Missing the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition", will "Return to Empire" be Tencent SLG's counterattack?

After "Gone with the Wind", Tenmi began another charge against the SLG track.

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Author | Dong Zibo Wang Yongang

Edit | Lin Juemin

SLG is an analog strategy game. SLG games are often referred to as games in the context of history or war, in which players maximize their interests and achieve different forms of victory through strategy and competition with other players.

For a long time, Tencent's game empire lacked the SLG puzzle.

With comprehensive self-research capabilities, Tencent has strong technical advantages and product matrix in moba, FPS and other fields, but only in the SLG track, Tencent has not yet launched a self-developed product with industry discourse.

Not willing to fall behind, Tencent has recently launched an impact on the SLG track. According to the news, after the launch of "Return to the Empire", the first day of the iPhone is estimated to have 313,500 downloads, and the two-day flow of the line is 1.1 million US dollars. Before there were strong enemies around "The Coast of the Land" and "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition", "Return to Empire" temporarily led with the momentum of the new launch, which may also mean that Tencent can break the wrist with NetEase and Ali on SLG.

What people don't know is that Tencent actually had the opportunity to dominate on SLG, but it missed it.

The story begins in 2011, when Dingdang (Zhan Zhonghui), one of the top players in NetEase Games, completely broke up and ran away from home. He gathered two other gods of the old club, Chen Wei'an (the vice president of NetEase in charge of "World of Warcraft" and "StarCraft") and Wu Yunyang (the core members of "Journey to the West" and "Fantasy Journey to the West"), and established a company called Jian Yue Technology in Guangzhou.

The heavy producers who have fled must be the indispensable places for the "enclosure" of large factories. According to a friend in the game circle, Tencent actually quietly held a part of Jian Yue's shares for a long time, but there was no large-scale PR. This experience is difficult to trace on the Internet.

Unfortunately, When Tencent held shares, Jian Yue, although there was a NetEase god sitting in the seat, could not escape the hero's shortness of breath. The "Momo Battle", "Momo Pinball", and "Heartbeat Manor" cooperated with Momo have no bright results; and Tencent has made a unique "Every Day to Fight" for the face, and it has not been able to leave a name in history.

A few years later, Chinese mobile games are the time when they are emerging. At this time, Jian Yue is like "chicken ribs" to Tencent: the food is tasteless and the pity is abandoned. At this time, the legend is that thanks to the mediation of Wang Yao, the chairman of Century Huatong, Tencent agreed to withdraw its shares, so that Jian Yue's subsequent sale can also be less troublesome.

Fast-forward the story to 2017, when Ali Games, which was in a hurry to develop its own ability, found an undesirable jingle and intended to acquire Jian Yue. According to a report in "Late", Tencent received the wind early, but it was indifferent to it. Tencent gave Jian Yue the opportunity to fight every day, but Jian Yue did not seize it.

"Do you really think Jian Yue is very good?" A Tencent executive said so.

Two years later, "Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition" made a strong appearance, and Jian Yue was also absorbed by Ali Games and became part of the new company "Lingxi Interactive Entertainment". The rest of the story is no longer a secret.

In this way, Tencent and Jian Yue "missed".

And things don't seem to be that simple. A game friend of Leifeng Network said: Tencent missed "Three Wars", not bad luck. If Tencent is always a shareholder of Jian Yue, then Jian Yue is likely to not be able to develop a work as successful as "Three Wars".

In the past few years, Tencent has not launched its own SLG products. 2017's "Gone with the Wind" is an important attempt by Tencent Tianmei Studio, but the results are not satisfactory, compared to "The Coast of the Land" and "Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition".

However, if the organization is large, it becomes difficult to think. Tencent IEG (Interactive Entertainment) loves to eat "old books", and it is not news. Even Tianmei is hoped to become the "second king" of "The King of Chaos", according to a large manufacturer SLG planning, the source code is also purchased from "The Dispute of kings", in the early stage of the game's operation, it can even be said to be "skinned".

In such a self-imposed manner, it is naturally difficult for Tencent to launch works of epochal significance again. A person in the circle who has handed over a lot of Tencent's IEG business said: "The only ability of Tencent employees is to spend money. They can do qualified project management and complete work within the framework of Tencent. But the things outside the framework and deviating from KPIs are not that they can't do it, but that they have no motivation to do it. ”

And the launch of "Return to The Empire" will be the "redemption" after Tencent missed the "Three Wars"?

According to one SLG practitioner, Return to Empire is essentially a "ROK-like" game. It absorbs the seasonal system of the land and the combination of military generals; but from the perspective of fighting, moving the city, and building the city, "Return to the Empire" is more of a model of "Awakening of All Nations".

