When we think of synthetic games, what names do we usually think of? The most famous should be "2048", or "Synthetic Watermelon", which exploded for a while at the beginning of the year.
If you think about it, you will find that the number of synthetic games is actually quite large, far from the ancient puzzle games such as "Seeking Unity" and "Eliminating Stars", and "Temple Run" and "Fruit Ninja" are basically the products of an era, and there are recent games such as "Esper Love Synthesis" and other classic synthesis + RPG gameplay games.
Synthesis games are easy to contrast with elimination games, the essence of both gameplay is to merge similar items, but the former is accumulating, starting from the most basic blocks, the same material required rises exponentially, the cool point comes from the increasingly difficult number of materials and the moment when the high-level block is synthesized, the latter is consumption, with the goal of clearing the screen, the cool point comes from eliminating combos, and almost no need to calculate the things after two steps.
It doesn't sound too much, but the popularity of the two types is completely incomparable, and we can easily recall the long-lasting elimination games "Happy Match", "Candy Crush Legend", "Dream Home" and so on that have existed for nearly a decade, but it is difficult to cite any synthetic games that have existed for more than two years.
Just like the difference in popularity between "Huarong Dao" and "Tetris", we always like to eliminate it in pain, rather than endlessly doing mathematical problems.
Compositing games are recovering
In recent months, AppStore and TapTap platforms have emerged some synthetic games, of course, synthetic games have never really declined, but its development is difficult to connect to the line to examine, and has always been intermittent, fragmented in front of our eyes.
This makes people wonder, in the elimination class, placement class, walking grid maze class light play have emerged a large number of successful commercial products, and thus let some companies on a larger stage at the moment, is the same classic game of synthetic play, doomed to have no chance to turn over?
Perhaps we should take a look at the products that fit the current market.
Spoof crafting game
At the beginning of the year, the explosive "Synthetic Big Watermelon" is undoubtedly a model of the viral spread of synthetic games, the game itself uses the design of the falling physics engine, and its transmission link is very close to the idea when the mini-game first emerged, that is, acquaintance social networking.
But the popularity of "Synthetic Watermelon" itself is completely based on coincidence, and the game itself has no depth to speak of, just like all suddenly explosive spoof games, it is a one-night talk.
Leisure cultivation
Recently, two synthetic games of "Little Mori Ling" and "Fat Cat Gym" can be seen on AppStore and TapTap, and the number of downloads in the TapTap synthesis genre is the top, both more than 100,000.
Both games adopt the style of the popular "farming management" game, focusing on small fresh healing, and the target audience is casual simulation business players.
However, the gameplay of "Komori Ling" actually borrows from the "Dragon Evolution Merge Dragons" released by Zynga - a puzzle level that simulates the style of business cultivation + entertainment, but all the materials are obtained and upgraded by synthesis. Its essence of farming class placement simulation management, and then with some small levels to expand the gameplay, and each material can be improved through the three-in-one level, even up to level 17, you can imagine the huge demand for materials, so it is a very long innate cultivation line, which belongs to the medium cultivation game.
"Fat Cat Gym" is relatively mild, the daily online time belongs to the category of small games, synthesis only needs to be two-in-one, the operation gameplay is relatively single, mainly relying on physical strength, each time online can also consume clean physical strength in a few minutes, is a typical light game. It should be noted that the synthesis of this game is basically not related to puzzle games, but only a way to obtain mission materials, which can be seen as a placement game like "Traveling Frog", but "Fat Cat Gym" has a weak depiction of the character story and the previous emotional connection with the player, so it is not a sense of substitution.
Medium to heavy card cultivation
Strictly speaking, there are no real heavy card cultivation games in this category, and they are basically restrained in the medium range - there is no need to calculate the activity pool, nor is it forced to scavege all the material every day, but the single-day game time has fully reached the heavy game level.
But if you only look at the length of the game, then this kind of game is completely liver emperor level. Examples such as Reborn Tower Defense: Raiders of the Lost Ark are some of them.
This game is designed in the form of tower defense levels, simple four types of defense towers + six kinds of weapons in each class of combination, two-in-one relatively easy synthesis requirements, through the synthesis of the defense tower to upgrade, light operation + placement to create cool points.
"Reborn Tower Defense: Raiders of the Lost Ark" is a fairly mature card tower defense game, which uses a very rich and mature design logic such as switching maps, upgrading the initial defense tower level, brushing materials to create new towers, etc., to solve the problem of player resistance caused by the rise of the synthetic material index, and very generously allows players to easily obtain various materials. The game, which is still in beta, has 170,000 followers on TapTap and a rating of 9.1. The product is actually expected to be tried towards the Sword and Expeditionlike.
In addition, Jiyousha has also launched a puzzle synthesis game called "The Next Sword", similar to the synthesis method of "2048" plus heavy RPG elements, level strategy heavy strategy, and cultivation is Royale Warlike. However, it is a pity that the market performance of this game is average, in fact, this is completely a product that inherits the style of thunder games, but compared to the core methodology of "long-process RL gameplay + heavy cultivation line" that "Incredible Game" and "Underground Castle" are good at, "Next Sword" has not played such an extreme commercial value.
From the above synthetic types of products, we can find that the synthetic games themselves have not lagged behind the user habits of the mainstream commercial market, and many developers have tried to cross-design with heavy cultivation, casual simulation, and spoofs, but so far, synthetic games have not yet appeared in the domestic market with any convincing head products.
