In October last year, GameLook introduced a meta-universe "playground" mobile game "Play Together" developed by South Korean game company HAEGIN, which was invested by Tencent and Netmarble.
Not only did the official boldly advertise "A Metaverse Playground" (a meta-universe amusement park) in the game introduction, but also successfully ranked seventh in the ten games with the fastest monthly growth in the third quarter of 2021 announced by the Data.ai, and Google Play data showed that the game has exceeded 10 million downloads within ten months of launch.
Recently, on the first anniversary of the official global launch of "Everyday Playland", HAEGIN announced a series of achievements in the past year or so: players have built 26.25 million houses in the game, eaten 38.91 million hot dogs, 47.95 million ice creams, worked 348 million times, experienced 38.56 million mini-games with friends, and 7 million players bought milk carton-style houses.
Of course, the most important of these is HAEGIN said that in the past year or so, the cumulative number of downloads of "Everyday Playland" has exceeded 100 million times (103.9 million).
However, in addition to the number of downloads, in a recent interview with the Korean media Gamey, the game's development manager Seungmin Yoo and HAEGIN's business team manager So-Dam Kim also revealed that the global daily active users (DAU) of "Everyday Playland" have reached 4 million, "in the first quarter of this year, the DAU has exceeded 2.5 million."
Among the 4 million DAUs, players from Southeast Asian countries and regions such as Taiwan, Vietnam, and Indonesia account for a relatively large proportion, of which Vietnam accounts for 70% of the total DAU of "Everyday Fun Park", but "the traffic in the main mobile game markets such as the United States, Japan, and South Korea is also gradually increasing." ”
The two also said in the interview that the team has set the DAU target for this year's "Everyday Playland" at 10 million, "we expect that this will not be an impossible number."
The following is the promotional video of "Playland Every Day":
A metaverse that lives rather than a Creator
First of all, we still need to briefly introduce "Everyday Playland" (if you want to know more about the product, you can search for "tens of millions of downloads in 10 months, this "Meta-Universe Paradise" mobile game has become a hit, and Tencent has low-key shares").
Players can enter the game after creating their own character in the face pinching system at the beginning of the game. In the game, each town has two floors, the upper floor is a social activity area, including supermarkets, department stores and other infrastructure, where you can work to earn money to subsidize the family; the lower level is a residential area, each player will initially have a "box room", players can buy a house that meets their wishes after making money, and decorate their own small home.
There will be no main line missions in the game, mainly some rewarding optional tasks, and players do not need to launch the liver game every day in order to catch up with the version and catch the plot.
As with the main quest, UGC and the trading system disappeared. The absence of the former means that all the experiential content in the game mainly relies on official development and provision, while the latter allows "Everyday Playland" to introduce a business model similar to traditional mobile games, without the need to open up new areas for decentralization and free trade. All of the game's paid points are focused on the player's avatar.
In fact, through a short introduction, it is not difficult to find the difference between "Everyday Playland" and the current mainstream meta-universe products. At a time when many products, including Roblox, are emphasizing rich experience content, UGC, and creator profits, "Everyday Amusement Park" chose to build a basic virtual life, social, and game scene first, and did not rush out to take a step of "metaverse" such as centralization.
This makes the current stage of "Everyday Playland" look more like a social game than a "meta-universe playground", which reminds GameLook of the GTA series that takes a similar route.
In the interview, Seungmin Yoo said, "We offer a variety of entertainment and environments within the prescribed standards, and users can freely expand within them." Just like "school" or "downtown", users do not need to be involved in construction and can be naturally connected through the experience of being in a space".
To this end, in the past year, "Everyday Playland" has also reached cooperation with 7-11 convenience stores, music platform Genie, beauty salon chain brands CHAHONG, IPX (formerly Line Friends) and other brands full of pyrotechnics rather than high-tech, adding virtual stores of these brands to their own platforms.
So-Dam Kim said that the cumulative "traffic" of the virtual store of the 7-11 convenience store exceeded 10 million within 3 weeks of opening, and the number of online people at the same time as Genie's first virtual music talk show held on the platform also reached 300,000 at one point.
Only by improving the quality of the game can we determine the direction of development
As for UGC, Seungmin Yoo's attitude is that "users have a lot of needs, but I think it could be confusing if you allow users to create too much content".
But even so, the official does not completely deny the possibility that UGC will be launched in the future, "we plan to provide a free environment where users can use furniture and building blocks with various functions in their own homes to make games that we never thought", "We are considering turning each user's home into a single platform." ”
At the same time, Seungmin Yoo emphasized that one of the key points of "Everyday Playland" in terms of content is that "we will avoid content that needs to be learned by users", and the UGC system of "Everyday Playland" in the future will not be too complicated, and the upper limit may be relatively low compared with many UGC platforms on the market.
At present, "Everyday Playland" will also maintain the mode of official experience content, and recently, HAEGIN has updated the new "Downtown(Downtown)" area for the game to meet the needs of players for one-on-one private chat, as well as the needs of some players who want to farm in the virtual world. In addition, working with more artists to launch virtual performances is also what players can expect from this year's "Everyday Playland".
Seungmin Yoo also said that HAEGIN is also considering The Day Playland's multi-platform support so that players can play with friends on platforms such as PCs, not just mobile devices. GameLook estimates that the game's richer operation methods and higher hardware caps will also give the team more creative space.
Finally, in the interview, the two interviewees also talked about the blockchain closely related to the metaverse, to which So-Dam Kim said that the company has noticed the trend of NFTs and P2E, and is under internal review, but "our top priority is still to strengthen the completion of the game and the quality of the content, understand the needs of players, so as to establish the right direction of development", in the Korean game industry today tout P2E tide, this kind of statement is sober.
epilogue:
Although the number of game downloads and other data is doubtful, there is no doubt that "Everyday Playland" is still a unique and hot existence in the meta-universe products on the market today, and it is no wonder that the game still has a high score of 4.3 while winning 1.969 million reviews on Google Play.
However, "Everyday Playland" is not perfect, the game's official content-based model has allowed many players in the comment area to complain that the game can experience the limited content, how to ensure that the product is currently high-quality content, low entry threshold as much as possible at the same time, open and manage the UGC ecology, is the need for HAEGIN to quickly come up with a solution to the problem.
Since the sign of the meta-universe has been played, the power of the masses cannot and cannot be ignored.
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GameLook Daily Game Industry Report
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