Written | Wu Xianzhi
Edit the | Wang Pan
During the Spring Festival, there is only one winner - Tencent.
On February 8, WeChat released the 2022 Year of the Tiger Spring Festival data report, which shows that the total number of WeChat red envelopes with covers during the Spring Festival (January 31 to February 5) exceeded 5 billion.
According to the requirements of the WeChat open platform, in order to make a red envelope cover, you must complete the enterprise authentication of WeChat public account users or video number users with effective fans of 100. After completing the registration, follow the corresponding process to apply for production. As long as it is approved, it can be purchased and used in the "WeChat Red Envelope Cover Open Platform". The official Price of WeChat for each cover is 1 yuan per piece, with a ceiling of 1000 to 2000.
According to this calculation, in 6 days, Tencent has a lot of income by customizing the red envelope cover function alone.
When the WeChat red envelope cover was sought after, at the same time, other giants were almost all in the situation of "plucking hair". Jingdong spent a lot of money to win the Spring Festival Gala cooperation, 1.5 billion smashed down without much splash, such as Baidu, Kuaishou, Douyin often a billion-level red envelope scale, its attention is completely less than a small WeChat red envelope cover.
If you taste carefully, since the PC era, Tencent's various businesses have been closely related to the "skin".
This skin is a virtual outfit in the QQ show in the PC era, a character skin of tens or hundreds of yuan in the game in the mobile era, and a custom cover with only 3 months validity in WeChat. Seemingly inconspicuous skin almost covered Tencent's entire commercialization period.
It is no exaggeration to say that whether the skin change is successful or not determines to a certain extent how much money Tencent can make.
Gild the instant messaging
The "skin economy" has experienced three forms: qq show to break the PC era commercialization of Tencent, game skin to make it from small to large, and now weChat red envelope cover has opened the door to B. This historical process is also almost consistent with Tencent's general direction from C to B.
Zhang Xiaolong diligently read and constantly released the statement that "WeChat is a tool" to the outside world, which greatly limited the possibility of WeChat seeking commercialization from C.
At that time, Tencent's first bucket of gold from instant messaging came from users. In 2003, the "Avatar" group led by Xu Liang launched the QQ Mall, capping the virtual image system QQ show.
In the first six months of the launch, 5 million people spent an average of about 5 yuan, and finally let users pay money. The avatar meets the personalized needs of young users, while raising the issue price of a single product and deliberately creating scarcity brings a higher premium. The price of popular parts such as hairstyle "Tokyo Raiders", "super cracked eyes", and clothes "trend front" was once speculated to tens of thousands of yuan.
Pictured: Buy Q coins in the official channel, it costs 1033.3 yuan to buy this skin
QQ show has driven the frequency of online purchases, thus revitalizing Q coin payment, the mature trading mechanism of QQ Mall has evolved into Paipai Network, and various member value-added services have also been abused since then. At its peak, there were 12 kinds of membership systems bound to growth mechanisms, and until 2010, it was an important driver for Tencent to maintain a compound annual growth of 50.92%.
Revenue from value-added services brought Tencent's commercial imagination and helped it successfully land on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and Xu Liang's success indirectly contributed to Tencent's second organizational restructuring in 2005. This adjustment determined the product manager system, "who proposes, who implements" and "once it is bigger, become an independent army" has become the goose factory creed.
Stepping into the mobile era of QQ micro-decline, WeChat has been replaced by it, coupled with the natural intergenerational changes of users, the group of post-85s and early 90s users who have pinned on the virtual image to highlight their personality continue to lose, and QQ Show seems to be on the verge of death.
In 2019, Tencent further opened the QQ show page for The To B customization service. QTrade, customized for financial practitioners, when chatting, the right column that originally displayed personal information was replaced with a customizable panel. In other words, the QQ show as a personality display becomes a brand display page, and the business model changes from to C to B.
Facing the to B market and catering to the new generation of users, QQ Show has made a lot of efforts but still cannot reproduce its former glory. Tencent is not worried, after all, there are many scenes of consuming "skins", and the commercial value may far exceed the former, such as mobile games.
