At the beginning of 2022, Tencent launched a women's game "Brilliant Star Road", and unlike the previous B game "Light and Night Love", which focuses on love, this mobile game is more inclined to operate and idol cultivation.
It can be seen that in the female to the game of this track, goose factory in the real force and make changes to meet different tastes of players. But what does not match "ambition" is that "Brilliant", which has an 8-point score in the internal beta TapTap, fell to 6.6 points after it was officially launched.
Image source taptap screenshot
Coincidentally, NetEase rushed to release tencent before the new work "Absolute Interpretation" and collided with the entertainment industry theme, and its TapTap score was only 6.2 points, which was really not the most miserable, only more miserable.
In the face of the successive "collisions" of the two major game manufacturers, people can't help but ask questions - do domestic women really have no good works to the game?
Big factories into the game of women, more "quality" less
To say that manufacturers will not do women to the game, folding paper can not agree.
The company that started by doing mobile women to mobile games released the first work "Warm Dressup Story" in 2012 and created a precedent for mobile dress-up games, and then launched the same series of "Warm Around the World" and "Miracle Warm Warm" in 13 and 15, and these two works have been favored by capital, the former being represented by Ali Games and the latter by Tencent.
It is precisely because of so many years of research and accumulation of women's games that Fold paper has become the first company in China to dare to eat B-swim crabs, and it is also the first company to make a phenomenon-level female mobile game.
According to public data, the company's mobile game "Love and Producer", released in 2017, set a record for the number of installs in one month on the line exceeded 10 million, and the highest single-day turnover exceeded 20 million yuan, which shocked the market, and can be said to be the first time in the true sense that capital can see the potential of "her game". Since then, the women to the game track ushered in a large explosion, with incomplete statistics, in 2020 alone, the number of women to the game has exceeded 20.
Image source: Mirror Entertainment
Among them, in addition to small and medium-sized manufacturers such as Mihayou and Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, Tencent, NetEase, B Station and other large manufacturers have also entered the game, but the first two have chosen to self-research and launched works such as "Food Language" and "Painters in Time and Space", and the latter has chosen to act as an agent and released games such as "Captive Palm".
However, the entry of Goose Factory and NetEase has not promoted the development of women to the quality of games, and even from the perspective of market reactions, most of the popular works are from small and medium-sized manufacturers, such as Qinyou Interactive's "Floating Life for Qingge", which has risen by 10 places per month after its launch, all the way to the game best-seller list, and finally achieved Top 10 good results.
Why do women raise the number of games, but the quality does not keep up? In the face of the frequent new additions of big factories, why don't players pay the bill? The Hong Kong Stock Research Institute will analyze from the following aspects.
The market is deadlocked, why is it difficult to get the explosive model?
From the perspective of the manufacturers themselves, the biggest problem is that the women they launch have a homogenization trend towards the game.
Taking Tencent's "Love of Light and Night" and NetEase's "Painters in Time and Space" as an example, their themes are indeed different, the former focuses on urban fantasy, the latter focuses on time and space fantasy, but the core gameplay of the two is still card cultivation and love, and the game CV (voice actor) also has a high degree of overlap.
Image source: Mob Research Institute
At the same time, the former is deeply involved in plagiarism incidents, knowing that the problem of plagiarism love and plagiarism in the light of night, its browsing degree exceeded 30w, and nearly 8,000 people made evaluations.
The source of the image is a screenshot
And after love and heat, the big factories have not been too strong in the female game, even in the aforementioned number of 2020 outbreak year, NetEase and Tencent also launched only one women's game, and that year they got the game version numbers were 15 and 11 respectively.
Compared with the big manufacturers who joined the war too late, although the small and medium-sized manufacturers made efforts early, they had no choice but to keep up with the capital chain, and the game version number could not fight the big manufacturers, resulting in the lack of marketing promotion, game planning and update frequency of the games they launched. This is also why the once popular "Traveling Frog" can only exit dismally in the end, this game that focuses on Japanese has not been able to launch the Chinese version for the first time after gaining the favor of Chinese players, so it has been abandoned by the market.
Look back at the entire gaming industry. According to Zhu Jiajin, head of Tencent Women's Game Products, since 2018, nearly 80 manufacturers in the mainland have joined the women's game track, which has promoted the rapid development of the industry, and therefore, many people have called 2018 "the first year of women's development to games".
