During this time, there was a recurrence of the new crown epidemic in Chengdu, where the game tea house is located, and the partial cases were still concentrated in the high-tech zone where game manufacturers gathered. Subsequently, nucleic acid screening, access and entry and exit need to be bright codes to obviously bring various inconveniences to life.
During such a special period, I often read some medical science books. Compared to books, medical games are few and far between. In the past two years, the "Doctor" and "Oncologist" that I have played are medical games that make my eyes shine.
On TapTap, "Doctor Oncology" scored 8.8 points (before Tencent took over, the rating exceeded 9.5), while "Doctor God" scored as high as 9.4 points, and the number of downloads exceeded one million. It can be seen that these two games are also high-quality independent masterpieces in the eyes of a large number of players.
Gameplay
To put it simply, "Doctor Shen" is similar to AVG+QTE to advance the plot and simulate the diagnosis and treatment process. The development team, Muccy Games, designed two plot lines:
Players choose to continue traditional medicine, win the favor of the members of the Royal Medical Society, earn a lot of wealth, and become a doctor who can't heal well;
Players embrace new forms of medicine, break with the Royal Medical Society, and advance medicine
What really appealed to me about the game was how absurd traditional medicine was during the game: anesthesia is about knocking patients unconscious with sticks; superstitious bloodletting can cure serious diseases; dispensing medicine is more about taste than efficacy, and so on...
What I didn't expect most was that every time I did amputation or bloodletting in the game, I would sell tickets for NPCs to watch, and even the tickets were still a lot of income. As a result, when I checked the information, it turned out to be historical facts. Supplemented by the game's dark Gothic art style, the absurdity of medicine at that time is vividly interpreted.
The early surgery was a show, and the audience bought tickets to watch
Doctor Oncology is played like Plague Corporation. The game simply summarizes treatment into surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy. The core of the gameplay is to collect points, click on the "skill tree", and combine the appropriate treatment plan to treat the patient.
The later stage of "Oncologist" needs to make a balanced choice between patient funds, the toxic side effects of treatment methods and physical strength to reduce the speed of cancer cell invasion and achieve the goal of passing the level.
The difficulty is in the decision of the treatment plan, whether to operate, the patient's physical strength may not be able to carry through the postoperative infection; whether to increase the dose of chemotherapy, the side effects of the drug may lead to the first failure of the patient's important organs; whether to use targeted drugs, the patient's funds may not keep up with the cost of treatment. Such a dilemma is exactly the same as the difficulties faced by every cancer patient in reality. Therefore, the sense of substitution of "Oncologist" is still quite sufficient.
A book, a terminally ill patient, inspired them to play medical games
Although both games have a good reputation, they still face the embarrassment of profitability difficulties.
Advertising monetization was added to "Doctor Shen", but it was still very restrained, and the advertisements filled were still orange by shareholders. As you can imagine, the income of "Doctor Shen" will not be very good. Lapin, the founder of Muccy Games, also told me frankly that the game has not returned the cost at present, and it is still in a "state of burning funds".
And "Oncologist" is directly in cooperation with Tencent, since the mobile game version was launched, it has not been updated for nearly three years. Game producer Hu Wanzhi has already invested his energy in new commercial game projects.
This is not only true of medical games, but also of other popular science or functional games. So why did Lapin and Hu Wanzhi choose to make popular science games that did not have a running business model?
"When we brainstormed about the project, we planned that our classmates read a book called "The History of Absurd Medicine", and his parents were also doctors," Lapin said, recalling the opportunity when the project was established, "He told us at the meeting that medicine and modern medicine at that time were very different, such as bloodletting amputation therapy, such as buying tickets to watch the absurd stories of surgery." We thought it was also very interesting, and we were also very interested in medieval art. So it was decided to make such a medieval medicine theme game. ”
This book inspired the creation of Doctor Shen
Even more special is Oncologist, a game that originates with a patient with advanced lung cancer. The patient approached Hu Wanzhi and hoped to collaborate on the development of a tumor science game, which he funded and developed.
Unexpectedly, "Oncologist" was initiated by lung cancer patients
"The topic of cancer was originally of great interest, and we quickly decided to cooperate in development." Hu Wanzhi told me that in order to ensure the correctness of the game science, he read several medical professional books, including how to use drugs, what are the functions of these drugs, etc., which is basically equivalent to learning a clinical guide for cancer.
The confusion of popular science game business model
Back to reality, how should this popular science game business model develop?
Lapin says she thinks the key to gaming is still fun. If you want to expand your influence, you must mainly use the free model to join the advertising monetization, which is not conducive to the development of teams like them. But if you make the game very fun, you can make it a paid buyout game.
"Our new projects all involve different areas of knowledge to explore how to do popular science games. Give it a try, and then see what to do with commercialization. Lapin told me.
Hu Wanzhi's thinking is more novel, he believes that popular science games can earn word of mouth, can not expect to make money, and commercialization can rely on the function in the game to split into special tools.
"After all, popular science games are small, there are so many game content, and the competitiveness is not as good as ordinary games." Games belong to games, and games are used to earn word of mouth and advertise. We split some of the functions in the medical game into a special app, and this app is used to charge a service fee. Such a business model would be a little better. ”
Hu Wanzhi revealed that they took out some of the functions of "Oncologist" and made an app for doctors to explain the condition to patients. However, there is still a lot of work to be done to enter the hospital application of this kind of app.
The road ahead is long, and I greatly admire Lapin and Hu's late attempts, and sincerely hope to see more and more fun medical games.
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