Today, game skins have become a unique culture, and the dazzling methods of co-branding IP, festival limitation, and creation of exclusives have created sufficient kryptonite reasons for users.
Selling skins has become the most important source of income for many online game manufacturers. For example, during the Spring Festival last year, King Glory earned more than 4 billion yuan by relying on 8 skins, and even if it was affected by the epidemic, King Glory achieved 9.2 billion yuan of flowing water in January by relying on skin alone. The "skin" trade is not only explosive, but also drought and flood protection.
This year's Spring Festival King Glory launched a total of 5 New Year's limited skins, and all the collections under the first week of the discount need to recharge at least 499 yuan, which is much cheaper than last year. However, due to environmental reasons, the official did not disclose the flow of water.
Do not sell games and sell skins
Surprisingly, it's not the first online game to unlock paid skins, but a classic stand-alone game. In 2006, The Elder Scrolls 4 launched a $2.50 expansion pack. Mainly added a set of golden war horse armor, but unfortunately did not provide any attribute bonuses, resulting in a lot of scolding.
That $2.50 saddle
Peddling skins is not suitable for stand-alone but for online games, the reason why people are willing to pay for skins is to please others, so the real famous by selling skins is still League of Legends. Before LOL came out, Fist had split into two factions around value-added services.
A small number of people think they can try selling skins again, including the main designer Steve Feak. Most people think that there is nothing wrong with skin and attribute linkage, and that skin alone is difficult to attract users to pay, and publisher Chris Enock recalled in the documentary that it was an opportunity to "make a hundred million dollars with this game".
The sheep knife made the right choice, the skin was completely decoupled from the game attributes, and jumped out of the "Shi Yuzhu Trap" where the free online games in the past lost balance due to value-added services. The success of the fist by skin has attracted many followers to follow suit, and the debate over whether the skin and the game attributes are decoupled has also troubled followers.
Tencent has enough national-level games to do both. The typical product that holds the "skin and attribute linkage" is crossfire (CF hereinafter referred to as CF), and the glory of the king is biased towards the skin and the attributes are weakly related.
CF's revenue stream is mainly through the sale of hero-level items and paid characters, and most of the items and characters that need to be purchased will provide corresponding attribute bonuses.
Taking the characters as an example, the official sales platform "Daoju City" can currently purchase 13 permanent characters and 2 limited-time characters. If a user wants to collect all the skins, it will cost almost 1400 yuan.
Paid items also brought considerable revenue to Crossfire, and the game's most beautiful years coincided with the time when the Fire Kirin and other M4 heroic weapons were sold.
Tencent did not continue the "skin and attribute linked" model, and the subsequent mobile games "Peace Elite" and "Glory of the King" embarked on the LOL's "selling skin" model.
Incomplete statistics, as of December 31, 2021, The Glory of kings has released a total of nearly 500 skins, 108 heroes, including several reworked heroes, such as Irene, Dianwei, Lianpo, Mengqi, etc., the diversity and sustainability of the game is comparable to other MOBA games.
New heroes make money for innovative gameplay, while skins are essentially a mental business, and only continuous innovation can satisfy both fun and good looks. Obviously, gameplay innovation can be encountered but not sought, and it will be much less difficult to acquire the mind.
Note: New heroes include redo
The number of new heroes and skins launched by Glory of Kings continues to decline, and the gap between the number of heroes and skins is getting wider and wider, which proves that the Tianmei team's innovation of gameplay is increasingly difficult. And the breakthrough in appearance is obvious to all, and the glory of the king should be the representative of the national style game. From this point of view, the team did put more energy into the "skin" business.
Yao Xiaoguang's team is well aware that consumers will calculate which ones will be stacked with time and which must be spent to get it" And then they will calculate in their minds whether the value of exchanging content through time and spending money on props is worth his continued play." As long as the two are balanced against each other and do not break through the user's psychological threshold, we have reason to believe that the glory of the king can continue to be beautiful.
The skins of The Glory of Kings can be roughly divided into companion, normal, brave, epic, legendary, season limited, KPL limited, anniversary limited, noble limited, achievement limited, treasure hunting limited, battle order limited, and a small number of internal test limits, etc. These skins vary in special effects, sophistication and selling price due to different categories and acquisition difficulties.
