The good results of the first week of the "Qing Yu Nian" mobile game online are not unexpected.
The original book has been serialized in the starting point Chinese network since 2007, and has continued to maintain the top five in the historical collection list in the past ten years, with a super high fan base. The eponymous drama of the same name received more than 10 billion views after it was broadcast in 2019, becoming a hit that year. With such a basis, on the first day of the launch, "Qing Yu Nian" was listed on the APPStore free list first, and the total list was second, which is expected to be "opened".
The ensuing decline in word-of-mouth is not surprising.
From 2015 to 2017, the film-game linkage was the hottest concept in the market and was written into the financial reports by a number of film and television listed companies. However, after 2018, there are few successful people in the film-game linkage, and the time difference between film and television works and games online is getting longer and longer, and the game itself will not make more innovations in the core gameplay. As of now, the rating of "Celebrating the Rest of the Year" on TapTap has dropped from 9 points at the time of booking to 5.6 points.
"The gameplay is too similar to the Tianya Mingyue Knife", "The activity forces the liver to force Krypton", "The sense of blow is poor", "The character scene wears the mold" is the reason why many players play a star. At a time when MMORPGs on the market are almost flooded, "Celebrating the Rest of the Year" seems to have not found a more attractive selling point in addition to the original IP.
This game, which has been open for appointment since 2020, was delayed until it was launched in this year when "Qing Yu Nian" is about to start shooting a sequel, which is not waiting for a good node. The official also played the concept of "1.5 seasons" when promoting this mobile game, trying to mobilize the audience's memories in this gap period, and also created momentum for the start of the second season.
Only, will it be active until the start of the second season?
The old story of the movie-game linkage
When the mobile game "Qing Yu Nian" "debuted", there were already many predecessors of "film and game linkage" in front of it.
Among them, most of them are the precipitation of classic IP, with movies, TV series and other types of cultural and entertainment products, such as martial arts IP "Tianya Mingyue Dao", "New Tianlong Eight Parts", and IP that has been circulating for hundreds of years, such as "Qiannu Ghost". Since 2014, the ip of the network has been paid attention to by the market, and "Immortals", "Flowers and Bones", and "Fighting to Break the Sky" have all been changed into various forms of entertainment products.
There is no original foundation, the number of games directly transformed from film and television works is small, the only old IP that is still active is "Wulin Waichuan", and the "Phoenix Yu Fei of Yanxi Raiders" that was recently launched, most of the games are like "Beijing Love Story" changed to match-three games, quietly online and quietly offline.
Beijing Love Story Mobile Game
Film-game linkage was once a popular concept in the capital market. In 2014, the entertainment Internet industry mergers and acquisitions are in full swing, different types of entertainment companies are looking for concepts that can be combined with each other, has produced "The Legend of the Eagle Hero", "Little Fish and Flowers" film and television company Ciwen Media and the game company Shunwang Technology signed a strategic cooperation, according to the agreement, during the strategic cooperation period, Ciwen Media every 12 months to Shunwang Technology or Shunwang Technology designated partners to authorize no less than 3 IP suitable for the game.
After some action, Ciwen Media achieved good results in the 2015 production of "Flowers and Bones". The game and episode of "Flowers and Bones" were released in the same month, and with the popularity of the series, game users maintained a daily growth of hundreds of thousands, rapidly exceeding 100 million, with an average monthly turnover of 70 million yuan, ranking in the top 10 positions of Apple's App Store. Ma Zhongjun, the founder of Ciwen Media, once reviewed later: in addition to the cost and various channels, the profit of the game "Flowers and Bones" should be more than 300 million, while the profit of the TV series is more than 100 million.
The platform welcomes such results and tries to push in the process. Xu Weifeng, then co-president of iQIYI, once said that "Flowers and Bones" can become a hit based on iQIYI's platform resources, paid membership, traffic value and brand effect. And iQiyi is not just involved in the game "Flowers and Bones". In the following 3 years, including "Old Nine Doors", "The Biography of Chu Qiao", "The Wind Rises in the Langya List", etc., iQIYI has successfully released and operated nearly 5,000 games.
But "Flowers and Bones" is the peak of the film-game linkage, and it has also become the beginning of the downhill road. Since 2018, almost all the "film-game linkage" has failed, and only the head IP of the level of "Douluo Continent" has a higher success rate. According to the observation of the Internet monster group, in the top 30 of the iOS game best-seller list, film/ animation / novel IP adaptation products can generally only occupy 3 to 5 seats, far lower than the terminal game IP adaptation products.