But even in 2018, when "a hundred schools of thought" were competing, female practitioners in the game industry were still far below men, accounting for only 27.3%. It is conceivable that when a female game is designed by men, because of the difference in gender, aesthetic differences, so a little carelessness will bring a "greasy" feeling to the player.
Finally, return to the overall market. From 2017, when love and birth were born to now, it has only been five years, and women's games have exploded from number to show a trend of lack of staying power. In addition to the reasons for the "strongest underage game limit" and the version number, it is important that this game track is almost "full".
This is because women have limited the audience of the game, rather than referring to a wide range of "female players", although there are also "male players" joining, but this range is still a relatively narrow concept. Therefore, after the acceleration of small and medium-sized manufacturers and the entry of large manufacturers, resulting in increasingly fierce competition, the entire women's game market tends to be saturated.
To grab users from limited resources, domestic game manufacturers also need to find new breakthroughs.
Compared with Japan, the "imperfection" of domestic women to the game
Where is the breakthrough? Japan, the birthplace of women's games, has something to say.
In 1994, Angeliko, produced by Japan's Glory Co., Ltd., was the world's first female game. Compared with the domestic "her game" market, which has yet to be tapped, Japanese women have been developing the game market for about 28 years and are relatively mature.
First of all, back to the game itself, women to the game can be roughly divided into simulated cultivation, management, dressup, leisure, etc., of which the simulation of the cultivation of otome, bl, lily and other elements, which are basically found in the Japanese game market, while domestic games are mainly inclined to cultivate and love, lack of more extensive elements.
According to incomplete statistics, of the 24 women's games released in 2020, 22 are love games. This kind of very different gameplay will not only bring aesthetic fatigue to players, but also make the game itself out of the circle, and naturally it will not be able to make a hit.
Graph source network
Secondly, there are restrictions on talent in the industry. Japan's well-known CV grabbed a big handful, many of which are even actors and singers debut, such as the perennial list of the most popular voice actors in japanese comics top 10 Hanazawa Kaori, she not only participated in TV dramas in kindergarten, launched her debut album in 2013, and held a personal concert in 2015.
In contrast, the domestic CV, not only famous is better, the top few people are also because they contracted half of the TV series dubbing, resulting in a widely circulated spoof picture on the Internet as "the drama you watch are the four of us in love", which brings auditory fatigue to the public. In this regard, some players have complained that they don't know which game to play with their eyes closed, because one of the male protagonists of which game is opened is Ajay dubbing.
In addition, the ability of domestic game manufacturers to create IP is not strong. To know that the vitality of a work lies in the development of its IP, a good IP can continue to feedback the merchant, and bring traffic and revenue, such as the global hot Marvel, Pokémon and so on.
In order to give the game a better IP effect, Japanese game manufacturers use common marketing methods to promote products, adapt the game into movies, TV series, radio dramas, musicals and stage plays, and launch official fan comics and sequels.
According to Meng Niang Encyclopedia, the most "old" work of B You, "Angeliko", currently has 10 works, while "Sword Dance", released in 2015, not only has 3 fandom anime, but also 5 stage plays and 8 musicals in 18 years.
Of course, there are also domestic game manufacturers that have adopted the same approach, and Fold paper launched the animation of the same name of "Love and Producer" in 2020. As for the effect? There are a lot of related complaints about the animation on the B station, and the heat is even less than the player's own handbook.
Screenshot of source B station
But as the previous high praise respondent said, "Love and Producer" fandom is at least the first step. And when we take the first step, domestic women may usher in more and better works to the game.
epilogue
Although domestic women's games are still exploring blockbusters, there are still many good works in different vertical game fields in China. In the case of NetEase, the two-dimensional mobile game "Yin and Yang Division" launched in 2016 is a representative. In order to manage this IP well, NetEase produced fandom animation to further build the influence of IP, such as "Hundred Ghosts Kindergarten" and so on. These works have also achieved good results on the B station, with an average score of higher than 8.5 points.
It can be seen that domestic game manufacturers can make high-quality products and operate IP well. In the future, if domestic women's games want to create the next "love and producer", manufacturers have more things to explore and improve.
Article source: Hong Kong Stock Research Agency, aiming to help Chinese investors understand the world, focus on reporting On Hong Kong stock companies, friends who are interested in Hong Kong stocks should pay attention to us