Since its debut at the 2021 Tencent Annual Game Conference, Tianmei's second SLG "Return to Empire" after "Gone with the Wind" has been attracting the attention of the industry and players.
Of course, in addition to the influence of Tianmei, the "golden signboard", the core reason why "Return to Empire" can always stand in the spotlight is due to the "breakthrough ideas" related to art and gameplay that have been disclosed successively after its first exposure, which has allowed the public to see its "ambition" of trying to jump out of the traditional SLG system, and the huge imagination space derived from it.
On March 29, carrying many expectations of the industry and players, "Return to The Empire" officially opened the undeleted test, and on the first day, it was listed on the iOS free list TOP1, and also broke into the best-seller list TOP10.
Frankly speaking, this time the head product pattern has been solidified for many years, and it has entered the SLG track of the stock era for a long time, and it is not easy for "Return to Empire" to obtain such market feedback.
So in the essence, in the two dimensions of content design and publicity marketing, what breakthroughs has "Return to Empire" made to drive it to stand out in the "twisted" SLG track?
Audio-visual upgrades, strategic Tuowei, and "Return to the Empire", which is committed to "making strategy come alive", have done it
Focusing on the game itself, the Slogan played by "Return to Empire" from beginning to end is "making the strategy come alive", which is not only the core idea of its multi-dimensional innovation in the SLG field, but also its courage to compete in SLG other products.
So how do you understand the innovative idea behind this Slogan?
GameRes believes that it can be disassembled from two broad perspectives.
First, make the strategic world come alive
In the past few years, several veteran head SLG products have basically aggregated the vast majority of SLG players, but with the passage of time, they have been online for some years, and they are inevitably facing the problem of disconnecting the "audiovisual experience" from the times.
On the demand side, players' pursuit of a more advanced and epoch-making "sensory experience" has never stopped, and the "imbalance between supply and demand" inside the track has also provided an entry point for the new competitors of the SLG track in disguise.
Source: Ai Media Consulting
Based on this, "Return to The Empire", which is endorsed by the technical strength of Tianmei and Microsoft XGS Studio, has also effectively achieved a new round of transition in the polishing of "audiovisual experience", presenting a real and vivid "strategic world" for players.
The three-dimensional architecture of the Zhongshan River on a vast map of 6.25 million square kilometers, as well as the design of the "four civilizations" with different styles of architecture and arms, as small as the composition of high-precision models with more than 60,000 faces, and the introduction of various heroic characters of real-life capture technology, plus the system design of day and night, the change of seasons and other systems that are in line with reality...
All kinds of delicate visual performances visible to the naked eye make "Return to Empire" have a very intuitive and outstanding competitiveness in the comparison of many SLG competitors. This not only makes it easier to attract the attention of players in the promotion, but also a stronger sense of immersion derived from sensory feedback, which is also of great benefit to user retention and long-term operation of the product.
It can be said that starting from the "audiovisual upgrade" and committing to "making the strategic world come alive" is an important foundation for "Return to Empire" to adapt to the trend of the times and the demands of players, and challenge a number of established SLG products.
Second, let the strategic gameplay come alive
Objectively speaking, in the face of the mature SLG gameplay framework, it is not easy for entrants to complete a drastic underlying innovation, because this is not only a huge test of R&D creativity, but also involves the potential risk of player acceptance.
Based on this, "micro-innovation" is still the main direction for new products to release creativity and seek differentiation, and this time "Return to Empire" is also anchoring the core charm source of SLG "Strategy Game", and mainly focuses on the "Strategy Battle" gameplay module for multi-dimensional experience upgrades.
In the past SLGs, designs such as "walking the grid" and "one-second settlement of battle" were called regular standards, but the strategic fun derived from this was inevitably too rigid and rigid, and this demand point with great room for improvement has also become the core incentive for "Return to Empire" to "make the strategy come alive".
Based on this, "Return to the Empire" introduced a large map like RTS "Free March", which players can use to manipulate their troops to move around the battlefield, which also derives more free "dynamic strategies" such as "cheating and pulling" and "sound east and west".
In addition, "Return to The Empire" also jumped out of the shackles of the traditional SLG battle process of "one-second settlement", changing the battle process to a more ornamental and operational continuous battle, so that players can enjoy the intense stimulation of a local war in the senses, and also pull out the operation space such as releasing skills and interrupting skills.
On this basis, "Return to Empire" even derived like the MOBA game, using terrain for "crouching grass ambush" gameplay, so that "luring the enemy deeper, defeating in one fell swoop" has become a visible and reachable reality for players, and also makes the game move closer to the real war, providing players with more diversified strategic fun.
Finally, "Return to The Empire" also extends the "siege warfare" in the traditional SLG, which can basically be summarized as "numerical confrontation", and extends the three-dimensionality in depth.
The famous city in the game is like the real ancient times, with four gates in the southeast, south, and northwest, and both the attacking and defending sides can deploy corresponding troops around these four gates, as well as lay the corresponding fortifications and siege equipment. Even after the breach of the city gate, the war was not over, because it was followed by a short "street battle" between the two sides, and only those who successfully took the fortress and the central city after the battle were the winners.
This design, coupled with the underlying operational logic of the "free march", undoubtedly allows both sides to engage in a strategic and continuous game in an immersive war environment.
In GameRes' view, before the emergence of "Return to the Empire", most SLGs, whether it is a sensory experience or a strategic experience, are "static", and the fun that players get from it is more inclined to the macro level of strategizing, but it is always lacking an immersive sense of substitution, and it is difficult to truly perceive the excitement and grandeur of real war.
