Introduction: The three big brands mentioned in the title have recently made frequent moves in the IP cultivation of their own products. At the beginning, I originally wanted to use "IP cross-border" to describe their recent initiatives, but if you think about it, the word IP originally has the attribute of "covering multiple fields", and when brands that were once perpendicular to a single field such as games, film and television began to become the "IP" in everyone's mouth, their cross-border has become inevitable.
Author: Erhao
Image: From the web
Two days ago, Fist Games officially announced that the first novel work under the League of Legends IP, "Destruction", will be released in September this year, and will be published in three forms: print edition, e-book and audio. This means that the League of Legends IP has officially begun to set foot in the field of novel literature.
This is one of them. Last week, Fist also officially announced its investment in Fortice, the production company of the first animated series of the League of Legends IP series "Battle of Two Cities", and then the two sides also revealed the future plans for continuing to create the same IP animation series. From the above two events, it is not difficult to find that the fist is continuing to exert force on the "cultivation" of the League of Legends IP.
Compared to Fist, the actions of Fortnite and Marvel may seem more "routine". From last month to now, Epic's game product Fortnite and Marvel have unveiled a series of IP cooperation. First of all, it launched a limited edition IP linkage comic "Zero Point War", featuring Fortnite game characters and Marvel comic book characters Spider-Man and Wolverine as the protagonists, and linked with the new comics in the Fortnite game content. Later, the content of the new season pass launched by Fortnite also implanted Related Props related to Doctor Strange and Spider-Man villain Prowler.
Why the action between Fortnite and Marvel is more "conventional", the reason is that the cooperation between the two in the IP dimension has lasted for many years, Fortnite has realized the film and television of Fortnite IP with the help of Marvel's business in film and television entertainment, and the Marvel Universe has long continued to add games and e-sports attributes to itself through Fortnite's game products.
In these cases and more cases in the past, we can not only find that more and more internal and external manufacturers have begun to exert efforts in IP cultivation, but more importantly, the game industry has become the core battlefield of IP cultivation. This also makes people wonder, what is the charm of this "IP cultivation game"?
01
From brand to IP, is the game's "endgame" entertainment?
The case mentioned above involves two industries, starting with Marvel and the industry he represents to talk about the topic of IP cultivation. Although the above only mentioned Marvel's recent actions in the field of game e-sports, it does not mean that Marvel is the only one who enriches its own IP through games. In addition to Marvel, DC, Hasbro, these peers with big IP have also long laid out the game e-sports industry, and of course, Disney above Marvel's head.
Why these big companies are so fond of games and esports is not difficult to analyze. On the one hand, game products and e-sports clubs are good publicity windows for external IP. Push back to April 2019, the time period when Marvel's "Avengers 4" was released. Before the release of the film, the linkage between Fortnite and Marvel became more and more frequent, from Thanos' first appearance in Fortnite, to other superheroes and unlimited gloves, US team shields and other props launched in the game, creating sufficient momentum for the release of new works at that time.
On the other hand, comics, film and television IP into the game industry also have natural advantages. In 2020, the United States has such a set of data: in the country's mobile game market that year, products with classic game IP support such as PUBGM and Call of Duty mobile games accounted for more than 30% of the revenue in the mobile game market, and in addition to such games, the strongest revenue is comics, film and television IP adaptation games, of which comic IP product revenue accounted for 13%, film and television IP accounted for 12%. It is worth noting that in this data, the revenue growth rate of comic IP products is the highest, with a year-on-year increase of 54% in 2020.
Of course, companies with comics or film and television IP need great game products to get a piece of the game market, and the marvel-Fortnite collaboration brings another way to benefit from the game industry.
According to Epic, when Fortnite partnered with the NFL in 2018 to launch co-branded items in the game within two months, the associated item sold 3.3 million, with sales of about $50 million. What does the NFL case have to do with what is discussed above? Last year, EPIC released the list of Fortnite IP cooperation value, and the NFL X Fortnite IP cooperation that generated $50 million in revenue in two months can only rank third, the top two being the Star Wars IP and the Marvel IP.
