Too many people want to get into the market.
Wen 丨 Xu Junhao
On the first day of March, Shanghai took the lead in the whole country and officially incorporated the management of script killing into local regulations, and its first registration certificate for script killing enterprises that was accepted and produced was issued in Baoshan District early on the same day. The nascent script killing industry has taken another small step forward on the road of standardized operation.
In the past two years, script killing has become one of the most popular entertainment projects for young people in China. Many media outlets refer to this form of entertainment as the new social darling. Such a role-playing reasoning game originating from Europe and the United States, after the blessing of well-known online variety shows and the promotion of social platforms, once launched, it quickly attracted a large number of young players.
A post-90s game industry practitioner revealed in an interview with Heike Finance that despite his busy work, he still played more than 70 scripts in 2021. He works and resides in Xi'erqi, one of Beijing's well-known Internet hotspots, with many Internet companies but fewer places for leisure and entertainment. In order to play the script, he will take a taxi to Wangjing, Shuangjing, Gaobeidian and other areas after work, and the cost of taking a taxi is more than 100 yuan, and the driving time is even more than 1 hour.
An offline script killing game is generally about 4 hours long. If you take into account the distance, meals, and teammates' late arrivals, it is likely that the time spent on a single script kill is more than 6 hours. If the script itself is a little longer, it means that the rest day is spent in the script killing shop from noon to night. For deep players, playing forty or fifty scripts a year is commonplace, which is equivalent to playing script killing every day of the week on average.
The love of real money and silver among players has contributed to the popularity of the script killing industry, which is intuitively reflected in the growth of the number of offline stores. According to the "2021 Physical Script Killing Consumption Insight Report", the number of script killing stores nationwide increased from 2,400 to 12,000 in 2019, and has exceeded 30,000 in 2021. According to data from ai media consulting, in the first half of 2021, among the offline trend entertainment methods preferred by Chinese consumers, script killing ranked third with a turnout of 36.1%, second only to watching movies and sports and fitness.
The question is, in addition to regulatory risks such as piracy, pornography, and violence, how long can players' love last in the face of more and more homogeneous stores and scripts with uneven content quality?
01
Addiction has its case
Originally titled Murder Mystery Game, the script was one of the earliest reasoning games to appear in Europe and the United States. Its history dates back to the 1935 game Jury Box. The game is derived from the court jury system, in which players play as members of a jury, listen to the prosecutor read aloud the case, and judge whether the defendant is guilty or not based on relevant clues.
Later this kind of game incorporated more playing elements. The player can not only become the detective in charge of solving the case, but also the party to the case or even the murderer. Player interactivity and puzzle solving coexist, forming a role-playing reasoning game such as murder mystery.
In 2013, China introduced its first murder mystery game, Death Wears White, which was very niche at the time. It was not until March 2016 that Mango TV, an Internet video platform owned by Hunan Radio and Television, launched the star reasoning variety show "Star Detective", which made this game form more widely known and gradually broke the circle. In 2017, the second season of "Star Detective" was played more than 100 million times.
With the east wind of the popularity of online variety shows, the script killing gradually started in China.
Early murder mysteries belonged to board games (Board Gmae), where the table was performed and required to communicate face-to-face, often with the aid of paper materials or models, as opposed to video games. At that time, the well-known table games were mainly Three Kingdoms Kill, Werewolf Kill and so on. Some board game stores will use A4 paper to simply print scripts for players, the content is often rough, and the number of players who can attract them is limited. With the "Star Detective" becoming a blockbuster network roundup, more and more people realize that the characters of good scripts are three-dimensional, the cases are complex and interesting, and higher requirements are put forward for the content of the script.
At a time when the script was niche and the copyright awareness was weak, some stores even directly copied the case in "Star Detective" to make a script. Some companies have keenly grasped the needs of players for high-quality content, such as the rapid transformation of Beijing Zhileyuan from developing board games to releasing scripts in 2016, and released 3 works of "Danshui Villa", "Memory of the Puppet" and "Ghost Revenge" within a year, leading the trend of script killing market at that time.