What's the problem?
Synthetic games are undoubtedly a very promising way to play, without it, because its "same kind" elimination games have shown us countless successes, without reason, synthetic games can not emulate success.
If you think about the masterpieces of elimination games at home and abroad, "Happy Match", "Candy Crush Legend", "Dream Home", you will find that although they were born from different countries and different user habits of the market, they all have the basic attribute of nationality.
"Happy Consumption" developer of the music element, in 2017 when the application for IPO, the market share of this product has accounted for 72.6% of the same type in China, the more live as high as 135 million, the success secret of "Happy Consumption" is to successfully conquer the sinking market, in the 2019 OPPO released mobile game report, it is clear that the per capita recharge amount of "Happy Consumption" after 60 players is 3 times that of the post-00s.
"Candy Crush Legend" began to rely on Facebook in 2012, was the top social product of its kind at the time, and even until 2022, it can set a new 12-month turnover of $930 million.
"Dream Home" was originally a hunting game released by Playrix on PC, adapted into a match-3 version, and began testing on the mobile terminal in 2015. The game alone took four years to develop, and by alienating the hunt gameplay into the current slow cleaning and decorating your own garden, Dream Home is almost the only match-3 game that can compete with Candy Crush Legend.
Synthetic games are difficult to do with the puzzle gameplay itself, as the paroxy games do, while introducing new levels over time. As the article said at the beginning, players facing this market do not want to do math problems in the game, so we can always only see some puzzle synthesis games with brain burning as the selling point, rather than heavy synthesis games with pushing levels and brushing physical strength as the core.
Synthetic games are difficult to do sinking market, that is, it is difficult to become a national-level big DAU casual game. On the one hand, the consumer fun game has already developed the market, and proves the strong competitiveness of this type,
But does this mean that the upper limit of synthetic products ends here?
No, the drama has only just begun
I have to give a negative answer to this question.
Not because synthetic games have not yet reached their potential, but because the lessons of the past tell us that even if you hold a national-level elimination game, it does not mean that you have an iron rice bowl.
In fact, the happy elements behind "Happy Fun" and the King behind the "Candy Crush Legend" series, the largest match-three product in the United States, although it is already a well-deserved Top1 in the field, but when their ambitions began to enter the capital market, it was still not smooth.
Le Element successfully landed on the new third board in the golden period of game concept stocks, but has been tired of proving that it does not have to rely on a product forever to determine life and death, and even tried idol music games such as "Idol Dream Festival". King's best product at the moment is still "Candy Crush Legend", which has been in operation since 2012.
In order to further develop, they all try to transform and try to expand their business influence, but perhaps because they spend too much time on a star product with a core that is too mild, and it is difficult to allocate energy to explore the mainstream heavy DAU market, so that they miss the best time. As a result, when the winds in capital markets have shifted to a forward-looking vision of a company's focus on the core and the sustainable strategic value of that core, the best outcome for most casual game developers is to be wholly owned by the really commanding giants in the industry, Blizzard's acquisition of King, and then Take-Two's acquisition of Zynga.
Because it has been pursuing nationality and allowing products to spread and take shape in the sinking market, the experience of national-level consumer entertainment products is loose - vertical and pure match-3 gameplay, quickly launching new levels to meet the demand for content volume, and dare not add too many heavy elements in the process of player growth.
In the ever-changing mobile game environment, this is already an old school school, losing imagination and losing growth.
High DAU, but the payment rate and per capita payment are very low, so developers have long tried to make up for this shortcoming by rushing ahead of others and launching new products at a faster speed.
However, even ultra-casual games and IAA games have begun to flaunt high-quality gameplay and healthy content consumption speed, combined with the formation of long-life cycle and considerable LTV.
From the perspective of the most cutting-edge market performance, the way out of casual games currently seems to be the same way - casual games are heavily cultivated. Take out (find) a heavy, long-term game and bet on all the advantages you have accumulated before.
A wordless consensus is that the era of continuous re-skinning and launching new products has completely passed, and if game companies want to show a long-term sustainable development, they must focus on a high-value core strategy, and for most of the casual game developers with high DAU but low payment rate and low per capita payment, no matter what kind of advanced technology, rich product methodology experience, and superb resource integration ability, they must finally "force" themselves to continuously launch new big DAU products to make up for the shortcomings of LTV. However, it is not easy to develop a second such blockbuster, not to mention the problem of squeezing market share of a blockbuster product, and the ability of players to pay for casual games is already a dead end.
In fact, any developer who successfully grasps the right to speak by relying on a product knows the difficulty of developing new works of the same type, not to mention the subtle changes in gameplay, which is already "interlaced like a mountain".
Rovio, the developer of Angry Birds, is probably the most vocal, after the slingshot game became popular ten years ago, Rovio tried dozens of different games with different styles of gameplay, trying to make Angry Birds a truly global IP, but the only success so far is the sequel "Angry Birds 2" - and this is still the previous slingshot game.
Then the heavy gradation of casual games is the only solution that seems to be now, and it needs to be tried in the direction of casual play + RPG cultivation, Lilith, Gigabit, etc. are successful pioneers, and synthetic gameplay has not yet come out in this field. In this way, synthetic games do not need to live in the shadow of match-3 games, the times have changed, and we should regard them as new opportunities and breakthroughs.