The above cases have fully illustrated why some entertainment companies with big IP prefer the game e-sports industry, so why are game manufacturers obsessed with building their games and e-sports brands into IP across multiple fields?
In fact, some of the reasons why game esports IP goes out and film and television comic IP come in are similar. These IPs all have a high degree of recognition and user assets in their vertical fields, which provides the most basic visibility and influence guarantee for them to extend to other fields. Of course, more importantly, popular artistic expressions and content carriers such as books, film and television works, and music can help the relatively vertical IP in the past to complete the circle.
In particular, the IP that was born in the field of game e-sports has a certain cognitive threshold when these IP are disseminated to the outside world. At this time, through various channels such as film and television, literature, and music, IP can make its original high-threshold content more popular expression. One of the most typical cases is the explosion of the fist anime series "Battle of Two Cities" and the theme song "Lone Brave".
On the other hand, for more vertical users, IP such as League of Legends itself has a high degree of recognition, so when IP begins to appear in the market in various content carriers and forms of expression, it can allow the audience to quickly generate product associations, so as to achieve traffic aggregation and transmission between different types of products. In addition, due to the content uniformity of the same IP products, a richer IP product matrix is also easier to meet the diverse content needs of the audience, so as to achieve the purpose of improving the stickiness of IP users. In contrast, these IPs can also obtain more vigorous development vitality.
From these analyses, it seems that whether it is entertainment companies cross-border game e-sports, or game e-sports manufacturers to create their own IP universe through various entertainment form carriers, IP cultivation has become the only way for the future development of games and e-sports brands. Under such a trend, the future development path of more game manufacturers with high-quality IP will also move closer to comprehensive entertainment companies such as Marvel and Disney, and due to the latter's layout of game e-sports, the boundary between the two industries may become more and more blurred.
02
Going out of the loop is not the key to "IP cultivation"
From the above point of view, IP cultivation seems to be the key to the sustainable development of game e-sports products, but it is worth noting that "IP cultivation" is not easy, and going out of the circle is not the decisive factor for the successful IP of game products.
To take a simple example, when it comes to the IP cultivation case in the game industry, Blizzard is a very typical example. From the game CGs such as Diablo, Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm, and Overwatch, which were initially talked about by the majority of players, to the release of the "Warcraft" movie later, it reflected the results of its IP of the game product, but because the core of its own IP - the game product did not synchronize with the film and television works out of the circle in the development process, players commented on it as "doing CG with heart, making games with feet".
The above-mentioned Marvel's achievements in IP gamification are also not satisfactory. Marvel's game business actually has a history of decades, and in the past, there was no shortage of classic game products such as "Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter" in cooperation with game manufacturers, but in recent years, some heavy games such as "Marvel Super Wars" have not performed well.
While the examples of Blizzard and Marvel appear to come from two different industries, we can still find the most obvious commonality in them – the content quality of IP products. We will not discuss too much about the problem of Blizzard, "Marvel Super War" due to the current homogenization of the head product on the market is too serious, in addition to the IP lack of obvious core competitiveness of game products.
Naturally, there are successful cases in the industry, why can Pokémon become one of the most valuable IP in the world? Why can "Battle of Two Cities" under the League of Legends IP get wide acclaim and ultimately empower game products and S competitions? Not only is the popularity of IP giving vitality to the corresponding products, but more importantly, all kinds of derivative products under these IP have excellent original content or gameplay.
In this way, for more game manufacturers who want to build vertical brands into more vitality IP, or for external forces that lay out games, the keyword of "content out of the circle" corresponding to the cultivation of IP is not "out of the circle", but "content". Nowadays, game manufacturers with excellent products have embarked on the road to entertainment companies, which may also set off a greater wave of "IP" and "entertainment" in the game industry, but when more and more big IP derivative products are regarded as "cutting leeks" by young people, it also indicates that this road to the future is not easy.