Text | Game Pizza, author | Dante's Ark, edited | Zhao Ordinary
Game companies have their own "fan base" and that's nothing new.
Players who support Nintendo will be called "Ren Dolphin", and Sony loyal fans will be called "Dog"... Obviously, these titles are often insulting and used to refer to extreme fans who will stand up for the brainless solidarity of the company and its games. It's just that they are scolded a lot, and there is no shortage of players who use them to mock themselves to express their love for the game company.
However, this phenomenon generally occurs in overseas giants, and domestic game manufacturers have not had an exclusive and large-scale fan base for many years due to various reasons.
Miha Tour is an exception. Avid fans of the company have been dubbed "mi guards," and the context in which the term is used has also changed from outside rebukes to players' self-ridicule. Players who resent the "Mi Guard" have made up "quotations" such as "Three-dimensional Defense Theory" to mock the fans' double-standard performance in maintaining their beloved games, and in the face of layers of buttoned hats, "Mi Guards" have made memes such as "Thank you, I like it" to express the attitude of dissolving stigma and being lazy to argue.
Putting aside all kinds of scolding and playing, it is a certain fact that Mihayou has a group of loyal player fans. Recently, the Copyright Administration bureau of the Central Propaganda Department has launched the "2021 Top Ten Annual National IP Selection", all netizens can participate in the voting on the app of a host organization, in the field of games, the top three votes are "Original God", "Crash Academy 3" and "Undetermined Event Book", all of which are games produced by Mihayou. Among them, the number of votes of "Original God" has now exceeded 1.37 million, Tencent's "Peace Elite" ranked 440,000 in 4, and "Glory of kings" with 100 million daily lives only had 150,000 votes, ranking 7th.
The number of votes in an appraisal does not represent the commercial ability of the IP, but the intuitive embodiment of the "combat effectiveness" of the fan group. According to the February global revenue ranking of Chinese mobile game publishers released by SensorTower, Tencent and NetEase still occupy the top two seats, and Mihayou ranks Third. On the mobile game revenue estimate list, Tencent has 9 games in the Top 20, NetEase has 6, and Mihayou only has "Original God".
In terms of being supported by players, Mihayou clearly enjoys a high status that does not match the total number of players, the number of games and the revenue of the game, which must reflect a certain uniqueness of this company.
Attack on the "Meter Guard"
Mihayou's company slogan is "tech house saves the world", and at the beginning of its establishment, it was indeed idealistic. In 2011, Liu Wei and two other classmates, Cai Haoyu and Luo Yuhao, graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University, and the start-up capital was a 100,000 yuan interest-free loan provided by the Shanghai Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Center, and the office space was a 50-square-meter office with only half a year's access.
The trio's first indie game was Fly Me 2 The Moon, an homage to the ending song of the TV version of EVA. At the end of the same year, Miha You got an angel round of financing of 1 million yuan, and then launched "Crash Academy 1", which also did not achieve market success. At that time, the second dimension was still in the state of "enclosure and self-love", just a niche subculture carrier, Liu Wei once said in an interview that entrepreneurship is more because of love than ambition, "it is also good to serve such a group of users." ”
"Generating electricity for love" often means more hard work, and the monthly salary offered by the three people to themselves is only 4,000 yuan, which is the lowest among the same class of students. The only thing that can be related to "fans" in that period is only Liu Wei's personal good image in the hearts of players, in order to promote the game, he was a "customer service lady" for a year, and he was also keen to go to various game communities to continue to interact with players, and gradually got a affectionate name "Big Viagra". However, this is actually a reflection of the company's too small volume, "Except for the original art painting, I have done almost all other types of work." Liu Wei once recalled.
Launched in 2014, "Crash Academy 2" allowed Mihayou to dig a large bucket of gold by leaps and bounds, and the operating income exceeded 100 million yuan in the same year. Two years later, "Crash Academy 3" made the "niche" impossible to ignore, in 2016 Mihayou net profit of 273 million, by the time of the release of the prospectus in 2018, "Crash Academy 3" had more than 22 million game accounts, with a cumulative recharge of more than 1 billion yuan.
"Rice Guard" was born from the operation accident of "Crash Academy 3", the most representative of which is the "Zero Point Bar Incident".
"Zero Bar" is the 0.98 harmonic sound, which refers to the probability of the character drawing cards. The game launched the S-class Valkyrie "Blood Rose", the official announcement of the extraction probability of 0.98%, but many players can not draw at all, in the face of doubt, Mihayou issued a statement in response to say that the probability is correct, but quickly was "punched in the face", someone combined with the data given in the statement, calculated that 0.98% contains the probability of the character fragment falling, Mihayou actually played a word game, the real probability of obtaining the character is only about 0.4%.
