In the past few years, based on the continuous high popularity of casual games in the global market, the actions of Chinese game developers to lay out "casual tracks" overseas have also been accelerating, and they have also successfully spawned "Project Makeover" such as "Project Makeover", which focuses on "image transformation + home improvement + match three".
But in addition to the leisure subdivisions such as "match-3 + X" and "synthetic +X" that have been "rolled" into twists, are there still some subdivisions that have potential but are ignored by the industry that deserve attention?
On March 14, Sensor Tower released the "February China Mobile Game Overseas Revenue Growth Ranking", and highlighted the "Solitaire Home Design" (hereinafter referred to as SHD), which ranked top 8 under Beta Games, saying that this main "solitaire + home improvement" benefited from entering a rapid upward channel in the US market, and the revenue of the current period increased by 42.7% month-on-month, ranking 8th in the revenue growth list.
According to GameRes, SHD is not a near-end new product, it has been nearly 2 years since its overseas release in April 2020, and it has hardly been at the top of the major lists in any country before the end of 2021.
But when the time came to 2022, SHD was a global surrobber, not only breaking into the iOS best-seller list TOP10 in 16 countries/regions, but even in the United States, a large-scale market, from the early iOS best-seller list to 1000, all the way to the top 79 position.
So tracing back to the source, what are the characteristics of SHD itself that supports its "second spring" glow? At the same time, the sudden explosion of the work after more than a year of obscurity, why did it come from?
The mobile side of the unpopular "solitaire" gameplay?
As mentioned above, the core selling point of SHD is the integration of "card + home improvement" gameplay, which is also the two core gameplay methods of the game that are relatively independent but interconnected - such as the classic "match-3 + home improvement" game such as "Dream Garden", the breakthrough type of "card" gameplay provides players with challenge fun, and "Clover", which is used to promote the development of the main line plot; the "home improvement" gameplay that advances in the same direction as the main line plot provides players with narrative fun and business fun.
In the game, the main plot revolves around the male protagonist "Eddie" and the female protagonist "Lori", the two live in the same mansion in disrepair due to a misunderstanding, and then live every day happily in the daily quarrel, while also working together to repair the home.
When it comes to the "card" gameplay in the game, players will face "public areas" with different card layouts in each level, and also have their own "card library".
The condition for passing the customs is to let yourself turn out the cards from the "card library" to eliminate the cards in the forward direction (example A, 2, 3) or reverse (example A, K, Q) or the cycle (example A, K, A), when the cards in the public area are successfully eliminated, they will pass the customs smoothly, and if their "card library" takes the lead in bottoming out, they will fail to break through.
Objectively speaking, shd this set of card play is still quite interesting, on the one hand, the "card library" and many cards in the public area are buckled, because the player does not know what cards are after opening, which is enough to affect the strong "randomness" of the trend of breaking through, but also injects extraordinary fun into the game.
On the other hand, with the increase in the difficulty of the level, as well as the emergence of special cards such as "hook cards" and "change cards", players need to have more elaborate planning to "count cards" and "solve cards", because once the level fails, the money consumed to open the level will only return about 10%, and the higher "sunk cost" will also drive players to think deeper strategically.
After successfully collecting the "clover" after repeatedly breaking through the level, players can continue to promote the progress of "home improvement" by unlocking the main plot, and step by step to make the original dilapidated mansion into their ideal appearance by replacing the floor, adding furniture and appliances, raising cats and dogs, etc.
In the process of repairing the home, there is a detail experience that is not good, that is, although every time furniture, home appliances and other objects are replaced, three different styles of items are provided, but the "prosperity" is not consistent.
For example, there may be players who obviously like coffee machines, but the prosperity of the cold drink machine is higher, which will inevitably make him fall into the contradiction between "personal preferences" and "prosperity", in a sense, in a sense, it weakens the freedom of home improvement gameplay.
In addition to the two main lines of playing cards and home improvement, there is also a noteworthy "dark line" that supports the long-term operation of SHD.
With the deepening of the game, players will gradually get to know lawyers, plumbers and other characters with very different personalities and images, and then they can choose their favorite characters to unlock the plot in a similar "bondage" gameplay, play the heroine "Lori" and meet many male characters, and in which to improve "favorability" through branch choices and unlock more rewards.
On the surface, "Bondage" is a very common way to play, but it is worth noting that SHD's design for the Bondage plot is surprisingly bold.
