The author | Cloud
If you sell your childhood memories by pound, the post-90s and post-00s can squeeze out 10 yuan and 8 pieces per capita. On February 23, 2022, the mobile game "Orbi Island: DreamLand" developed by Baitian Games and represented by Thunder Games was launched, and two days later it was on Weibo's hot search, bringing something different to a list of slaughter - childhood memories.
Source: Hot search time machine So does "Orbi Island" deserve this heat? According to the data disclosed by Baitian Game's parent company BIOHome in 2020, this former top children's page game IP has more than 200 million registered users, and the population of Russia and Ukraine does not add up to 200 million, while according to the "2021 China Game Industry Report", the scale of mobile game users in China is 656 million. It seems that on the data level, "Orbi Island" should take a hot search. But if you've lived through the era when children's page games exploded around 2009, you might remember a covert war that took place in a computer room. "Moore Manor" and "Orbi Island", which were launched after half a year, competed for the 10 yuan membership fee that the primary school students squeezed out of the breakfast money every month, and once fought openly and secretly.
However, in this new era when "Glory of the King" has become the collective memory of a new batch of primary and secondary school students, the former opponents have been absorbed by the Thunder Game under Gigabit, and have been successively on the hot search within two years, and because of the game mechanism "forced the liver to krypton", it has become a "crematorium" for the collective memories of contemporary young workers. A good hand of cards is a mess, why did childhood memories come to this point?
01 A brief history of the demise of children's page games
This matter has to start with a "Chinese Disney" dream. In 2005, a children's web game for 8-14-year-olds "Penguin Club" was launched, and by loading small games including dress-ups, simulation business, fishing and other small games in an interactive community, it quickly swept the United States, and in 2007, it received more than 30 million registrations, and was acquired by Disney for $350 million in the same year, and received a $350 million bonus after meeting the performance standards.
Image source: video platform screenshot You know, in 2007, the NBA only took $50 million in revenue in China, which has 300 million basketball fans, and today, this concept of immersive social + game will probably be packaged by capital as a "children's meta-universe" to make a lot of money. This made two technical veterans in China move at the same time. At that time, Wang Haibing, the "father of QQ pets", left Tencent to start Taomi Games in Shanghai, and Wu Lili served as deputy marketing director at Huawei's supplier Altron, and the two saw huge business opportunities for children's page games almost at the same time.
Left Wang Haibing Source: Southern People Weekly Right Wu Lili Source: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Alumni Association
The former introduced the forest fantasy concept of "Moore Manor" to the market in April 2008, catching up with the tail end of the spring semester and the entire summer vacation, while the latter was a little later, and only after the start of the school year in September did it take out the main island style "Orbi Island" online for public beta, and successfully decoupled Altron and became independent of Baitian Games, that is, the later Biot family interaction. What neither of them expected was that although they shared an "ancestor" and also reproduced the mechanism of "Penguin Club", it was not a small game, but the word of mouth of primary school students in the computer room, so that the two games quickly produced social fission and obtained exponential user growth.
Source: Webmaster's House
However, 2007 was an extraordinary year, when Yang Yongxin, the "King of Raiden", was elected as the "First Top Ten Outstanding Citizens for the Protection of Minors" in Shandong Province for his "outstanding achievements in the treatment of adolescent Internet addiction". God became a god because of faith, and his holiness became his holiness because parents who feared the "cow, ghost, and snake god" pushed their children to the ward where they were treated for Internet addiction.
In that era when the traffic was unknown and the game was boycotted by all the "adults", mild casual games such as "Moore Manor" and "Obi Island" only dared to launch a monthly membership mechanism of 10 yuan to earn a little income, and took the initiative to close the service before 12 o'clock in the evening, and there were few means of monetization. Under these conditions, the two companies must find a way to find new ways to monetize traffic, converting the accumulated users of Moore Manor and Obe Island into more profitable projects, and now the two legs of the game's monetization , card drawing and selling skins , have been launched. In 2009, Taomi came up with a high tribute to the "Pokémon" sci-fi concept battle game "Sail", and the following year, Baitian launched the same "Aura Star" with the main mechanism of battle, which means to draw cards, which is of course more profitable than small games. At the same time, "Obi Island" in its own main battlefield to go further, enlarge the small game in the dress-up elements, in order to be more convenient to sell skins, the game planning in 2014 after the launch of the "magic transformation" system, players can choose to the core IP image Obi (bear) into a human form, in order to consume more cool and exquisite skin, many old players expressed strong dissatisfaction, but can not prevent Baitian from seeking to monetize the process. This also laid the groundwork for the release of "Orbi Island: Dreamland" to retain the bear form and receive initial praise. After a series of monetization operations, Taomi and BIOT also listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011 and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2014. Driven by capital, Taomi tried to "return to the original intention" - benchmarking Disney, spending a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources to carry out animation film production business, but the main IP "Moore Manor" three movies missed the golden period of the core audience, and only recorded box office revenue of 17.47 million, 24.831 million and 8.93 million in 2011, 2012 and 2015 respectively.
On the contrary, the "Purcell" series not only made 7 consecutive films due to the pointing to older teenagers, but also received a total of nearly 450 million box office, but compared with Disney's film and television empire, there is still a difference between cloud and mud. In 2016, taomi went private after only five years of listing, and in 2021, it was acquired by Giant Network at a valuation of 1.5 billion yuan, and Taomi, which fished on a page game, failed to complete the dream of "China Disney", and temporarily left the public eye along with the "Moore Manor" page game that has almost stopped updating. Compared with Taomi, BIOO obviously has more survival wisdom, not only is the "Obi Island" page game still in operation, but also catches up with the wave of mobility, timely converts the page game IP into a mobile game, and wins the favor of Tencent to invest heavily in the shares, gaining a glimmer of vitality. But like Moore Manor, waiting for elementary school students to grow into adults is painful. Biao, which once had hundreds of millions of registered accounts, only 13.4 million were left with quarterly active accounts disclosed in the 2020 financial report, of which 1.7 million were paid accounts, and the average revenue of quarterly paid accounts doubled, from 88.2 yuan in 2019 to 166.9 yuan.