More importantly, the limit increases the difficulty of skin acquisition, increases playability, and changes the low threshold that the first five types of skins can obtain pure kryptonite.
For example, the seemingly free battle order limited skin, in addition to ensuring the game duration, also costs 388 coupons (38.8 yuan) to get the second one; the treasure limited skin costs an average of 1500 yuan (glory crystal), and the blind box play is quite top-notch; and the annual/anniversary limit, the noble limit, and the KPL limit bind the time, scene, and emotion, and the user is willing to kryptonite for it.
No one will doubt that Tencent is the giant who will create scarcity the most, which is also the mystery of the glory of the king to maintain youth.
ADWAYS once used a large-scale sample to calculate that the life cycle of the hand game is only 25 weeks, and the glory of the king is about to turn seven years old and is already a rare old man in the middle ages. Now, the new hero squeezes toothpaste, returning to the field in addition to the normalization of the old skin, can only rely on IP and e-sports to continue to live.
Tencent is not worried at all, if the consumer market is tired of selling leather aesthetics, then the business of selling leather in the enterprise service market has just begun to appear. To paraphrase Liu Qiangdong: This will definitely recreate Tencent.
Among the value-added services, game revenue accounts for the absolute majority, while the income of online games based on skins in games dominates.
The change in revenue structure and proportion shows that in the year of Gengzi (2020), which is fully affected by the epidemic, the proportion of value-added services is significantly higher, and Tencent's revenue has always maintained a growth rate of 25% in that short period of time. When the epidemic subsided, Tencent's revenue growth rate fell slightly, and the proportion of games was still very high.
It is worth mentioning that in the first quarter of each year, it is often the time when the proportion of value-added services is relatively high.
Sell skin to to B
Let users willingly pay for the skin is not successful, Tencent also successfully cultivated the needs of corporate consumer skin, no one can imagine, six years ago WeChat red envelope raid Alipay, six years later just launched the red envelope cover, WeChat has completely become the biggest winner of the Spring Festival red envelope in the past three years.
As early as the Spring Festival of 2019, the enterprise WeChat tested the custom red envelope cover in order to accumulate users. According to the WeChat Open Class public account, in just one week after the custom red envelope cover was launched, more than 15,000 enterprises customized the exclusive red envelope for the Spring Festival for 14 million employees. There are many makeup giants such as Givenchy and L'Oréal, as well as fast-moving consumer goods giants such as McDonald's and Starbucks.
More than two months later, the 2.8.0 version of Qiwei officially launched the "WeChat Red Envelope Cover" function. The frequency of red envelope issuance far exceeds the frequency of skin purchase, and the red envelope cover service for enterprises is extremely explosive after binding with the festival.
Internet giants will copy success, but only Tencent is well versed in "Gou Yigou, all have", as a friend of time.
For the success of Micro, WeChat did not hurry, waiting for a year to announce the official launch of the WeChat Red Envelope Cover Open Platform at the 2020 WeChat Open Class Pro, and only open registration to enterprises, governments, media and other organizations. The skin economy of the to C market can be perfectly reproduced into the to B market, and even to G, which shows Tencent's ability to sell "skin".
Compared with Micro, WeChat has continuously enriched the form and gameplay of red envelope covers in recent years. Earlier, 5 pictures, videos or mixed rows could be displayed, and the Year of the Tiger further expanded the scope of customization, adding the amount without price increases, 1 yuan 1.
Previously, WeChat mainly opened the customization function of red envelope covers to B and to G markets, and this year it was opened to all individual users after meeting three conditions: 1 created a video number; 2 published a video number this year; 3 Content published this year received comments from 3 friends.
The above three restrictions can be regarded as WeChat opening the right to customize the red envelope in exchange for the user's use of the video number.
During the Spring Festival, which is a time period with a high frequency of use of WeChat red packets, cover customization satisfies the user's personality and also provides a very special exposure channel for brands: after a person receives the cover of the red packet, it will spread because of social relations.
