Text | April
After going through Tencent, NetEase has not been able to successfully revitalize this match-3 game in the Chinese market...
On March 16, some players said on the social platform that "Candy Fun" issued a suspension announcement, announcing that due to business adjustments, "Candy Fun" will stop operating at 10:00 a.m. on May 18, 2022. Since 10:00 a.m. on March 19, 2022, the operation of the "Candy Fun" national service has been officially stopped, and the server has been shut down and the official website has been closed.
After the game server is shut down, unless otherwise stipulated by laws and regulations, or otherwise agreed in the agreement signed by the publisher Treasure Ship Games and the player, all account-related data and information in the game will be deleted. In addition, in order to thank players for their support of the game, from March 19 to May 18, the in-game piggy bank will be changed to a free open mode, and the daily login benefit will receive an additional 10 gold bars.
At 10 o'clock this morning (March 17), Treasure Ship Games also confirmed the suspension by publishing a news release on the official website of "Candy Fun", which said that the suspension was mainly due to the expiration of the agency contract.
01
In 8 years, the two giants took turns to play
The ending is much the same
The first product of the Candy Crush series, "Candy Crush Sage", was developed in 2011 by a small team of 5 people under the European casual game manufacturer King, landed on the FaceBook platform for testing in April 2012, and was officially launched in November on the mobile platform dominated by strategic tower defense.
However, to the surprise of the R&D team, around April 2013, Candy Crush Sage gained 97 million daily active users, 46 million monthly active users and 62 million monthly turnover worldwide. As of 2014, the game is firmly in the top three of the App Store revenue list, and is the top and second place in the Google Play game download list and the second place in the revenue list.
It is worth noting that "Candy Crush Sage" was once available on the Chinese App Store in English, but it was not a huge success due to its lack of social and localized promotion. After entering the Chinese market for the first time, "Candy Crush Sage" began to be represented.
Due to the performance of "Candy Crush Sage" in the overseas market, it quickly attracted the strong attention of the domestic giant Tencent, and it was also in 2014 that Tencent officially announced the exclusive agent of the game, and on August 22 of the same year, "Candy Legend" officially opened the public beta and entered the vision of Chinese players.
Tencent has high hopes for "Candy Legend", not only inviting Kim So-hyun, who was on fire at the time, as the game recommendation officer, shooting a series of recommended videos, but also linking Mayday A xin, He Junxiang, Chen Yirong, Wang Xinling, Yao Yuanhao, Zhou Bichang and other stars on Weibo to create momentum for it, and at the same time joining hands with major mainstream media to launch the "Candy Girl" selection activity.
At that time, Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent, said in a special way when facing the media: "Tencent has always hoped to bring high-quality mobile games around the world to the majority of users, and "Candy Legend" is the best of the best, and we are very happy to reach a cooperation with King." It is believed that with the excellent quality of "Candy Legend" and the strong power of Tencent's mobile game platform, Chinese players of "Candy Legend" will be able to have more fun. ”
Although Tencent poured a lot of resources into "Candy Legend", in addition to the popularity of a period of time after the public beta, the game was soon forgotten by most players and was in a tepid state, until July 23, 2020, Tencent announced that due to the expiration of the contract, "Candy Legend" officially stopped operating and withdrew from the Chinese market.
After Tencent's "folding", the next home of the Candy Crush series is the upgraded version of "Candy Legend" represented by NetEase Treasure Ship in 2019.
In January 2019, "Candy Fun" opened the Android test, and in February, the IOS test was opened, but in addition to landing in the TOP30 of the IOS free list in the first week of the test, and on October 10 of the same year, due to the linkage with "Hearthstone" ("Candy Fun" players only enter the game, bind the Blizzard Battle Net Pass, complete the task of completing the 15th level, you can get 6 gold card packs) logged in the IOS free list TOP10, The game did not make it to the top 100 of the IOS free list.
It is worth noting that since the launch of "Candy Fun", it has never entered the top 200 of the IOS best-seller list, and has been hovering around five or six hundred, which is not only related to the operation of the game, but also directly related to the version number. Official information shows that on December 2, 2020, "Candy Fun" officially got the version number, and this is only 15 months after the date it was announced to be suspended.
According to the calculation of the game magician, the revenue of "Candy Fun" in the past month is about 490,000, and the annual revenue in 2021 is about 7.17 million.
In sharp contrast to this is the data of two other match-3 games in China, Le Element's "Happy Match" is currently ranked 20th in the best-seller list and 6th in the free list, with revenue expected to be around 125 million in the past month, and the annual revenue in 2021 is expected to be around 1.24 billion; Tencent's "Everyday Love Elimination", which is currently ranked 78th in the best-seller list and 131st in the free list, is expected to have a revenue of about 30.53 million in the past month, and the annual revenue in 2021 is expected to be about 360 million.
With such data performance, how can NetEase continue to act as an agent?
02
The time and place are favorable and the people are not occupied
The domestic dilemma is difficult to solve
Candy Crush's data at home has been weak in the past year, but it is still strong overseas. According to Activision Blizzard's recently released financial reports for the fourth quarter and full year of 2021, Blizzard, which is more well known to domestic players in the three divisions, was hit by the most unknown King with a net income of $684 million and an operating income of $385 million. In addition, with the segment Activision, it is not as good as King's 56% operating margin and 240 million monthly active.
It specifically mentioned: "Thanks to King's largest IP, Candy Legends grew 20% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, and King's net in-game revenue increased by 14% year-on-year, reaching a new record in the fourth quarter." Candy Legends is the highest-grossing game IP in the U.S. app store for 18 consecutive quarters."