Games that were once considered important businesses by iQiyi have also changed. According to previous media reports, the game business is the "hardest hit area" for iQiyi's layoffs at the end of 2021. "LatePost" once reported that iQiyi's executives once hoped that game revenue could account for 20% to 30% of total revenue, and required that the development and launch of each game must cooperate with the progress of film and television dramas, but it is still too difficult to really cooperate.
Judging from the "Yanxi Raiders" and "Qing Yu Nian" that have been launched this year, the industry's rhythm and way of film-game linkage have been adjusted, which is also treating games as independent and important content products, rather than as ancillary marketing of film and television works.
According to the producer of "Qing Yu Nian", the mobile game has been planning more than a year before the start of the show, and in addition to the small partners in the company's support department, 30% of the R & D team is doing content work. In the usual MMO team of the same type, this proportion is about 10%.
The process of the game launch is also more bumpy, as early as 2019, the trailer has been launched; in June 2020, the mobile game debuted at the Tencent game conference, began to book and test, but by January 2022, a new reservation began. It wasn't until two years after the episode aired that the game came late.
Why MMORPG?
Why can "Celebrating the Rest of the Year" be adapted into a game? Its producer Sun Yong once commented: "The layered sense of content is very rich, providing us with a lot of creative space, which is very important for an MMORPG product." ”
The level of content is first reflected in a sufficiently rich character. In the nearly 4 million words of "Qing Yu Nian", a large number of characters appeared, and the story of the protagonist's fathers also had many extendable plots, and many viewers said at the time of the broadcast of the series that they "want to see Ye Qingmei (the protagonist's mother) prequel." ”
Sun Yong said that when the team designed the game plot, in addition to the main line plot, many original characters have their own exclusive plots, which may be branches or independent plots triggered by players in the daily interaction process with the characters. "And these plots may be an extension of the original story, or they may be original stories based on the character setting and the development of the main line."
Having a well-structured worldview also sets the foundation for developing games. "Qing Yu Nian" has settings such as crossing, temple, and future civilization trying to transform ancient civilization, providing an explanation for the combination of ancient civilization and modern civilization in the whole world. The game also extends this concept, in the "temple" where the player enters, the wreckage of the aircraft can be seen, and the player's mount is not only a horse, but also an electric car.
The writing path of male frequency network articles often constitutes the concept of layers of upgrading, which is naturally suitable for gamification. The female frequency IP often takes emotion as the core of the promotion, and there are many contradictions in the design of the world view, leaving little room for adaptation of the game. Ma Zhongjun once said in an interview that although the income of "Flowers and Bones" is also good, if it is a male frequency IP adaptation game, it may reach a revenue of more than one billion.
Based on this foundation, MMORPG is a natural choice for fans to immerse themselves in the game world. Players can not only enter the world constructed in the original book, but also build social relationships with other fans to change the world's plot together. From the perspective of the market, MMORPG mobile games are also the most gold-absorbing categories in the domestic game industry, and Gamma data shows that in the TOP200 mobile games in the Q1 best-seller list in 2021, MMORPG/ARPG categories account for the first, close to 40%.
But the more you go along this road, the more difficulties of innovation will naturally appear. The production team of the "Qing Yu Nian" mobile game "Heirloom Studio" once admitted in an interview that the current MMO has indeed encountered a relatively large bottleneck.
Although there are many products with very good local performance at the level of graphics, technology and gameplay, there is no product that has brought about essential changes. "For reasons such as more fragmented player activity time, the product design has made more changes in terms of reducing the barrier to entry for players, relatively weakening the content of forced interaction, and increasing leisure and fun gameplay."
The "Qing Yu Nian" mobile game is also a general continuation, and local adjustments have been made. They stressed that one of the innovations made by mobile games is that the way of playing is based on weapons, rather than discipline. However, judging from the evaluation of players in Station B, this change has not been implemented into the real fight, and different outputs and operations will not have an essential impact on the outcome of the battle.
MMORPG is also a relatively mature game category. The choice of MMORPG, on the one hand, is the security choice of IP linkage, and on the other hand, it is also the "story exploration" of MMORPG itself. The comments of "Sky Knife Skinning" are slightly harsh, but they also reflect a certain dilemma of IP changing to MMORPG.
From an optimistic point of view, these are all "least bad choices". Even considering its sustainability, in the multi-season linkage, the continuous updating characteristics can also be connected to the development of the plot.
The China Commercial Industry Research Institute has released a report that the average life cycle of MMORPG is longer (between 8 and 18 months) than the average life cycle of all mobile games in Chinese mainland (between 3 and 12 months). Maybe one day, the game will enter a period of stagnation in growth, and the update of the series can set off a new round of "mutual marketing", it is not known.