However, with the launch of "Return to Empire", the pain points of this category have been very effectively solved, and after the two-pronged efforts of "audio-visual upgrade" and "strategic topology", it has successfully promoted the SLG experience to achieve a leap from "static" to "dynamic", which is not only the underlying logic of its market performance after its launch, but also the ceiling of SLG game quality, leading this track to usher in a new round of breakthroughs.
In addition to releasing loud volume through integrated marketing, the circle-breaking strength of this "whole work short film" exceeded expectations
The breakthrough innovation in content has implanted a "explosive gene" for "Return to Empire", but in addition, behind its high-light market performance, it is obviously inseparable from the efforts and explorations made by Tianmei on the distribution side.
As one of the blockbuster new products of Tianmei in 2022, "Return to Empire" Tencent is the top resource support of various channels, as well as the large-scale investment does not need to be repeated too much. On this basis, a series of "content marketing" carried out by "Return to Empire" with Luo Yonghao, PDD and other top-notch talents have also achieved good results, which can be said to be the source of the entire network after the launch of the work.
However, objectively speaking, whether it is the "buying volume delivery" aimed at reaching pan-mass users, or the "talent marketing" customized by SLG core players, it is actually a set of "integrated marketing" ideas that have long been systematic, and in essence, they are also aimed at the "existing users" in the SLG field for penetration.
It should be known that in recent years, the biggest constraint restricting the further development of the SLG field has always been the lack of "incremental user" entry. Therefore, in fact, only by achieving a real sense of "breaking the circle", such as transforming the "Z generation" who may be more enthusiastic about quadratic elements, MOBAs, and RPGs, can the product itself jump out of the mud of SLG's "inner volume".
Surprisingly, GameRes found that Return to Empire seemed to have made a breakthrough in this regard.
On March 29, the day of launch, at the same time as opening the above-mentioned "integrated marketing", "Return to Empire" quietly joined hands with Actor Li Guangqi, who played the "melon stall boss" in "Conquest", as well as Tan Qiao and Uncle Erxianqiao, who are famous for "Tan Talk traffic", and released two cooperation videos in the "Ghost Animal Area" of Station B.
One of them has more than 6 million plays and more than 500,000 likes, and the other has once topped the popular list of B stations, and has even been included in the list of "weekly must-sees" of B stations, with more than 8 million plays and nearly 600,000 likes.
In these two "whole work short films", "Return to Empire" with a very creative script design, buried a large number of "hot memes" from the field of pan-entertainment, and has reproduced the three famous scenes of "Huaqiang Buying Melon", "Zhang Fei", "Li Is the Same", and "Head Character D" in the "Ghost Animal Area" of Station B.
Under the funny interpretation of the old drama bone Li Guangqi, as well as the Internet celebrity Tan Qiao and Uncle Erxianqiao, a large number of laughs implanted in the video poured out to the audience intensively, and the bullet screens of the two videos were almost from beginning to end filled with the "terrier spit" and "hahahahaha" of the "Z generation" of the B station.
Seriously, this is really the funniest whole job advertisement I've ever seen
In addition to the eye-catching content design, what is more commendable is that in the "advertising connection" of different clips of each video, "Return to The Empire" is also very smooth, basically on the basis of undertaking the plot trend, quite naturally brought out its own "living strategy", "city attack and defense", "multi-civilization and multi-culture", "do not take the grid" and other core selling points, the slightest blunt advertising implantation also ensures the immersion of the video and the coherence of the plot.
Under the support of high-quality video content, a phenomenon visible to the naked eye is that players not only do not resent "ad implants" in the bullet screen or the comment area, but do not hesitate to praise. You know that in the past few years, it is very rare for users to be able to say such things.
This scene, on the one hand, makes GameRes can't help but sigh Tianmei's deep understanding of young player preferences and psychology, on the other hand, it also marks that this "whole work marketing" has formed a strong circle-breaking effect in the "Generation Z" group, which is quite rare.
For Return to Empire, this move may have given many "Generation Z" who had never been exposed to SLG games the idea of trying, and perhaps it was the addition of this "new force" that promoted its high-light results.
In addition, and more importantly, Return to Empire is a move that younger users prefer, helping them build an initial understanding of SLG games that was difficult to do with conventional marketing practices in the past. As long as this "information barrier" is successfully broken, we have enough reasons to expect that the future SLG track may usher in more incremental users led by "Generation Z", thus entering a new stage of rapid growth.
epilogue
At the end of 2021, according to the "China Game 2022 Trend Report" data released by Gamma Data, SLG has become a representative of mature markets, and the head product flow will account for about 40% in 2021.
In the report, Gamma data also analyzed the development trend of the SLG market, which said that the opportunity of this mature category will be more inclined to high-quality products in the future, and game companies need to pay attention to the polishing of all aspects of research and development, distribution, operation, etc., and comprehensively improve product quality in order to meet user demands and enjoy the benefits of mature markets.
Combined with this point of view, it is not difficult to see that the design and planning of "Return to Empire" on both sides of content and distribution just conforms to the requirements of the head boutique under the development trend of the SLG market.
On the one hand, its series of innovative layouts around "make the strategy come alive" have elevated the sensory and strategic quality of SLG games, formed differentiation, and effectively improved the actual experience of players; on the other hand, on the basis of ensuring the coverage of mainstream SLG users at the time of publicity, it has injected new vitality into both the user ecology in the SLG field by means of "whole work marketing" to expand the circle of radiation completed by the "whole work marketing".
It is foreseeable that in the future, under the deep cultivation and operation of Tianmei, "Return to Empire" may also bring more surprises to the industry and players.