.
01
In 2022, where is the breakthrough for the dual-end monetization of casual games?
For the domestic game industry, the biggest policy change in the past year is undoubtedly the version number. Since the beginning of this year, the decentralization of the version number has continued to tighten, and even the suspension of the version number approval since August has not been resumed, which has also disrupted the rhythm of game developers to a certain extent.
Especially for casual games that focus on the App side and the small game side, its light gameplay and fragmentation characteristics require manufacturers to iterate and launch new products at a faster speed, which shows that the impact of the suspension of version approval on developers is great.
This problem also prompts developers to think more about the long-term operation of the game itself and no longer do "a wave of streams". Therefore, how to further tap the potential of game users and commercialization has gradually become a pain point that casual game manufacturers need to solve.
According to the recent "2021 Casual Game Research Report", in 2021, casual games will account for 78% of the download share of the mobile application market, but only 23% of the revenue generated, and "difficult to monetize" is a common dilemma faced by casual game developers. Moreover, casual game manufacturers are more small and medium-sized enterprises and individual developers, and the overall anti-risk ability is weak, and further breakthroughs need to be made at the level of monetization.
In addition, from the perspective of game types, casual games or games based on IAA monetization are more affected by the NEW DEAL OF IDFA on the monetization side. And after the development of small game platforms and user ecology in recent years, the mining of IAA advertising monetization has also begun to "peak", and game manufacturers want to make greater breakthroughs at the commercial level and need to find new growth points.
Under the influence of two factors, "hybrid realization" has become the most feasible commercial breakthrough at present.
As the IAA excavation space begins to peak, in-app monetization (IAP) naturally becomes the first monetization opportunity point that casual game manufacturers will pay attention to. And for players, in-app payment is very common in medium- and heavy-duty games, and the level of acceptance is high, and all developers need to do is how to establish a good in-app purchase system in casual games.
Moreover, from the perspective of the global market, "hybrid monetization" is no longer a development trend, but a conventional monetization model recognized by the market and adopted by many game development companies. At this year's Google Games Overseas Summit, Google shared a data with Newzoo: Taking North America as an example, the number of games with the highest Google Play revenue in 200 games with the highest revenue increased rapidly from 26% in 2016 to 58% in 2020.
Source: Monetization data provided by Newzoo, Apptopia, and Airnow
02
How to do a good job of hybrid monetization in casual games? Potato Hero shares some secrets
In the past, we talked about the monetization tuning of casual games at both ends, mostly around the monetization of IAA ads. How should casual games be properly inserted into the in-app purchase system, and how can players accept in-app purchases? This is still relatively unfamiliar to many casual game developers, especially for small and medium-sized developers, who may have a harder time tuning the design of both IAA and IAP.
Recently, the Potato Hero team did an in-depth interview with Game Choice, sharing with us the experience of double-ended tuning and hybrid monetization of casual games.
Full interview video
Liu Xiaofei, producer of "Potato Hero", believes that if you want to do "hybrid monetization", then you should start to consider the game when it is established, and the commercial design should also be placed in the game development stage. "Hybrid monetization is a commercialization direction worth exploring for medium and light products, and users are becoming more and more expensive and more difficult to obtain in the general environment, so fully tapping the value of users is something we have been thinking about."
Although the commercialization goal of hybrid monetization was set at the beginning, the team had no clue about the direction of the design. Finally, with the help of game selection, Potato Hero did a thorough user value analysis and sorted out the entire commercial model, thus laying a good foundation for subsequent specific advertising and paid design.
Liu Xiaofei said that they have built a pyramid model according to the degree of user value contribution, which are basic users, active users, paying users, and super users, and build different in-app purchase and advertising payment points according to the preferences and characteristics of different user groups. This not only provides players with a better in-app purchase and ad viewing experience, but also maximizes user value.
Not only that, the game's preferred help at the user analysis level also allowed the Potato Hero team to take a lot of detours in the game tuning stage.
When the initial purchase test was done, the "Potato Hero" team found that the female users of the game were relatively high and the retention was good, so they began to adjust in the direction of female casual games, but the payment ability and advertising value of this part of the players were very low, and no matter how to adjust the data, there was no significant improvement. Until the user analysis and model were re-done with the support of game selection, it was found that the original user positioning was wrong, and the correct user group should be dominated by male groups aged 20-40, and the ROI performance of this part of the user was the best. After iterative adjustments based on this new user profile, the game data has been significantly improved.
After laying the groundwork, Potato Hero became more targeted in both advertising and paid designs.
At the level of advertising monetization, Liu Xiaofei believes that the advertising bury of casual games should focus on not affecting the core experience of users, and control the timing and rhythm of advertising pop-up. Second, advertising should be regarded as an integral part of the game content, reducing the chance of passive triggering, and allowing players to be more active in accepting advertising.
