Showa American Story, released on January 7, is an ARPG (action role-playing game) developed by China's Suzuku Games, with an undetermined release date, and is expected to land on Steam, PlayStation and other platforms.
The game is mainly about the 1980s, "in the United States, which became a Japanese colony, embarking on a journey of revenge and truth." ”
The 80s pop culture memories of killing, historical reversal themes, B-grade film art style, coupled with the background of domestic manufacturers, make this work just released PV trailer attracted countless attention.
The well-known game media Nomad Starry Sky believes that this is "a cute gamer behind the screen of plasma, and a domestic console game that pays tribute to "Kill Bill". ”
In the history of domestic consoles, this is a game that lacks technical reserves, financial support, and can only get such a high degree of attention by relying on the innovation of B-grade film genres. The last thing that was remembered was "Black Myth: Goku", which released a trailer two years ago.
On the game introduction page released on the official website, this game has RPG characters and stories, as well as ARPG action-adventure combat, and also has AVG and EDU cultivation and collection gameplay. Judging from the degree of mixed categories, this is a game of stitching monster level.
Introduction to the gameplay of Showa Rice Story
The same is the gameplay fusion theme innovation, why some games make players highly anticipated? Some are chased by players and scolded for "eating ugly"? One Entertainment Observation selected the five most popular categories in the market in the previous year to analyze the profound impact of category themes on the game industry, and the industry background of gameplay integration, what kind of integration can be accepted by players, rather than the final scolding of the whole network?
1. Battle Royale class
Status: Revenue performance and market performance are firmly at the top of the list
Future prediction: Players need more products under the theme of integration, such as martial arts chicken games
Masterpieces: "PUBG", "Peace Elite", "Eternal Destruction", "Fading Light: Hate", "ARK: Survival Evolution", "Infinite Law", "Realm Royale", "Spell Broken", "Tetris 99", etc
Trend Interpretation:
2017 is known as the "First Year of Eating Chicken".
"H1Z1" (King of Survival) and "PUBG" were first launched in the Two Continents of the Americas and Asia, and quickly swept the world with the influence of short videos and live broadcasts.
PUBG (PUBG)
An important reason for the popularity of the world is because these two chicken-eating games themselves are the product of gameplay integration: both the thrill of FPS shooting games, the various vehicles that RAC racing game fans like, as well as the RPG elements of friends and peers who love and kill each other, and the real-time strategy elements of team cooperation are also reflected.
Rich gameplay, excellent viewing, and the ability to chat and make friends are the categories of live games that were urgently needed at that time.
Producer Brendan Greene said in an interview that the popularity of H1Z1 and PUBG is mainly due to the live broadcast industry.
"The anchors began to recommend each other, the fans recommended to their favorite anchors, or the anchors themselves discovered the battle royale game. In short, more and more dota 2 and "League of Legends" well-known big anchors have begun to broadcast "H1Z1" and "PUBG" in their leisure time, professional anchors have also mushroomed, and major live broadcast platforms have begun to spread the game like a virus for a while. The producer said.
Chicken eating game, the upper limit is very high, the lower limit is very low.
Professional FPS players can snipe, and casual players also like to land in boxes or enjoy the scenery in the game. This makes the chicken eating game a national game. As of now, according to Sensor Tower's domestic mobile game revenue list in December, Tencent's chicken eating game "Peace Elite" is still at the top of the list.
According to Qimai data, in December iOS download list, "Peace Elite" is still in the top three. This shows that the battle royale mobile game is still the most popular and highest-revenue game category in the market, and there is no one, and the peripheral income such as game live broadcasting, hardware upgrades, supporting services, and competitions that it has spawned is also very impressive.
Even if "H1Z1" and "PUBG", which first ate crabs, were removed from the domestic live broadcast platform in 2017 and 2022 respectively, this does not mean that the game of eating chicken is declining, but it is just a change of vest.
Because latecomers found that in the chicken eating mode, not only the categories can be integrated, but also the gameplay and theme can be integrated.
This is also the development trend of the chicken eating game in the next stage. Different from the film and television industry genre film system, different types of film fans have different interests and do not understand each other. The same chicken eating game can even accommodate a chicken eating universe, and players who like different game themes can find their favorite chicken eating games.
