Home improvement is one of the ways to play that everyone is familiar with, and in mobile games, it usually appears as a fusion element. But as early as 2016, there was a product on the market with pure home improvement as the core gameplay. Although it doesn't look like a game, it still achieves impressive commercial results.
To this day, the product, called Design Home, is still at the top of the best-seller list, with Sensor Tower stating that it has seen a turnover of $7 million (about 44 million yuan) in the past 12 months.
("Design Home" iOS best-selling ranking trend in the past year)
In 2018, there was another mobile game on the market that was "too similar" to "Design Home". Not only does the same home decoration as the core gameplay, but also follows the scoring mechanism of player voting, that is, the decoration effect of players in the game is not evaluated by the system, but is pushed to the player voting page, and other players vote and choose. The mobile game is called Redecor and was developed by Finnish manufacturer Reworks.
("Design Home" left main interface, right voting interface)
(Redecor left main interface, right voting interface)
I thought Redecor was just a fish eye for confusing players, but I saw it again at the top of the US best-seller list. In the past 12 months, it has received $6 million (about 38 million yuan) and is currently the second largest design entertainment app in the world in terms of in-app revenue, after Design Home.
(In the past year, the U.S. iOS best-seller ranking, red for "Redecor", green for "Design Home")
Perhaps because the similarities between the two are too coincidental, or because they feel threatened by competitors, In short, Desgin Home's parent company, Glu Mobile (hereinafter referred to as Glu), took Reworks to court in the name of "patent infringement", and the case is still pending and inconclusive.
As usual, "Design Home" is still active in the market, an ordinary peeling product should not have such a good result, but "Redecor" did it, and more and more latecomers to take the upper position, almost became The "big problem" of Glu.
This is very interesting, "Redecor", as a less innocent late entrant, how to occupy the market?
01
Refining the gameplay and lowering the bar, Redecor is evolving
However, before discussing whether Redecor is innocent, it is still necessary to briefly introduce its gameplay. It is said to be pure home decoration, but home decoration is also divided into many kinds, such as furniture collocation, such as color change, and this game just happens to be the core of color change.
In the game session, the system will provide players with pure white model room renderings, and all the player has to do is to select the appropriate decoration task from more than 3,000 materials.
(The dark part is the footage that has not yet been unlocked)
In order to make the color change gameplay more valid, Reworks chose to package it from two dimensions, namely a sense of substitution and a sense of accomplishment.
In order to enhance the player's sense of substitution, the decoration task in the game appears in the form of customer demand, and the player, as a designer, needs to start decorating after clarifying the customer's demands. These scheduled design tasks will be pushed to the homepage of Redecor, and players can choose to "take orders".
In terms of broadening the source of players' sense of achievement, Redecor starts with a voting scoring mechanism. As mentioned above, the quality of the design is not the system to decide, but everyone to decide. When the renovation is completed, the final product will be pushed to the voting pool, and after multiple rounds of voting, the top 10 designs will finally be selected.
The top 10 users will receive a lot of rewards, and the rest of the players will be able to see their designs on the leaderboards. In order to encourage users to participate in the voting mechanism, the official has adopted the form of remuneration, whether it is the participants or voters, can get rewards for unlocking or purchasing new decoration materials.
(Leaderboard and some design renderings)
Home improvement and voting scores are the basic framework of Redecor, and they are also design home, but the two products feel very different, mainly in the detail optimization and lowering the threshold.
1. Detail optimization
In terms of detail optimization, the most obvious is the UI interface. Although both products adopt a more minimalist business style, they have their own characteristics. Design Home, which went online earlier, is dominated by dark blue, purple and white, and supplemental information is presented in the form of a horizontal drag screen.
(Screenshot of Design Home game)
The UI of "Redecor" is based on white and gray as the main colors, which not only maintains the simplicity of the overall tone, but also highlights the key content on the page through the change of brightness, and the vertical screen pull-down method to obtain information is relatively more suitable for the current user's habits.
(Screenshot of Redecor game)
When presenting design needs, Redecor takes a more modern form of commerce. Compared with the cold and hard demand, simple story scenarios can give players more sense of substitution. After giving the corresponding design requirements, Redecor also comes with some renovation suggestions.
In portraying the environment to be renovated, the two products also adopt a realistic style, but "Redecor" is more extreme. At present, the game presentation effect is close to the real photo. On this basis, Reworks also added a light and shadow change effect, and players can intuitively feel the contrast between light and dark during the transformation of different colors. In addition, the overall style of home improvement is also more in line with the current simple, low-saturation aesthetic mainstream.
2. Lower the threshold
However, the optimization of these details is more like the icing on the cake, and the reason why "Redecor" can be successful after "Design Home" is that it reduces the difficulty of playing and increases the lower limit of the decoration effect.