The "stitching" on the system, but the player does not fully buy it; the design details such as too long novice guidance, dragging and wrong touch, etc., are criticized; although the picture is exquisite, it is one of the advantages of the fans of "Return to the Empire", but the lack of optimization has also led to the loss of one or the other in the smooth experience.

No game is perfect, but in the eyes of the player, the biggest problem of "Return to the Empire" is still krypton. The suspicion of lock cards (referring to the game locking the card pool when drawing cards, only some fixed warriors), unreasonable pre-resource allocation, and highly guided lineup settings make players deeply anxious.

It's not hard to imagine that revenue may still be the only metric for "Return to Empire." In the article "Cai Haoyu: China's First "Game Maniac"" of Leifeng Network, tencent's management model was introduced: the development team has a strong sense of KPIs within it, and most of them attach great importance to turnover and profitability. According to a former Tencent employee, even NEXT Studio, which focuses on independent game development at IEG, has recently saddled with revenue KPIs.

Of course, whether an SLG can succeed is not as simple as the system. The amount of purchases is also an important indicator of the survival of SLG games.

SLG buys have "rolled out of the sky". According to media collation, although "Return to Empire" has invested 5772 purchase materials in the past month, it is difficult to surpass large buyers such as "Civilization and Conquest" and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition", ranking 11th in the list of medium and heavy game purchases.

"Tencent's own games, the scale of purchase can not be too large. After all, their own user pool is here. An SLG practitioner said. If you add the promotion resources invested by WeChat and QQ, Tencent's early investment in "Return to The Empire" is not necessarily inferior to "Civilization" and "Three Wars".

Materially, IP strategy is a new trend in SLG competition. There are so many Three Kingdoms SLGs, why can "Romance of the Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition" reach the top? One of the main reasons is the blessing of big IPs. One practitioner said: "The IP of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has unearthed many new increments that are not SLG players. Moreover, the IP of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is large enough and old enough, and the player is enough to recognize, and the cost of understanding to enter the game is lower. ”

The use of IP must also take into account the tightness of the combination with the game. In the early stages of "Return to the Empire", more with the appeal of "Age of Empires" players to buy volume publicity, but it breeds new problems.

The internal affairs, diplomatic relations, and wars in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" are basically in line with the big logic of "Three Wars". The gameplay of Age of Empires is very different from the core of SLG's gameplay. An old player of "Age of Empires" complained to Leifeng Network: "As a twenty-year "Age of Empires" player, I have been looking forward to the mobile version of Age of Empires, and as a result, I saw this advertisement on Douyin every time, thinking that it was RTS (real-time strategy game), and clicked into it to find that it was an SLG mobile game, which has been deceived. ”

So when the game was about to be launched, "Return to the Empire" changed the previous purchase strategy, and the material was somewhat evasive about "Age of Empires". A large factory SLG operation planner told Lei Feng that "Return to Empire" is only a set of IP "skin", and the system is not the same in essence. In the early stage, IP can be used to create sound and form a gathering effect; if the "Age of Empires" is tightly held in the later stage of publicity, the transformation effect may not meet expectations.

However, why is SLG's buying and quantity war not "fighting the world" and "defending the world"? Even if you can rely on high-intensity delivery in the early stage to win the attention of players in a short period of time, if you do not continue to burn money for promotion in the later stage, the daily activity and payment in the game will also suffer a corresponding blow.

With high-intensity purchases, the SLG mobile game "Under the Red Chart", developed by Zulong and represented by Tencent, also topped the App Store free list on the first day. After the gradual slowdown in launch, today's "Under the Big Picture" has already fallen out of the free list, and the game's best-selling list is also hovering outside the 250th place.

When the version number will be restored is still far away, and various game companies are holding the mentality of "there is an old family, if there is a treasure", and they operate their own works with existing version numbers and cherishes themselves. Especially in SLG games, the long tail effect is obvious, and doing long-term operation can be said to be the only solution. However, long-term operation also represents long-term investment. This also forms a game between the amount of buy and the quality of the game:

Is "Return to Empire" worth Tencent's long-term investment?

At a time when the launch time is still short and the operational data is still unclear, the answer to this question is not yet known. As "predecessors", "The Coast of the Land" and "Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition" are undoubtedly the biggest contenders of "Return to Empire" on the SLG track.

As a phenomenon-level game on the SLG and even mobile game ends, "Romance of the Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition" can be called a well-deserved "masterpiece". "Three Wars" spent so much money to buy, can the Cover off the income? What is it like to deal with Japanese IP parties? What kind of grudges and hatreds are there between "Three Wars" and "Rate the Land"?

In the face of such doubts, Leifeng Network will complete the in-depth interpretation in the second part of the game series "Dazuo Visit", and please look forward to it.

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