The combination of chicken eating gameplay and Tetris is the NS platform elimination game TETRIS 99; the combination of magic themes is comparable to Zelda's "Spell Break"; the chicken eating gameplay combines the overwatch class system with the World of Warcraft mount and forging system, which is last year's critically acclaimed "Realm Royale"; and the combination of ancient world and dinosaur themes is the chicken-eating version of Monster Hunter, such as "ARK: Battle Royale".
Screenshot of ARK Battle Royale
Eating chicken can be integrated with almost all the genres of gameplay in the industry, colliding with sparks. However, the theme innovation that is most in line with China's national conditions is the martial arts eating chicken.
Since 2017, Dreamgame's "Wuxia Qi", Shenzhen's fun-loving "Nine Robbery Song", and Lei Wu Games' "Jianghu Survival" have successively entered the wuxia chicken eating track, they hope to replace the original military shooting chicken eating chicken with the national style martial arts culture, but in the end, it is NetEase's "Forever Haunted" that breaks out in the market.
In December last year, "PUBG" was announced to be free, at the same time, "Forever Doom" topped the list of domestic paid games, selling 6 million copies worldwide in three months, and the popularity of "Forever Doom" Douyu Live broadcast increased to more than 30-40 million, ranking third.
"The competitiveness and ornamentality of the game itself, coupled with the community ecology that the official intends to create, "Forever Doom" is entering the vision of more players through live broadcast and video. Therefore, for the official, a higher level of e-sports events naturally becomes the next direction to focus on layout. The Travel Research Agency analyzed.
2. SLG strategy game
Status: the game returns to the sea, and the local game goes to sea
Future prediction: technological innovation, big IP blessing, breaking through the limitations of historical themes
Representative works: "Awakening of Nations", "Total War: Three Kingdoms", "Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Strategy Edition", "Nobunaga Nobuyuki", "Allied Death Squad", "Clash of Tribes", "Leading the Land", etc
One Entertainment Observation has previously interpreted in detail the collective return of domestic SLG strategy games and the current situation of fierce competition in local strategy games.
But that's only one aspect.
On the other hand, it should also be noted that local SLG strategy games are also actively going overseas to seek a larger market.
In 2019, NetEase's "Coast of the Land" (Japanese service name: "Romance of the Three Kingdoms") entered the top ten of the Japanese service best-seller list twice; in 2020, the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" landed in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, South Korea and other places, with multiple lists entering the top ten, some regions entering the top three, with overseas flow of more than 100 million US dollars; in 2021, "King of Avalon" in the US market swept the live broadcast room, becoming the first Chinese game to reach the top of the US game best-seller list.
Before 2017, the game industry was worried about domestic games going abroad, except for the "Chinese character culture circle" areas such as China, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia, it was difficult to gain a foothold in the European and American markets. Game media gamewower once said bluntly, "Behind the IP radiation effect brought by China's unique culture, it is difficult to open up the international market, and can only obtain certain results in Southeast Asia and other regions, but Southeast Asia is a place worse than China's hardware conditions, and this achievement can only be said to be better than nothing." ”
Today, going to sea has become the consensus of the industry, and 40% of the games going to sea are strategy games. These SLG games are not only popular in the Chinese character culture circle, but also in mature markets such as Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea.
Why is the SLG category more popular in the game of going to sea?
This is because strategy games are rare in the game category that return to the essence of the game, that is, games with innovative gameplay, and the requirements for characters, stories, backgrounds and even the screen itself are not as high as RPG games, but the balance of the game and the level of player skills and tactics are higher, of course, because of the focus on strategy, it can also be more international. The classic 4E theory in strategy games, namely explore, expand, develop and destroy (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate), is essentially irrelevant to the game background, only about the gameplay, so the acceptance of players in various countries is relatively high.
From the perspective of future trends, SLG needs to work hard in three aspects: technology, IP and historical background. Technically, to take a simple example, when some players compared the "Age of Empires" windows phone version of the same era and the same era of "Clash royale", some players said that they preferred the former, because "the soldiers in "Clash of Clans" will not turn", whether it will turn This is just a gameplay detail, behind which is a series of technical optimizations such as code optimization and mobile phone computing resource allocation. The main strategy game is thousands of people on the same screen, global service, thousands of game units moving, attacking, and assigning tasks have given manufacturers technical pressure, and are closely related to the gameplay.