From 2016 to 2021, Zhileyuan launched 28 works called the "Giant Thriller" series in 6 years. These works are all set in the Republic of China, spreading out the complex character relationships within the big family through cases, which can well meet the needs of players for role play, and almost exclusively dominate the script market in the early days. Classic scripts such as "Good Birthday And Auspicious Day", "Ghost Spirit", and "Year Ring" launched by other script distribution studios only began to be released in 2018-2019 and gradually became popular.
The essence of script killing is a case-centered RPG (Role-Playing Game), reasoning is the core of the plot, and character design is the key to whether the character can be substituted. From this point of view, the "Giant Thriller" series is undoubtedly quite successful, and players can personally experience the grievances and hatreds of the Republic of China that can only be seen in film and television works or novels in the past during the game.
This also makes domestic players realize that the murder mystery copied from abroad is likely to appear unsatisfactory, and it is difficult for foreign script plots to directly empathize with domestic players. Even the name "Murder Mystery" itself is very European, not as concise as "script killing". The script is an essential element of the game, and the word "kill" highlights the "murder" element, and the structure of the word is similar to the well-known Three Kingdoms Kill and Werewolf Kill, which is convenient for memory.
The development of localized content prompted script killing to quickly become independent from tabletop games. On the basis of case reasoning, the rules of script killing are very simple, but because of the plot, there is a considerable degree of freedom. As long as the player can complete the reading and can express normally, they can participate in the game, which is less than the threshold for understanding the rules than most board games. This also makes the script kill not only out of the desktop into a real scene, but also with the development of technology online, and even into a completely virtual scene.
Since 2020, script killing has been frequently searched, making this form of the game more widely known. At the beginning of the year, the online script killing APP was paralyzed due to the influx of too many players during the New Year, and at the end of the year, CCTV financial reports on script killing related matters. In 2021, a Harbin new crown patient repeatedly appeared in the itinerary of the script killing shop, once again triggering a hot search.
The entry threshold is low, and there are reasoning puzzles and role-play with a certain degree of freedom, which is equivalent to quickly opening a virtual life at a very small cost, and it is no wonder that contemporary young people are addicted to it.
02
The blue ocean has become the red ocean
The popularity brought by the network has gradually heated up the script killing industry, but if you want to develop further, you must have a steady stream of high-quality content filling. In this process, the script killing industry has formed an internal closed loop: the distribution studio publishes the work, the store buys different works to form its own uniqueness, and the player chooses the store according to the work.
According to Heiko Finance, the current script is generally divided into boxed, city-limited and city-exclusive, boxed book price ranges from 300-600 yuan, any store can be purchased; city limited referred to as the city limit, a city only 3-5 stores can buy, the price ranges from 1000-1800 yuan; urban exclusivity means that only one store in a city can have this script, and the price is often more than 4000 yuan.
In order for their works to be selected by stores, the distribution studio will raise the volume and quality of the city limit and exclusive works upwards. The high-quality city limit and exclusivity can attract players for the store, and the overall content level is raised.
With the broadcast of the annual season of "Star Detective" since 2016, the popularity of the script killing, offline stores and the number of players are increasing year by year, and the script content can basically meet the needs of players. However, the script killing at this time did not immediately become a well-known hit, and the real blowout was after the epidemic.
After the increase in the popularity of the script killing, the Internet also hopes to get a piece of the pie. In 2018, 4 online script killing platforms such as The Great Detective and I Am Mystery obtained financing respectively. In 2020, the epidemic caused offline script killing stores to be unable to operate, and online script killing APP became popular overnight.
Script killing mainly relies on text to distribute scripts and clues, and online is not complicated. Players change from reading paper scripts on the desktop to browsing the scripts in the APP with their mobile phones, changing face-to-face communication to voice communication, and finally using the APP to vote to find the murderer. In the three weeks from January 20 to February 9, 2020 Spring Festival, 5 online script killing APPS appeared in the top 100 downloads of game APPS, and some script killing APPS increased by 20%-30% during this period.