Although they are all pure home improvement gameplay, the focus of the two mobile games is different, and Design Home is more in line with the traditional perception of the home improvement process. Players need to choose the right colored furniture, decorative paintings, and even carpets and several other decorations to complete the construction of the entire scene.
(More complex decoration elements)
In this process, players have to consider more design factors, including but not limited to the combination of colors, the unity of furniture styles, the choice of decorations, and so on. In simple terms, the player cannot easily complete a set of decoration tasks that look good, and once there is a mistake in the control of one of the above links, it will have an impact on the final effect.
(Runaway renovation effect)
Redecor, on the other hand, wisely cut out the content of home improvement gameplay and chose to focus on color change. Players need to choose the right materials, patterns and colors according to different scenes, and finally form a unified style.
To counteract the tediousness that color changing gameplay can bring, Reworks offers more than 3,000 materials. This includes, but is not limited to, colors, and different designs based on the material of different items. For example, flannel materials and cotton fabrics are provided for fabric products, marble and wood textures designed for floors and walls, and even decorative vases are available in ceramics, glass, metal and other materials.
In a single-game design, the system will provide the player with materials step by step, with the purpose of raising the lower limit of the game. As long as the player is not deliberately randomly selected, even if it is only selected in the given materials of the system, it can also achieve a good decoration effect.
Combined with the above-mentioned player like ranking mechanism, this practice of lowering the threshold and raising the lower limit can allow players who are proficient in design and decoration to get more recognition, while allowing non-core users to gain more sense of achievement under the premise of not investing much. Coupled with detailed settings that fit the current habits of users, this makes "Redecor" a rising star.
02
Why is this game so attractive?
Looking at it this way, "Redecor" is not so much a home improvement game as it is an entertainment application that gamified the decoration design. Before there was "Design Home", then there was "Redecor", obviously very similar gameplay, but can attract countless players to follow, this mechanism in the end to attract players?
In my opinion, the first is because Reworks accurately grasps the needs of non-player groups and follows the voting scoring mechanism. People habitually think that games are games and should present more entertainment content, but for the audience of "Redecor", they do not want to experience games, they just want to experience home decoration design, this mobile game meets their needs very well.
At this time, "Redecor" is more like a platform for experiencing home improvement design. On the platform, players use virtual currency to purchase props for decoration and collocation, and then the users on the platform like and vote. In the process of liking, users mainly rely on their own aesthetic intuition to choose the one they think is better in the two renderings.
This seemingly single but very objective voting mechanism, which maintains maximum fairness, is one of the factors that retain users. In order to give full play to the function of the platform, in the design works presented in the top ten of the leaderboard, players can see the materials used by different users to complete the design, which provides the possibility for users who are obsessed with design to learn and learn.
(Decoration elements used by others can be seen in the leaderboard)
According to Glu, as early as 2019, there was not yet an entertainment app on the market designed for female users over the age of 29 and with higher education, and the emergence of "Design Home" filled the gap in the market well. It is not difficult to see that the target users of "Redecor" have some overlaps with it, and the sense of business that this mobile game first gave users should come from this.
(Target female audience: 29+ years old, well-educated, creative)
Secondly, in this seemingly casual mobile game, Reworks cleverly added competitive content. The voting ranking mechanism allows all players to actively or passively join the competitive process, and they subdivide the game for users who are willing to accept the competition.
In the game, players can choose to participate in the limited-time design mission released by the full service, and they can also choose to participate in two or two competitions. For the design effect that has been released by another player, the player can choose whether to compete with it, and the final voting result is announced in the form of the proportion of votes obtained.
Compared with the massive number of players in full service, this way of healthy competition for specific players is undoubtedly more able to stimulate the morale of users, and at the same time allow players to obtain a more specific sense of achievement.
Finally, Redecor's social element should not be underestimated. For users, after completing the renovation task, they need to get a sense of identity from others, which in turn translates into a sense of accomplishment. If the in-game voting mechanism doesn't meet their needs, then choosing to seek recognition on social platforms is a good new way.
(After the renovation and results, I will ask whether to share)
If it is not enough to just share the completed decoration results, there are still ranking results to share. Whenever the player takes the first place in the design task, the system will automatically generate a decoration video, and the player can choose whether to publish to the social platform after saving.
(I won the first renovation work)
On top of that, players will have to wait for hours or even a day to get their votes, which will encourage players to log into the game regularly and complete renovation tasks, ultimately forming a looping game experience.
However, these factors are all built on the basis of a sufficiently fun home improvement game. Although it is only a simple color change, Compared with the four or five colors available in products with home improvement elements, Reworks can be said to have taken the capacity of the material library to the extreme. At the same time, the restoration and realism of the picture scene are also its advantages.
