Image source @ Visual China
Text | Photon Planet, author | Wen Yehao, Editor | Wu Xianzhi
"Bet on a wave of bikes turning into motorcycles." ——Faced with a lottery game held by vendors at the school gate, children under the age of ten blurted out.
This is the sentence that impressed me the most at the March 15 party. It is hard to imagine that children who are not deeply involved in the world have mastered the words of the "gambling dogs" to comfort themselves.
In fact, about ten years ago, the streets and alleys were filled with such lottery games, 5 cents at a time, there is no current golden egg, stamp collecting and other fancy play, only similar to scratch music like ordinary lottery tickets. These so-called raffles, with toys or cash as prizes, loot the pocket money that children have not yet covered.
"At that time, the young man did not understand things, and when he saw that the grand prize was still there, he used a week's pocket money to cover all the remaining lottery tickets, but in the end he did not get anything. Later, I learned that the boss had torn up the lottery tickets himself at the beginning. "When it comes to the past, Zhou Junqi has a vivid memory.
In fact, in a way, Zhou Junqi is "lucky", after all, life always has a time to become a leek, even if the primary school students evade the school lottery, can they escape the harvest of the magic reward in the future?
Blind box or gambling?
If you search for "magic rewards" on the B station, most of the messages at the bottom of the video will persuade you to turn back to the shore as a person who has come over.
Compared with the cheap feeling of street raffles, magic rewards reflect "refinement" and "trend" from the ACG elements in the products to the cool style of the lottery page.
But in the bones, the magic reward still retains the same secret point as the street lottery.
It is reported that the magic reward is the B station membership purchase plate in the play, through consumption, users can randomly get "super god model", "European emperor model", "hidden model" and "ordinary model" goods in different prize pools.
Among them, different styles of goods often belong to different price points, with a prize pool of 45 yuan per issue, "super god" goods up to thousands of yuan, a premium of nearly 100 times, and the reference price of "ordinary" goods is exactly 45 yuan.
That is to say, from the user's point of view, the purchase of goods through magic rewards can not only "protect the capital", but also have the probability of "winning the lottery".
In this regard, the B station official has different descriptions in different periods. In the past, when the magic reward was questioned because of the undisclosed probability, the customer service of station B responded with "the magic reward only upgrades the offline blind box purchase to the online blind box purchase form, so it is temporarily unable to provide the probability".
At the time when the current blind box economy is being closely watched by the regulator, the B station discourse has been changed to "This is a form of purchase purchased by members, not a blind box".
But whether or not you wear the cloak of a "blind box", the core of the magic reward has never changed - gambling in disguise.
At present, the hot blind box economy mainly boosts the desire to buy by not marking specific styles and distinguishing probabilities, which on the surface is no different from the magic reward of B station. However, whether it is a blind box for tide play or a blind box for stationery, there seems to be a hidden bottom line, that is, the difference between the price of the blind box and the value of ordinary goods is controlled in a reasonable range, and most of them only provide a kind of "small luck".
Taking Bubble Mart as an example, the blind box with a price of 69 yuan is at least worth dozens of yuan after being opened, while a small number of special models and hidden models are used as "probability awards" products to boost the desire to buy. Therefore, the blind box economy, however questioned, can also be classified as "consumption".
Magic reward is different, with its own control of the pricing power, B station and manufacturers to establish cooperation at low prices to get a large number of goods, a number of low-priced goods or silt inventory as a high probability of extraction of "ordinary money", and apply high premium goods as bait, so as to sell the "two-dollar store" and inventory goods at a high price, so as to open up profit margins.
Taking the "Spirit Blade Game Notebook Prize Pool" as an example, according to the probability of the official announcement, the price of 99 yuan has a 93.25% chance of getting the "Xeno Fantasia PVC Puzzle" with a price of 99 yuan. It is worth noting that the average price of the same new puzzle on the idle trading platform is less than 10 yuan, which cannot match the selling price of 99 yuan at all.
Similarly, in the "Nintendo Switch Prize Pool" with a single draw of 169 yuan, the B station is priced at 169 yuan "ordinary" commodity "Black Lord AJ339" mouse, which has been removed from the Black Lord Tmall flagship store, and its brand store has a monthly sales of 0, and the idle trading platform is only sold for about 60 yuan.
This is enough to show that the so-called guaranteed commodity of the B Station Magic Reward is actually a product of forced value, and only exists as a symbol of "lottery tickets". In addition to the guarantee, probability is also another "magic trick" of magic reward.