The low-threshold, cost-free, social online script killing has quickly pushed the game form of script killing into the public eye, and speculative players, social players, and playing players can all find their own place in it.
However, the popularity of online script killing has not lasted for a long time, and many people think that online is only a last resort and prefer to play offline games. For example, I am a mystery APP, which peaked at 12th place on January 28, 2020 in the iOS app free list rankings, and then fell all the way. Online scripts such as reasoning masters and versatile detectives killed the head app daily active (DAU) about 1 million, and there was no big breakthrough.
RPG games focus on the sense of experience brought by the play, which is precisely the weakness of the online script killing. Offline script killing provides a sense of playing experience through a large number of words, long games, enclosed spaces and face-to-face interactions, but the online script killing game is generally 1-2 hours long, and the player may not be immersed in it, and the game is over.
Judging from the follow-up development of the online script killing APP, its own profit closed loop has not run through. At present, script payment, membership payment and game props are the main revenue channels of online apps. I am a mystery APP in the common price of paid scripts is 6 yuan, which is very different from offline script killing. Lin Shihao, the founder of I Am Enigma, has publicly told the media that I am Enigma and has not achieved profitability.
Since online feeds back to the offline, many online script killing companies have also invested in the business path of offline development, attracting users through online APP, and then receiving players through offline stores. However, as offline stores become more and more dense, offline script killing has also changed from the blue ocean to the red ocean.
Take Gaobeidian Street in Beijing's Chaoyang District, for example, which was once a haven for small and medium-sized film and television companies, and the industrial park-style planning, large housing area and relatively cheap rent attracted hundreds of film and television companies. Due to tax reform, epidemic and other reasons, these small and medium-sized companies have withdrawn one after another and changed to script killing stores. Searching in the public reviews, it can be found that there are more than 50 script killing stores in the Gaobeidian area, many of which are marked with the words "new store". The offline store of the I-QuiCK APP in Beijing is also opened here.
But a few square kilometers of space is crowded into more than 50 stores, and the degree of saturation can be imagined. According to The field visit and observation of Haike Finance, the old store has a stable customer group and word of mouth, and the weekend is often full; the new store is difficult to attract users, there are only a few tables of customers on the weekend, and it can only use low-cost sales, and it is difficult to obtain sustained results. It can be seen on the public reviews that some store reviews do not exceed 100, and have been labeled as "suspended business" and "closed".
03
The future will only be more volumes
As the number of practitioners soars, the industry inevitably rolls up, and everyone is working around the experience of RPG games.
The more common way is to do real scenes, that is, like the scene in "Star Detective", the furnishings and clues of the crime scene are physical objects, and reasoning relies on the search of physical objects. Players will need to change the costume provided in the store to fit the game character and follow the instructions to complete the mission.
This way of playing has a strong and direct experience and is deeply loved by players. In 2021, a newly opened real-life reasoning hall in Beijing launched 6 themes, the average price is between 358-428 yuan, the game duration is about 4 hours, and the current Friday night and weekend two days are almost all full, and it is difficult to book even the next week and weekend.
The real scene is getting more and more gorgeous, the price is also rising, and players in first-tier cities can still afford it, but in the sinking market, it is less popular. Among the 30,000 stores, the vast majority of them are non-live script killing, also known as desktop script killing. This is closer to the state of the tabletop game, where all the scripts are presented in text form, and the clues are mostly graphic clue cards.
In order to stand out in the fierce competition of desktop script killing, the store can be described as a strange trick, mainly in terms of dressup, interpretation, reasoning difficulty and length. The room scene where the script is played cannot be redecorated, so the costume change is used as a "semi-real" gimmick, with the interpretation of NPCs (Non-Player Characters) to create a sense of substitution.