However, no matter how Taomi and Biotuit package the two games to pay for the mechanism, for the two games' most loyal computer room players, the reason why they are willing to play hungry is not because of the game mechanics. Rather, it is because in the era when everyone competes with who has more QQ suns, the social relationships in reality can continue in the network, and even experience the composition of the social division of labor in the game, which is indeed a cool thing.
The two companies cover up this underlying logic and self-planted bitter fruit, and can only swallow it raw.
02 Released eating meat, making soup, childhood memories died of the desire to harvest
Also the overlord of the computer room, 4399 lives much better than Taomi and Bioo. In the golden age of children's page games, although "Obe Island" and "Moore Manor" were extremely homogeneous and overlapping audiences, they both chose the 4399 platform intermodal, although it is difficult to imagine Mercedes-Benz and BMW selling cars in a store, but in the game industry, this situation has always been the norm, and it has become more and more intense in the era of mobile games. Ding Lei said in NetEase's 2020 earnings call: "China's Android channel is divided into up to 50%, even about 20% more expensive than Apple, which is the most expensive and unhealthy in the world." "In addition to channel sharing, in the fierce competition, game manufacturers also need to pay a high purchase cost, according to Guosen Securities research estimates, in 2020 alone, the byte-based platform alone harvested more than 30 billion game purchase costs." The data of the Game Working Committee shows that from 2018 to 2020, the proportion of buying in the game turnover has increased from 23% to 34%, increasing year by year.
Source: Guosen Securities Economic Research Institute In this market pattern, although the general environment is more and more stringent in the supervision of games, according to Sensor Data, January 4399, January 2022, 4399 can still rank among the top ten Chinese mobile game publishers in terms of revenue, and the Thunder Game responsible for the release of "Orbi Island" and "Moore Manor" also ranks 11th because of the emotional big card of the "Q Dao" mobile game version in his hand. It is foreseeable that when the version number becomes a scarce resource, these players who master the channel will gain a relatively stronger survivability.
Although the channels and purchases ate the profits of the production, the role of the Thunder games is still very important for "ankle" game companies such as Taomi and Bioo. The most obvious effect is the difference in momentum-building power. Although Taomi lives on the Giant Network, it is also carrying out its own mobile game layout, claiming to have 100 million registered users of the "Sail" independently issued by Taomi, but the amount of public opinion is far less than the "Moore Manor" that has been searched several times, and the role of the real "Giant" gigabit and thunder games is self-evident.
But what is more to the point is the adjustment of the mobile game version to the bottom of the game, which is also the most "hurt" part for old players. As we mentioned earlier, "Obe Island" and "Moore Manor" have achieved explosive growth through the social fission of "human-to-human", but the gameplay is inherited from "Penguin Club", which is mainly based on a collection of small games with short processes and difficulties in monetization, and in the case of extreme inward volume in the mobile game market, only social but no core gameplay, can not survive at all.
On the basis of retaining the image and art style of "Moore", "Moore Manor" chooses to strengthen the simulated management gameplay of "farming stream", and uses running maps and collecting materials to lengthen the game process, which really turns "Moore Manor" into a game of operating a manor.
"Ob island" plays a sentiment card that returns to the image of "Obi" bear, and further consolidates its "female orientation" and dress-up attributes on the basis of absorbing and improving the poor experience of "Moore Manor" running map. Currently, the costume pool and furniture pool of Obe Island: Dreamland are even mixed together, which also means that players who specialize in one side must pay more time and money to draw cards in order to get satisfaction.
What makes the scalp of old players even more numb is that most of the social relationships established on the original page games have been difficult to inherit to the mobile games, but both games have tried to reproduce the "feeling of the year" through some "forced social" mechanisms, and the result can only be that many people are afraid of frequent attacks, and then abandon the pit.
On the TapTap platform, players with the ID "L_zz" recorded the whole process from their expectations for the remake of the "Orbi Island" mobile game in 2020 to the disappointment after really participating in the internal beta.
Image source: TapTap review
Among them, the most impressive is his last message: "Run away!!! Don't get close, it will become unlucky... I'm completely disappointed in Orbi Island... Goodbye to my childhood..."
In fact, "childhood memories died in mobile games" has long been an old news in the game circle, not only these children's page games. Plants vs. Zombies and Temple Run, classics that once defined what a mobile game is, are completely different games at home and abroad. The national service version of "Plants vs. Zombies 2" is now "difficult to play without Krypton, or it will have to be a large liver", represented by The Dream World, "Temple Run 2", which has been decoupled from the producer, has become a "hanging escape" that Krypton gold can jump off and rely on skin circle money.
Source: B station UP master "L other Tang" No matter what the ending of "Orbi Island" and "Moore Manor", at the moment when the door of the game is slowly closing to minors, the once brilliant children's page game can not survive the next era is a foregone conclusion. The new generation of young people have too many choices, they are face control, are hardcore players, but also have their own way of socializing, children's page games "borrow corpses to return the soul", doomed to eat the cake of new traffic.
All they can harvest is a new generation of workers who have dreamed and are now grown up but do not want to wake up. Let the past remain in the past, after all, the past is only the past.