When the gameplay framework is more similar, there is no reason why users should not choose a better quality product.
03
The business value of gamification platforms
For users, the attractiveness of the gameplay mechanism is what they are more concerned about, but for manufacturers, perhaps the monetization method of this gamified platform is what they are more concerned about. And in Redecor, we happen to see some of its commercial potential as a platform.
In the case of Redecor, its monetization means can be divided into two categories: in-game and out-of-game.
As far as the game is concerned, "Redecor" adds the consumption attribute of the material props, that is, the decoration materials purchased by the user are only used 5 times, and when the number of times is used up, they need to be repurchased. This mechanism both avoids player rot and opens up possibilities for commercialization.
(The number in the upper left corner is the number of times remaining)
With this mechanism, the in-game monetary system can be roughly divided into three categories, namely Cash, Gold, and Tokens. Among them, banknotes are relatively easy to obtain and can be used to exchange relatively low-grade color material. Gold coins are not easy to obtain, but they can be exchanged for more design-inspired materials.
However, if you want to buy materials, you first need to unlock the corresponding types of materials, and when you unlock the types, you need star coins, which is directly linked to the recharge system, and the recharge will be the player's most important channel for obtaining.
Not only commercial content, but also the amount of props used by players to complete design tasks will also appear on the leaderboard, and players can fully see how other users have completed a cost-effective renovation.
During the renovation process, the player cannot directly preview the final product, but can only preview the combined effect of the 2 colors. This setting to reduce the fault tolerance rate not only makes users who love design feel challenging, but also opens up the possibility of increasing revenue. Especially when the preset doesn't match the final effect, players need to re-purchase materials for renovations.
In order to form a benign long-term operation, kryptonite points such as the Battle Pass season card are also implanted in the game, and the reward is some relatively rare decoration materials. At the same time, the game has introduced a season system, in different seasons will be based on different decoration styles as the theme, for example, in the new season, Reworks to Bauhaus (Bauhaus art trend, the most important and significant impact on the field of graphic design is to lay the three major components in the design education: flat composition, three-dimensional composition and color composition) as the theme, can clearly see that the new season of color collision will be stronger than the previous season.
(Bauhaus season content)
When new content with a high degree of differentiation appears, it will inevitably stimulate the user's desire to consume. With the opening of the new renovation theme, "Redecor" has also climbed the best-seller list, and the flow is expected to exceed the $6 million last month.
In addition to the regular in-game monetization methods, the direction That Redecor is trying to take has given me a glimpse of the endless possibilities of gamification platforms. According to their official information, they are trying to cooperate with physical home improvement manufacturers.
(Reworks official website investment information)
This business model is not the first time to appear, as early as "Design Home" users can buy the furniture styles they like in the game on the relevant websites, and even completely reproduce their own decoration effects in real life.
(Physical furniture sold in Design Home)
In "Redecor", but from the perspective of furniture, it can not provide more colors of the same furniture, but also has a certain potential for personal customization. When it gives full play to the functions of the platform and connects online and offline, its value will be further enhanced.
Not only is it the possibility of commercial platforms, as mentioned above, the style tone of "Redecor" is very much in line with Instagram, and this kind of platform with pictures as a carrier may have the possibility of extending to the field of home improvement design.
Playtika was the first to see an opportunity, and the Israeli manufacturer recently completed the acquisition of Reworks. The acquisition is $600 million, and Playtika will first acquire an 80% stake in Reworks for $400 million in cash, and if the latter completes the specified EBITDA (EBITDA) performance indicators in 2022, Playtika will also acquire the remaining 20% of the shares for up to $200 million.
(Playtika decided to buy public information about Reworks in two installments.)
If the remaining stake in Reworks could be acquired for $200 million, it would mean that the Finnish manufacturer's valuation would have been as high as $1 billion. In short, Playtika invested only $600 million and net $400 million two years later.
Back in 2012, Facebook spent $1 billion to complete the acquisition of Instagram, and Bloomberg Intelligence speculates that Instagram's current valuation has reached 100 billion.
04
epilogue
The commercial value of this mobile game is secondary, and what Reworks is doing has made me realize that the boundaries of the game may be far wider than people inherently believe. In addition to the pure entertainment, leisure, and time-passing functional attributes, games can also try to become new forms of content carriers.
"Redecor" is a good proof that it fully has the elements of a simulated home improvement mobile game, but it highlights its own function as a platform and tries to expand it continuously. Despite being in-game, players can still visit other people's renovation cases as offline, choose from a large number of home improvement materials, and even communicate with other people who are renovating.
Whether the mechanics of this gamification platform have the potential to replicate to other game categories are not yet known, but it is worth looking forward to.