That is to say, this is a "kryptonite" suspected of fraud, a group of players preached to "retreat", Mihayou then apologized and compensated, and took out an area in the company, named "Zero Point Bar" to warn themselves that they will not make mistakes in the future. But in the process of fermentation of the incident, there are also a group of players who resolutely maintain the image of Mihayou, saying that "this is actually an outbreak of long-standing resentment against Mihayou, which has evolved into a national carnival of trolls, and most ordinary players do not feel it at all, because they cannot afford to smoke."
"Crash 3" Animated Short Film "Perpetual Burning"
Players who hold similar "washing the ground" are scolded as "rice guards", and behind them is actually a rice circle behavior that does not distinguish between right and wrong. At this point, the "Mi Guards" are just a differentiation within the Miha players, "one powder top and ten black", they are considered to be on the opposite side of more ordinary players.
It didn't take long for "Original God" to come.
After the release of the first PV "The Stranger Who Hunted the Wind", "Original God" fell into the controversy of plagiarizing the Switch exclusive game "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness" because of the similarity of the drawing style and many play mechanisms, and Gamma data once counted that the proportion of plagiarism words in the comments of this PV was as high as 64%. There are many up main production "real hammer comparison" videos on station B, and the number of plays is generally more than 200,000 times. The "original god" is jokingly called "restoring the work of god".
The Stranger Who Catches the Wind
The circle-breaking effect on the promotion of "Original God" has triggered a broader differentiation between the inherent players of Miha Tour and the domestic console players, and the scope of "Mi Guard" has been expanded to all Miha players. The mentality behind this is that when the nature of the topic has been "determined" in the minds of the external group, any positive remarks involving "Original God", whether expected or justified, are "necessarily" issued by the "rice guards".
Zhihu some players helplessly wrote: "The mi guard can never understand why the single-player game player is so angry, and the single-player game player cannot understand how the mi guard can be so shamelessly reversed black and white." For single-player players, for many years for domestic games have a kind of "mourn their misfortune and anger it is not disputed" mentality, "open world", "3A" labels often belong to overseas masterpieces, when a game with these labels, but openly launched in the form of "plagiarism", it will be considered a great shame.
Mihayou's fans are mobile game players, and in the face of surging anger, there are also endless remarks such as "supporting domestic games" and "no "Original God" who knows "Breath of the Wilderness". Some people also believe that the "main circle" is used to superiority, and "Original God" and "Rice Guard" are just used as scapegoats for fire.
During China Joy that year, a group of players in front of the Original God booth raised their swaps in their hands and drew their middle fingers in protest. As Miha you announced that "Original God" would land on the Sony PS platform, a player with the online name "My Teammate Four Dogs" smashed his PS4 on the spot, and before performing this performance art, he sent a Weibo: "I really can't do this... This kind of game end out to take the ps4 to the world to see, can't afford to lose this person, really can't afford to lose, most of us still want to face. ”
The ChinaJoy incident is an extreme embodiment of the spread of online emotions to the offline, the testing of "Original God" is still going on as usual, and more dramatic things happened in January 2020: "Original God" announced that it would land on the Nintendo Switch, and the players who copied by faith seemed to be stabbed in the back by Nintendo, and the "Rice Guard" ushered in a stage "victory". On September 28, 2020, "Original God" was officially launched, which was called (another) "the darkest day in the history of Chinese games".
Along with this is a series of astonishing business records: $245 million in the first month became the world's highest-grossing mobile game that month, and the world's fastest mobile game to reach the $1 billion revenue milestone... Throughout 2021, the revenue of "Original God" remained at a high level of $1.8 billion, and the long-term high income means that more players have joined "Original God".
In the same year that the game was released, Mihayou's annual net profit soared by 474%. Since "Original God" is the most important product of Mihayou today, "Rice Guard" has become a synonym for players who maintain the reputation of "Original God".
The cause of the "Rice Guard"
Today, to explore whether "Original God" constitutes plagiarism has lost its meaning, one view is that Mihayou has taken the road of "black and red" from beginning to end, specific to "Original God", the "visual sense" caused by the publicity period is like a kind of porcelain marketing, and "similar style" is difficult to be identified as plagiarism, gameplay, human settings, details, etc. can be left for follow-up polishing, and continuous update can get rid of the "plagiarism" accusation.
Judging from the results, overseas media, awards, etc. are indeed more tolerant of "Original God". When the 1.1 version was updated, the 19 media outlets included in MTC were divided into 84, and the quality of the game was generally recognized. IGN gave it a 9/10 rating, with a review that said: "This game is not a clumsy imitator, "Original God" is a school of its own with a fantasy world, a variety of characters and a profound RPG system. ”
If it is defined as "a breath of the wilderness imitator with its own characteristics", it has become perfectly normal in the game world.