In response to these two points, the game adds some reasonable advertising points in some non-combat scenarios, such as refreshing the direct purchase hero in the mall, adding advertising points that can accelerate production in the production of potatoes on the farm; at the same time, it also releases a part of the core resources in the advertisement, such as the launch of the "seven days to see the advertisement, take the legendary hero" activity, only need to see the advertisement to get the legendary hero, which is very attractive to the core players.
In addition, user portrait insights and models are also applied to the differentiated advertising push of "Potato Hero". "If you vigorously put ads, it is bound to greatly affect the user's experience, and it is necessary to develop differentiated advertising pushes." For example, for users who do not have the habit of watching ads, or have fewer ads viewed, they will take the initiative to push ads for them at the appropriate time; if they are players who watch ads more times a day, the game will not take the initiative to push ads to reduce interruptions.
Liu Xiaofei said that after the launch of these three advertising tuning methods, the per capita number of ads in the game increased from 4.4 times to 7.7 times; after identifying the target user group, the game's eCPM was also increased by 3 times compared with the original. Overall, daily advertising revenue has increased more than 5 times compared to before.
At the level of in-purchase payment, the "Potato Hero" team believes that the paid content of casual games should be less and more refined, and cannot give players a "too heavy" sense of payment, and needs to be combined with game content and gameplay to develop user payment habits and increase the depth of user payment.
As a tower defense game, Potato Hero players have a great demand for new heroes, so in addition to watching advertisements as a way to obtain, the game also provides legendary heroes that can be purchased directly, and regularly pushes messages to players. Later in the game, combined with the needs of players to cultivate heroes, the game also created an exclusive system that increased strategy to improve players' enthusiasm and stickiness.
It is worth mentioning that during the period of commercial exploration, the team adopted a commercial strategy for female users, and the value of props was kept very low, resulting in the collapse of the game value system. Therefore, when the commercial design was re-commercialized, the game removed the low-cost gift package and eliminated the brush shard mechanism, reshaping the sense of value of props and characters.
After a series of adjustments to the in-app purchase strategy, the in-app purchase payment of "Potato Hero" has exploded, and the revenue has increased by nearly 10 times compared with the original, and finally achieved a single-day turnover of more than one million.
In addition, Liu Xiaofei also shared a precaution for mixed monetization: the "sense of value" of advertising and in-app purchase should be unified, which is also the key to mixed monetization for long-term. He said that developers should pay attention to shaping the value of goods in the game, such as how much of the in-app purchase "diamond" corresponding to an incentive video advertisement is, so as to be relatively stable and consistent, and will not make players feel divided.
03
The turnover share of hybrid monetization games has increased to 25%, and game selection has once again boosted the upgrading of the casual game market
Looking back on the past two years, Game Selection has made many eye-catching achievements in creating game products and promoting the healthy development of the industry ecology.
After more than two years of development, the "game full-cycle life service" of game selection has been very mature, including game project establishment, R&D tuning testing, large-scale publishing, etc., which can help game developers create high-quality casual games from the beginning of the project.
Especially in the field of large-scale distribution, Game Preferred can not only provide developers with multi-dimensional, strong analysis of BI data tools, but also rely on the tencent advertising global traffic ecology including Youlianghui and WeChat advertising, and realize the fission of game users with the help of user social capabilities. Taking "Potato Hero" as an example, the long-term operation of this game makes full use of WeChat ecological resources such as video numbers, live broadcasts, game communities, and events. Its producer said that "mini games + video number live broadcast" is very suitable for leisure competitive products, and doing a good job of user operation outside the game can promote the benign development of the entire game ecology.
After opening up the release link of the casual game App & Mini Game, Game Selection is also continuing to explore how to grow together with the industry, and the success of "Potato Hero" is a breakthrough in the level of game selection in the monetization level of casual games.
The producers of "Potato Hero" once said in an interview that they did not cooperate with game selection at the beginning, but the team explored for half a year on their own, only doing advertising monetization, the direction and user groups were not quite right, and entered the bottleneck; until the beginning of this year, they cooperated with game selection and tried to enable hybrid monetization, and achieved double growth of users and flow.
It is understood that Game Preferred will also increase investment in hybrid monetization games in the future, and encourage double-ended casual game developers to try hybrid monetization. For example, in terms of support policies, the game is preferred on the App side, and the proportion of mixed monetization game turnover is increased from 20% to 25%, and the ability of mini game publishing services is gradually improved. With the increase of investment in the head platform, in the next 2022, we may see more hybrid monetization of boutique casual games appear on the market.