It is reported that the probability announced on the magic reward product page is only the actual matching probability of the initial quantity of the product, and the real probability when the user extracts will change with the inventory of each commodity, that is, the fact probability. And the probability of each prize pool is geometric, and the customer service of station B is called to ensure that fairness cannot inform users.
Compared with the "freshness" pursued by the purchase of blind box goods with small price differences, the magic reward is more full of "excitement" with a small and broad, and the "ordinary model" with a high probability is almost equivalent to garbage for users, and what really makes users flock to it is the "hard currency" with low probability and high premium.
Therefore, behind the so-called blind box and membership purchase, it is not "consumption", but the use of user speculation psychology, carefully wrapped betting.
It's just that unlike small traders who take high-priced lottery tickets along the way, the magic reward traffic on the platform is continuous, and they can make profits through "sitting" without cattiness, while the fragile humanity of players will provide them with wave after wave of "gamblers".
Station B, as a bookmaker, only needs to stir up the wind and ignite the fire.
"Up-and-over" economy
Pathological gambling, commonly known as "shangtou", as the name suggests, is the addiction to the head, can not control themselves. In order to make the player "head", the magic reward is not less effort.
In the past, there was a recycling model for magic rewards, that is, the goods that users did not like in the prize pool were returned to the platform at 80% of the original price, and the platform also used the corresponding "magic crystal" (magic reward tokens). This also means that Station B can be arbitrarily recycled through unequal probability and earn 20% of the profit out of thin air.
The "magic crystal" returned to the user will often be collected by the B station because the user has illusions about the "flipbook".
Despite the excessive complaints, recycling patterns are a thing of the past. Objectively speaking, this alleviates the user's "head"phenomenon to a certain extent, but it does not mean that the pace of harvesting at Station B will stop here, but it strengthens the activities and marketing around the magic reward, so as to make up for the sharp reduction in the attractiveness of the magic reward.
The first is to pull the new, enter the current page of the magic reward, you can see the "magic newcomer first week task" activity designed by the B station for the user, in the form of "recharge ladder reward", "purchase reward", "trial reward" for new users to issue "magic crystal", and through the time-limited use of the way to give users a "sense of urgency", prompting them to quickly jump into the "cage" of weaving.
It is worth noting that in just a few moments after the Photon Planet Observation Magic Reward page, Station B sent a new text message to the bound mobile phone, and reissue it again after a few hours, full of a sense of encouragement.
Not only that, Station B also launched the "Demon King Play", once the user wins the "Demon King" product randomly generated on the day, he can occupy the title of "Demon King" of the prize pool, and get the "Magic Crystal" produced by the user who did not draw the "Demon King" product during the occupation period.
Based on the "Demon King's Play", the Magic Reward creates a logical closed loop of "Challenge - Occupy - Occupied - Challenged Again", and updates the "Battle Situation" in real time. In order to occupy for a longer time to get more "magic crystal" dividends, players enjoy the excitement brought by gambling on the one hand, and spend money to enjoy the pleasure of fighting.
Obviously, this is the addictive design carefully polished by Station B, which aims to make the player "head" through the aforementioned two-tier game, and he himself sits on the benefits of the fisherman and pockets the "military expenses" of the "demon king" and the "challenger".
In addition, the evaluation page of the Magic Rewards Prize Pool is also full of news of past "lucky winners". According to unconfirmed news on the Internet, Station B will delete some obvious negative remarks from time to time, and if the rumors are true, they can create survivor bias, which will also deepen the "player".
Due to human nature, gambling attributes and such "top", even experienced adults can not achieve full control, let alone young groups and even minors.
Starting from the B station of ACG, it seems to be doing the business of young people. From the perspective of the magic reward pool, including but not limited to handmade, game consoles, mobile phones, dolls and other goods, of which the handmade and game hardware of the main ACG culture occupy most of the country, and this accurately hits the preference of the Z era.
On the black cat complaint platform, there are thousands of complaints related to magic rewards, and a large part of them are students with low self-control.
Users who come for speculative purposes, "a shot into the soul" or a tragic harvest, can be blamed on the choice caused by "greed", but as a content community with such a high degree of stickiness of young groups, whether Station B should once again think about its responsibilities in addition to commercialization.
If this kind of "bad water" is still the same, then we may be glad that the primary school students who sang "Good Luck Come" and wept empty-handed at the lottery shop at the entrance of the school, after all, many of them have only bought valuable lessons at the smallest cost of their lives.
"I'm actually grateful to the boss who cheated me out of my pocket money, because since then, I've never been lucky and avoided the fate of being a leek many times."