Clash of Clans introduction page
In terms of IP and historical themes, the SLG game has gone through three stages: developing its own IP, to mixing up the history of various countries, to doing corresponding background character biographies and standing paintings for the localization of the sea. This has been confirmed in IP such as "Awakening of All Nations" and "Sword and Expedition".
Of course, Chinese culture going out is inseparable from the excavation of its own culture, but the excellent classic IP of other cultures can be used as nourishment for Chinese manufacturers as well as history. The British can develop the "Total War Series" to travel to the Three Kingdoms, and the Chinese producers can also make the British Isles into the game.
This is also why the "Showa Rice Story" mentioned at the beginning has become a "lifetime" series for domestic players. Because the market finally saw a work about foreign history produced by a Chinese team, it means that the Chinese game industry has gradually begun to grasp the interpretation of the history and culture of other countries.
3. RPG/ARPG
Status: Quadratic RPG games are gradually saturated, ARPG games hit the console budding and end-game return express
Future prediction: the main game is host, and the trend of host-side game leisure is irreversible
Representative works: "Phantom Tower", "Original God", "Journey to the West", "Uncharted Sea", "Legend of the Paladin Sword", "Sword Net 3", "The Last Survivor", "God of War", "Only Wolf: Shadow Death Twice", "Death Cycle", "Wilderness Dart", etc
Trend interpretation
Role-playing games have always been a must for soldiers, and it is also the place where many players' dreams begin.
Whether it is the plot of "Li Xiaoyao peeking at Zhao Ling'er bathing" in "Immortal Sword", or the Western section of "Red Dead Redemption", or the hand-dead player who was beaten by a creep in "Dark Souls". The charm of the game as the ninth art is vividly expressed in RPGs/ARPG.
There are philosophical reflections in "Wanda and the Colossus", long hair fluttering in "Angel Hunting Witch", deeply touching in "The Last Survivor", and dreams in "Tower of Illusion" and "Original Gods". It can be said that whether it is a plot party, a character party, an operation party, or a gameplay party, you can find your favorite works in this category.
According to the report of data statistics agency Newzoo, the global market size of the hosting platform reached $176 billion in 2021 and is still growing. In the domestic market, host and terminal games soared by 20%.
Unlike the mobile game market where battle royale and strategy games occupy half of the country, the terminal game and console market are the real home of RPGs/ARPG, but unfortunately, the secondary theme that has promoted the development of domestic RPGs in the past five years has peaked.
The Game Working Committee's "2021 China Game Industry Report" shows that although Generation Z promotes the growth of two-dimensional games, the dividend of Chinese game users has peaked due to the impact of fewer children and short videos.
In fact, this has long been a precursor.
In 2020, the Tencent TGDC Developer Conference released a report showing that the growth rate of secondary users plummeted from 22% in 2019 to single digits, only 1.97%.
The growth of secondary users has stopped, and the Xianxia PRG has ushered in strict supervision, resulting in domestic RPG/ARPG games not rising and falling in the field of mobile games, but this is not a good thing.
First, you can force the production team and players to return to the end game and the host, after all, the big screen, keyboard and mouse and the controller are more suitable for RPG/ARPG; second, in the past, this category was basically focused on several types of themes such as the two-dimensional element and the fairy tale class, and there are still opportunities in other themes such as science fiction, theology, zombie exploration, wasteland, cyberpunk, etc. In the future, there are still opportunities, because the RPG/ARPG category itself is good at portraying characters and describing plots.
Dune
Looking at it broader, in this world, there is not only one kind of plot character in the second dimension, the cute girl. In theory, how many genre films there are in the movie, the RPG category can include as many game themes as possible. Such a difficult novel as "Dune" can make an RPG game, what else can't it be?
4. FPS/TPS games
Status: Revenue declines, scale declines, and gradual integration with other categories
Future Prediction: Dramatization is the future of FPS/TPS games
Masterpieces: Call of Duty, Battlefield, Rainbow Six, Doom, CS, Halo, Resident Evil, Legion Fortress, Road to Survival, etc
In 2019, the well-known game media IGN selected the top 10 shooters in the history of games, unfortunately there is no "Crossfire", but there is "Half-Life".