Among the six red envelopes in the above figure are both Internet companies and productive enterprises; there are both celebrities and personal custom covers.
In the Year of the Tiger, the red envelope cover swept across Huaxia, and WeChat's skin business once again ended perfectly.
The red envelope cover perfectly unleashes the potential of the B2B2C model. Its business model and ordinary page advertising are essentially no different, but because B-end customers have higher traffic needs, brands are large consumers of covers, and they regard WeChat red envelopes as the best way to accurately market and expose brands.
On the C side, not only is the aesthetic fatigue brought about by changing the same cover, but the psychological environment of opening red envelopes is quite conducive to brand implantation.
Tencent's opening of the function of the cover red envelope is rhythmic and purposeful. The Year of the Rat tested the waters, the Year of the Ox activated Micro, and this year used the sensational effect of the WeChat red envelope cover to drain the video number.
On the one hand, it gathered the popularity of the video number, on the other hand, under the strong demand, the team mastered the accurate user portrait, laying the groundwork for the subsequent development of the video number.
The cumbersome application process was originally not conducive to the promotion of red envelope covers, but the actual effect was very different.
This has to be attributed to the WeChat team's ability to control the user's mind. Over the years, WeChat red envelopes have long become a high-frequency social method of the festival, two years of mature experience in operating the cover, at this time the opening of "human-to-human" personal customization, the beneficiaries of the Spring Festival red envelopes in the Year of the Tiger have not been left behind, still Tencent.
It is unknown how much income Tencent has received from the cover of the red packet, but from the perspective of the profit situation of the downstream industry chain, it should be quite impressive. Recently, many media have reported the industrial chain of e-commerce platforms selling customized WeChat red envelope covers, which will not be repeated here.
Regardless of whether there are loopholes in the application rules for the cover of WeChat red envelopes, at least there is no doubt that Tencent can not only rely on skin to enrich itself, but also generate a premium and mix with others.
end
In summary, qq show and colorful diamond membership system, game skin, WeChat red envelope cover witnessed the three stages of Tencent's monetization model.
QQ Show pixel-level reproduction sayclub.com found the first printing machine for Tencent. Mobile games with a life cycle like a single child have become both stable and explosive because of the sale of skin. In the past two years, the commercialization of WeChat has accelerated, and the red envelope cover has found a way for brands to get rid of the internal volume of traditional page advertising, and the cost of human-to-human transmission with the help of private domain traffic is obviously lower and more efficient than that of traditional web advertising.
Using "skin changing" to classify Tencent's monetization model in these three historical periods is only a change in appearance on the surface, and it is not difficult to see how powerful Tencent's insight and control of the user's mind are through review.
From the Altamira mural "Wounded Bison" 30,000 years ago to today's Z era, even the vicissitudes of the sea cannot change the pursuit of humanity.
In the PC era, the Internet has just entered China, online life stays on the page, QQ show provides a channel to display virtual appearances, so young people after the 80s and early 90s are willing to pay for it. Unfortunately, later launched a variety of diamond members, overdrafted the PC era communication tool - QQ's commercial carrying capacity, rapid decline.
In the mobile era, the rise of mobile games, the free model forced manufacturers to find new ways to monetize, and Tencent Games once again grasped the connection point between game characters and personal emotions, constantly enriching the skin economy. It is very apt to summarize the sentence that Baidu recently loved: what you see is what you get.
As for the WeChat red envelope cover, combined with the background of Tencent's shift to to B in the past two years, with WeChat as the basis, micro-enterprise as the spear, and QQ as the shield, the skin economy 3.0 may not be far away from us.
When a new growth anchor is found, even if the glory of the king enters history and becomes the next QQ show, Tencent can comfortably lie on the skin-wrapped printing machine and shout "technology for good".
Resources:
1. Interface News: Tencent's Rejuvenation Strategy from the Rebirth of the "QQ Show", 2017.
2. Game Hero Davin Drama: How did the game skin rise? 2020.
3. Shenzhen Business Daily: WeChat 2022 Spring Festival data: 380 million red envelope covers were collected, and the total number of WeChat red envelopes with covers exceeded 5 billion, 2022.