So it seems that Candy Crush has the ability to continue to make profits for long-term operations, so why has it been repeatedly frustrated in the Chinese market with the blessing of giants since 2014? The game magic can be summarized for the following reasons:
First of all, the domestic three-elimination market head is stable, the competition is fierce, and it is difficult to break through.
When "Candy Legend" entered the Chinese market in 2014, Le Element had already obtained two rounds of financing with "Happy Aquarium", and in early 2014 launched the absolute head of the future domestic match-3 game category, "Happy Match".
It is reported that once it was launched, "Happy And Happy" topped the list of App Store downloads in China, and occupied the champion of the Android revenue and download double list in China for more than half a year.
According to the official statistics of "Happy And Happy", "Happy And Happy" has about 800 million users in China, and the number of monthly users is more than 100 million, of which 66% of the users are female players living in third- and fourth-tier cities. At the same time, another specialgamez data also shows that from the distribution of age, the age group of the three-match user is concentrated in 35-54 years old. In summary, its appeal to sinking markets and pan-entertainment users is huge.
However, these two types of users, without a long period of localization precipitation and absolute recognition of the market, are difficult to easily impress, compared to game users, their group characteristics are much weaker.
In addition, around 2014, in addition to the squeeze of "Happy Match", Tencent's "Everyday Love Elimination", Microfun's "Bingo Elimination", and "Eliminate the Stars" of the palm game are all exerting their strength, and to this day, the data performance of the above games is still very beautiful.
The second is the "addictiveness" and high stickiness of the internal mechanics of the match-three game.
Match-3 games, as a casual game that consumes players' fragmented time, is not as simple as most people think.
Deng Hui, vice president of the game industry in Google's China Major Account Department, said in an early interview with the media: "People often underestimate the difficulty of making match-3 games. The design of this category of match three is the same as the series, and it is a series of hundreds of episodes, it is likely that the first twenty or thirty episodes look like the player's retention is good, but the more you go to the back, the more you need to launch different levels to retain players, and the production really needs the accumulation of talents and the accumulation of experience. ”
The addictive and high stickiness of the match-3 game is directly linked to the rising levels in the game, and as the cracking level goes from easy to difficult, players begin to develop from the thrill of their own clearance in the early stage to the excitement of needing to recharge props to break through the goal in the last few steps.
This leads to the homogenization of the attraction of match-3 games to users, and as players deepen the breakthrough of a match-3 game level, the possibility of leaving this match-3 game directly declines.
According to the 2021 research report data of Pacific Securities, in the distribution of the number of mobile game product types in China's top 100 revenue in 2020, elimination games accounted for only 4%; in the revenue distribution of China's top 100 mobile game product types in 2020, elimination games accounted for only 2.46%. To sum up, due to the problem of game mechanics, it is very difficult to break the monopoly.
The third possibility is that the Candy Crush national service agent has not really attracted core users in the process of game operation, and there is no landing plan for long-term operation.
Judging from the "Candy Fun" agent Fang Bao ship game, NetEase in 2018 Bao Ship, the publishing brand, agents to publish overseas mobile terminal and PC terminal boutique games.
It was first known by practitioners in February 2019, when the domestic publisher of the "Vanity" mobile game was changed from Giant Network to Treasure Ship, and since then Treasure Ship has successively represented games such as Marvel: Super Battle, Tokyo Idol Project, Esper Contract, and Mithra Star. In addition to Chinese mainland, Baochuan's operating positions also include Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. The agent has released a number of Japanese games, such as "Alchemy Workshop" and "The Last Claudia".
However, the above games, except for "The Last Claudia", which is currently performing well in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, the other games are in a state of high and low. And throughout the operation of Candy Fun, there are almost no other memory points except for the linkage with Hearthstone.
As an outsider and a latecomer, the simple and replicable operation model of "Candy Fun" is certainly not feasible, it needs a detailed set of plans to attract pan-entertainment users in the sinking market, but this is undoubtedly very low for the treasure ship that only got the version number in December 2020.
03
summary
In August 2014, when the media interviewed Wang Bo, vice president of Tencent Games, by phone, he asked such a question: Many products that have been successful overseas have ended up in China, so how is Tencent prepared to deal with the localization of candy?
Wang Bo replied, "Any project has two indispensable legs. One is that the gameplay content of the product should be of high quality and sustainability; The other leg is operation, you can't simply move it over, do a Chinese and go online. In fact, there must be accumulation in operation, and there must be a lot of communication with developers to ensure that the product can be authentic, and in the case of the same gameplay, it is necessary to be able to make changes to adapt to the market. These two points must be organically combined.
The content of "Candy Legend" has been verified to be successful in the world, and Tencent's ability in operation has also been tested, but it does not mean that the two together can ensure success like 1+1=2, and there is still a lot of meticulous work to be done in the middle. But overall we are very confident, especially in terms of products, the domestic market is still in a period of vigorous development, sometimes it is really the enclosure as king, who runs fast, fierce, who can do bigger. ”
Although "Candy Legend" did not outperform similar products, the above answers are still valid in today's overseas boutique games, and when the content is verified, how to make the operation help content land in different markets is more important.
Since 2014, there has been no major pattern change in the domestic match-3 game market, and according to the game mob, in recent years, most of the target markets for domestic manufacturers of match-3 games are overseas, and the match-3 games that are famous for their low threshold for simple gameplay are much lower than we think.
Resources:
The Other Side of Activision Blizzard: Eliminating Crazy "Gold Sucking" in Games
"Tencent Wang Bo: Using "Candy Legend" to benchmark the boutique manufacturing industry"
"800 million Chinese have been down, uncles and aunts pile up the gold-sucking empire to consume fun"
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