Some scripts that focus on emotions, a game of 5-6 hours, may require seven or eight staff members to play NPCs to interact and interpret with players. If it is a horror theme script, the store will use lighting and sound effects to create a horror atmosphere, and will also arrange for staff to "play ghosts" and design a series of links to scare players. For example, the well-known hardcore horror book "Axe Holding Offu", some stores will use real axes or pig offal as props to enhance the sense of horror. The new store will use holographic projection and VR to make players more immersive.
Closer to the core of the script is the hardcore reasoning theme script, and the distribution studios and stores often flaunt the difficulty and duration. The 2020 boxed script "Seven Chambers of Secrets" created more than 7 hours of game time in the case of a general script length of 4 hours at that time, and soon became popular with the script. Many stores have taken advantage of the trend of marketing and launched a free/half-price activity to complete the game within X hours. The script of more than 6 hours in 2021 is everywhere, and "Once Upon a Time THE PAST", known as the "hardcore ceiling", generally has a game duration of 10 hours, and "Sage Stone 2" takes 13 hours to start.
However, this "inner volume" is not fully accepted by players. The more scenes and staff you have, the more cost of the game and the higher the price players have to bear. Before 2020, the price of boxed scripts in first-tier cities is generally 98-128 yuan, and in second- and third-tier cities, it is 58-88 yuan. Now, the general price in first-tier cities is 128-168 yuan, and in second- and third-tier cities, it is 68-108 yuan.
However, in order to retain old players, the store seems to have to "roll". As players play more scripts, seeking novelty and breakthroughs is a common mindset. Advanced players have higher requirements for the quality of the script, digest the script quickly, and it is difficult to play with new players. Whether the store can balance the new and retention, and control the cost of buying a new script, is also a question that needs to be considered.
According to Heike Finance, the current cost of opening a script killing store ranges from 200,000 to 1 million yuan. In addition to rent and renovation costs, the main costs are hiring DM (game hosts) and buying scripts. According to the calculation of 30 boxed scripts at the time of opening the store, the cost is 15,000 yuan, and at least 2-4 new scripts need to be purchased every month thereafter. If you want to buy a city-limited script to enhance your competitiveness, the average annual cost of purchasing a script is more than 40,000 yuan.
The number of store rooms in first-tier cities generally ranges from 4-10 rooms, and the average unit price of customers is 150 yuan, and each game is 6-8 people. Shops with better business conditions can play 2 games per room on weekends, and are full on Friday nights, while the rest of the weekdays are available at about 80%. That is to say, a small store with 4 rooms has a monthly turnover of more than 80,000 yuan and an annual profit of more than 300,000 yuan.
But the feelings that different scripts bring to players are very different. Word-of-mouth stores are often full on weekends, a difficult to find, and the number of bookings even depends on a similar form of ticket snatching; some stores are full of customers, and there are only one or two customers on weekends.
The script killing is a sense of experience, but the sense of experience is very personal, and the offline script killing cannot even be standardized, which also limits the profit scale of its stores. The same script, different stores have different decorations, different opening methods, DM may be different in the state of each game, the same player state is different, and even the player's own state is not controllable. This has caused that if the store expands, the development of new and old stores of the same brand will also be very different.
According to Ai Media Consulting data, the scale of China's domestic script killing industry in 2020 is 11.74 billion yuan, 17.02 billion yuan in 2021, and is expected to increase to 23.89 billion yuan in 2022, an increase of more than 40%. It should be clear that even if we assume that the data is reliable and credible, the number of entrants in this market compared to the surge in the same period is not very large, and with the increasingly serious involvement of the industry, the big wave of sand will go further, and only a few of them can really cut into large pieces of cake in the end.
The script killing, which is full of suspense and reasoning charm, satisfies people's social, acting, emotional catharsis, sense of accomplishment and other aspects, and even some people think that it is close to the psychological drama in psychotherapy, which can help participants pay attention to their inner feelings and solve psychological problems. From the perspective of game form, it can be expected in the future, and there is still a lot of room for development, but how to standardize and develop on a large scale is a big problem that the entire industry needs to solve urgently.