Originally a branch of FPS shooters, battle royale games are now the absolute overlords of the game category.
However, hardcore shooters based on shooting gameplay have more than enough to do in the era of mobile games.
The income is acceptable, the market share is OK, but it is tired and it is difficult to say the future.
Also in this year's "China Game Industry Report", in terms of overseas revenue, domestic shooter games are only in role-playing games, accounting for 12.96 revenue, much higher than MOBA games and elimination casual games; among the top 100 products in China's mobile game revenue, shooter games account for 14.07%, second only to MOBA games. Together, shooters, MOBAs, and role-playing split 48 percent of China's game market revenue.
China's independently developed mobile game overseas market revenue accounted for the top 100 types of revenue
Take "Crossfire" as an example, this old game from ten years ago, although it is no longer at the level of the top three global revenues in 2019, will still contribute 400 million yuan per month in 2021.
The current situation of shooting games being tasteless and abandoned will continue for a long time. The reason is that the shooting game on the mobile phone is not easy to operate, in the final analysis, it is still a hardware problem.
On January 12, 2022, according to 36Kr, Tencent intends to acquire Black Shark mobile phones and enter game hardware. It remains to be seen whether the problem of difficult childbirth in the shooter mobile game can be solved.
Now it seems that the keyboard and mouse is still the most suitable interactive method for shooting games, that is, in the PC game market. That said, only Microsoft has the strength to regroup the shooter's past glory. Microsoft has the "Halo" series at the bottom of the box, the understanding of shooting games is one of the best, and there is the console XBOX exclusive shooting game "Rotten Country".
Halo
From a trend point of view, FPS games may need to be freed from pure PVP confrontation, paying more attention to the sense of story and battlefield atmosphere, the Hollywood story mode of Call of Duty, the atmosphere of Battlefield 1 charging with teammates, the mecha battle of Titanfall, the Warcraft and Queen Alien World Wars in Gears of War.
Although it is a burden for hardcore shooters to pass the plot, in the future, shooter games need RPG elements such as characters, backgrounds, and plots to add luster to themselves, while taking advantage of weapon systems, vehicles, team cooperation and other advantageous elements to a higher level.
5. Casual niche category
Status: rich categories, small audience, and diverse means of innovation
In the future: multi-terminal and more suitable, new mainstream game categories will be born from here, and some niche categories have a higher market acceptance
Representative works: "Warm and Warm" series, "The Strongest Snail", "Hit a Big Watermelon", "Traveling Frog", "Simulated Goat", "Plants vs. Zombies", "Defending Turnips" and so on
From the perspective of game categories, in addition to mainstream game categories such as car gun balls and adventure actions, almost all can be classified as niche categories, but in the market, the income level of niche categories such as Otome rematch, placement RPG, and bullet screen shooting is not low.
One Entertainment Observation counts different game categories and themes on the market, and categories and categories, themes and themes, themes and categories can be integrated with each other, which means that the form of fusion games is unlimited.
Especially under the trend of multi-terminal and simultaneous, the original criticism of low operation difficulty, poor picture quality, backward technology, simple casual gameplay, into the mainstream game built-in Easter eggs, such as "The Witcher 3" built-in Quint card, retreat can further simplify the gameplay,
Enter more platforms, such as smart TV boxes or electric vehicles, such as casual mini-games in Xiaomi TV boxes, because the operation is simple, only the remote control can be controlled.
Screenshot of the TV Box game
In general, the traditional category still occupies the mainstream of the game market, the domestic market and the international market have their own preferences for categories, but that is only the size of the different, the categories tend to be consistent, the biggest variable lies in the leisure niche category, rich themes, diverse categories, hiding the seeds of innovation.
Domestic game manufacturers can take advantage of their strengths and avoid their weaknesses, no longer blindly chasing technological leadership, publicizing more gold, and overseas investment, but have found a path suitable for the development of domestic games, that is, relying on the deep historical and cultural background and the international vision of big countries to compete, and work category themes, which is a wise choice for overtaking in curves.