The degree of recognition has undergone a process of first suppressing and then rising, and the unity psychology stimulated in the process is the first reason why the "rice guards" can develop and grow. From "Original God", "Rice Guard" is actually a group that is named and represented, in the field of public opinion full of gunpowder, Miha play the role of "counterattack", and attacks from the outside world can always promote internal unity, and "Original God" players tell us: "Logic is a bit like a rice circle, when star fans have the most combat effectiveness, it is the time when there is 'home'. ”
During the controversy, the "Mi Hei" was actually louder than the "Mi Guard" and the action was more extreme. 1 month after the release of "Original God", 3 days after the italian ios best-seller list, the Chinese Embassy in Italy official tweeted and publicized, and there was no shortage of players angry and insulting below.
After the market position stabilized, "Original God" was appreciated by the mainstream game industry, "Original God" ranked second in the "Golden Joystick Award" annual game selection, and in the subsequent TGA awards season, "Original God" received two nominations for "Best Mobile Game" and "Best RPG Game", and was awarded "Best Mobile Game" at the TGA in 2021.
In addition, the income of "Original God" in overseas markets has remained high, and it has become the champion of China's mobile game overseas income for 6 consecutive months, and the policy level has also been included in the "National Cultural Export Key Project". The transformation from the "shame of the national tour" to the ability to "win glory for the country" is not insignificant, and it is not surprising that the "rice guards" who have experienced such ups and downs will unite under an emotion of "turning over" and "pride", and have more arguments when arguing on various occasions.
The second reason is related to Mihayou's company history, whether it is the "old player of the rice factory" or the "Mengxin" who entered the pit from "Original God", the good impression accumulated by Mihayou in his early years can still play a role. Some common Mi-Guard speeches would look like this:
"When the game companies were generally, they made Crash Academy 2 with love, and soon took the money they earned to make Crash Academy 3, and many skinning games made more than they did, are they stupid? I pay for Miha Because I know he can get the game right with my money and not run around in circles. ”
"This company still has its own insistence, and the introduction of the emergence of "Original God" has raised the threshold for future mobile games, which is equivalent to a pioneer. Even if there are shortcomings, I still have to appreciate Mihayou's courage. ”
It is not difficult to find that in the eyes of fans, Mihayou plays a heroic role, and in 10 years from 3 people to more than 4,000 people, from loan entrepreneurship to become a business giant, its development is full of legend, for players who love Mihayou games, the flow of water numbers is cold, but the story is vivid and perceptible. Mihayou has also been proposing larger visions, such as the 10th anniversary of the declaration that "by 2030 to create a virtual world in which 1 billion people are willing to live", all of which are easy for the "Rice Guards" to gather.
The third reason is to return to the properties of the "quadratic element". The second dimension itself has a large circle layer, just like the concept of "serving this group of people" at the beginning of the business, Mihayou has only focused on one track so far, and when the user portrait is unified, it is naturally easier to form a "company powder". Although the overall revenue of Tencent and NetEase is still ranked before Mihayou, there are many product lines under it, and the player preferences of different types of games are not the same, which will form a loyal fan of a certain game at most. And "Glory of kings" and "Peace Elite" have been developing in the direction of "national products", and breaking the circle is their goal.
Regarding the different characteristics of the two-dimensional track and previous games, Liu Wei once summed it up: "Mainstream games pay for hate, and two-dimensional games pay for love." This is first reflected in the psychology of payment, MMORPG, FPS, MOBA and other types involve confrontation between players, and it is impossible to avoid "fighting and killing", while the two-dimensional game single-player attribute represented by "Original God" is heavier, and fans are more likely to appreciate art and experience stories with a relaxed and playful mentality.
More importantly, the official content and fan content in the two-dimensional field have always complemented each other, and the vitality of the second creation can not only extend the vitality of the game, but also allow fans to gain a sense of circle identity outside the game. The second creation of "Original God" has given birth to some high-quality cases, such as the 2.4 version of the new character Yunwei's opera singing section "Goddess Splitting View" has been popular overseas, and it has been reported by Wen Wei Po as "new cultural symbols going to sea", and the B station of the plot PV has been played more than 10 million times.
Goddess Split View
Mihayou is also well versed in this way, not only the official community "Miyousha" to bring players closer, but also the offline creation festival miYoSummer to let the fan culture of its games have a space for communication and display. The attitude towards Erchuang is also quite open, the "Original God Fanzine Peripheral Operation Guidelines" allow fan creators to sell corresponding works to make money, and fan creators receive financial support from MihaYou, traffic tilt and game console prizes are all circulated in the community as a good story.
In essence, the "rice guard" is a kind of group behavior that forms a spontaneous group under the premise of two-way interaction between commercial companies and subcultural groups. Although there have been many ironic words and deeds in the fermentation process of the phenomenon, objectively speaking, it is still a confirmation that the game has cohesion.
When the circle of players expands and the degree of rice circle of the "Rice Guard" weakens, its nature, whether black or red, will sooner or later be submerged in the colorful world provided by the game.