It has been observed that SHD in the plot of many characters, in addition to the regular "sweet pet" content, has also introduced a lot of "adult" bridges (of course, the overall description is still relatively obscure, and there will be warm tips before the plot is opened), and many "stimulus points" that are difficult to see in public games are buried.
On this basis, coupled with the amount of content of each plot chapter is not small, the author's narrative technique is also quite skilled, so the player can also harvest a lot of fun from it.
GameRes speculates that this more "obscure" but eye-catching enough design, and there is a continuous iteration of imagination space, may be just a detail to improve the stickiness of HD users (of course, this type of design is only suitable for overseas markets!). ), which provided a boost to the smooth operation of the game for more than a year, and finally under the coordination of the increased difficulty of the card game and the subsequent payment stimulation, SHD finally entered the upward channel this year.
"Hunting" material design to promote "explosive"? The market performance has caused controversy in addition to the soaring performance
Strictly speaking, the "solitaire + home improvement" type of gameplay is not the first of the SHD, GameRes in the review process, found that the Israeli game developer Plarium as early as 2018 has launched a similar gameplay product "Undersea Solitaire Tripeak", its "solitaire" core gameplay is almost the same as SHD.
The difference between the two is mainly in the "Undersea Solitaire Tripeak" home improvement business gameplay, which requires players to create a home in the "underwater world" for crabs, lobsters and other marine animals, and the cartoon style is more intense than SHD, speculating that the overall audience may be aimed at "young players".
In contrast, the core difference between SHD and "Undersea Solitaire Tripeak" is obviously that it has chosen the "urban theme" that has been verified by the market to undertake home improvement gameplay, coupled with creative card play, which has successfully broken through in the highly homogenized overseas leisure market.
But objectively speaking, these obvious content advantages SHD has been available since the early stage of launch, but why did it suddenly explode after nearly two years of smooth operation? With that in mind, GameRes looked at the way it played marketing this year and seemed to have spotted another driver behind its changes.
Source: App Growing International Edition
After combing through the key overseas release materials of SHD this year, GameRes found that the plot of most of its purchased materials was designed as a female character who suffered negative events such as boyfriend cheating, domestic violence, voyeurism, etc., and was discouraged and ran away from home, in addition, in the copywriting section, SHD's focus is to call on players to "save her (help her)."
Guessing the overall design idea of this kind of material is that SHD hopes to attract players to watch with negative hot social events as an incision, and then use copywriting to awaken players' sense of justice and empathy, and finally guide them to download the game.
In addition, there are also some materials that choose to cut from the public's hunting psychology, and many of them are not uncommon in the design of materials that are linked to elements such as and... But forgive me for not wanting to paraphrase this kind of plot in words.
Admittedly, from the perspective of marketing and customer acquisition, SHD's design for the above types of materials is "successful", because it has indeed captured the public's attention, which may also be the core driver of SHD's continuous high market performance this year.
But on another level, the design orientation of such materials is quite negative, which not only runs counter to the current industry's pursuit of positive value transmission, but also causes a lot of controversy among Internet user groups even in more inclusive overseas markets.
GameRes has observed that many users on Twitter have attacked the amount of MATERIALs bought by SHD, which also shows that this kind of excessive sensational "edge scraping material" will undoubtedly ruin a lot of "passers-by", which may not be worth emulating.
epilogue
From an obscure "little transparent" to a popular casual game that broke into the TOP100 of the US market, SHD took less than two years.
In the final analysis, its visual experience that fits the aesthetics of global players, the "home improvement" gameplay anchored by drawing on many boutiques of the leisure track, and the most core creative "solitaire" gameplay have synergistically supported the game quality of the game that is both interesting and innovative, laying the foundation for its outbreak this year.
In particular, the idea of "solitaire + X" can be said to be a new "blue ocean" of subdivision that needs to be reclaimed urgently, which is worth thinking about and learning from the majority of developers.
In addition, although whether it is some of the "adult-oriented" content implants in the game, or the controversial "hunting" material design, it seems that the way of SHD is a bit too "wild".
But in fact, from another point of view, shd's attempts also provide us with a new idea: for a sea product, under the premise of compliance and legality, in the content, the purchase dimension of the appropriate strange tricks "clever", may also be a strategy to tap potential opportunities, but the scale must be controlled, otherwise it may be serious "word of mouth", more than worth the loss.