Text/Zhao Jiahe
Edit/Gale
Just as the live broadcast room is the second spring of expired actors, the advertising film of legendary games has become a continuous battlefield for middle-aged stars for several years.
Recently, a video has been circulated on major platforms. In the promo, titled "The Biggest Dark Horse in Legends in 2022," the platforms of nine stars appear in just 45 seconds. In addition to Chen Xiaochun and other classic "Causeway Bay Ancient Puzzle Boy", there is no shortage of cross-talk actor Sun Yue, director Feng Xiaogang and other star artists appeared, bowing to the camera and apologizing, saying "Sorry, we are late, if you want to play, play me this xx legend ..."
It has been five years since the "slag ash" that the brothers cut without a word exploded on the whole network, but the ads for legendary games are still star-studded. In addition to the above stars, some time ago, Jackie Chan's endorsement of "one person attacking and killing the whole scene" triggered a ghost animal boom in the B station; even the "industry lamp" Teacher Luo also gave his portrait rights before.
What may surprise most young players is that these legendary games with "single gameplay and shoddy production" are not the tears of the times. According to the data of Game Daily in 2021, the domestic legendary game market size is as high as 30 billion, accounting for nearly 15% of the Chinese game market.
Similarly, games that can invite so many stars to promote their momentum are probably only this legend. The legendary game with shoddy graphics and simple and rough game mode has an enduring vitality in the stubble of the spokesperson holding a machete.
Past games, bundled with middle-aged stars
According to the official website of legendary games and network news, you can roughly sort out a list of major star endorsements.
Image source: Zinc Finance finishing and production
There are high and low coffee positions, but they all have one thing in common: middle-aged and above tough guy roles, or can be known by the current middle-aged male group.
Why do legendary games prefer these kinds of stars? This is inseparable from the legendary game audience. According to a user portrait survey of the game platform 9k9k, the page players are mainly men aged 30 to 49 in third-tier cities and below.
20 years ago, they were all young people who grabbed the opportunity to play "Legend" in the Internet café.
In 2001, the "Legend" of The Grand Introduction Agent can be said to be the enlightenment of online games at that time, and calling friends to open pictures and fight monsters has become the memory of that generation. With the passage of time, that generation has entered middle age, and the development speed of new games is too blowout, the acceptance of them is not high, and the biggest demand for entertainment games is still the feeling of that year.
Therefore, this group of players does not have so many high requirements for game quality and gameplay. Similarly, compared with today's small fresh meat, Chen Xiaochun's gang of "Causeway Bay carrying handles" can make them regain the vigor of their youth.
But can such a game really afford to be endorsed by those stars?
It is understood that most of the celebrity endorsement fees are 1 million to 15 million a year, and the top stream will even be far beyond, for example, there have been online legends that the cost of Jackie Chan endorsement legend games is as high as 30 million yuan. However, at the 2020 Giant Creativity Festival, Liu Yang, head of the greedy game brand business, publicly said: "The cost of speaking people per generation accounts for less than 1% of their annual budget." ”
Most people don't look up to the legendary online game, in fact, the flow behind more than most game types. For example, the most famous example, Zhang Jiahui's endorsement of "Greedy Blue Moon" was launched in 2016, and the annual turnover in 2017 has exceeded 1 billion yuan, and by 2020, the cumulative turnover has exceeded 3.9 billion yuan.
Even if the gameplay is shifted from the web page to the mobile game, the legendary gold absorption ability is still undiminished. According to Qimai data, since the launch of the Phoenix Legend Mobile Game on April 25 this year, the average daily income has reached about 30,000 US dollars in just three days.
Image source: Seven-wheat data
In comparison, the cost of celebrity endorsement is indeed only a dime.
Secondly, for the cooperation with stars, game companies also have their own routines to suppress the cost. It is understood that in fact, most of the stars who appear in legendary online games cannot be regarded as "spokespersons" in the true sense. For the star, because he does not involve too much publicity of the game, the main job is to shoot a promotional film, so the shooting fee is often charged.
The cost of shooting can be much cheaper than the endorsement fee. Strictly speaking, the partnership ends as soon as you step out of the studio. However, game parties often use or even steal video materials through editing, buying, etc., to achieve brainwashing dissemination. For example, the video of "the biggest dark horse in the legendary world in 2022" mentioned at the beginning, after the comparison of zinc financial investigation, actually continued the video material of "the largest dark horse in the legendary world in 2021".
The overwhelming game uses the same star material, which naturally makes it easy for consumers to mistakenly think that the star has become a spokesperson. Spending less money, but achieving a marketing effect comparable to endorsements, in a sense, the stars are also "bundled" by the game.
How many legends have there been in more than twenty years?
A set of marketing materials has been abused and stolen many times, which also reflects the huge number of legendary games.
According to the previous statistics of Game Daily, there are currently tens of thousands of legendary games on the market. Since they were all born out of the classic "Legend" that was grandly introduced more than 20 years ago, all parties rushed to declare themselves "orthodox legends".
The same retro screen, the same gameplay, the same "one knife 999", just search for legendary games, you can see countless similar screen flashes.
After investigating the developers of mainstream legendary games on the market, it was found that Zhejiang Shenghe Network, the developer of games such as "Raging Legend" and "Legend of Gold", and Guangzhou Eighty-Nine Tour, which developed "Legend of one knife" and "Dominating Sand City", were the main companies that appeared.
Behind these two companies, kaiying network and Jiangxi greedy play.
Image source: Sky Eye Check
Kaiying and Greedy Play can be said to be the two giants of the deep binding of the page game industry.
On the evening of April 28, Kaiying Network just released its 2021 annual report and 2022 first quarter financial report. According to the disclosure of important events, it can be learned that in January 2021, Kaiying Network has reached a strategic partnership with Jiangxi CoyoTear Information Technology Co., Ltd.
In fact, this is not the first time the two have joined forces.
The "Legend of the Blue Moon" (Greedy Blue Moon), which has a turnover of more than 4 billion yuan, was originally developed and released by Kaiying, and for the first time with star marketing, the buying volume promotion style was a great success, and also laid the industry position of the two companies.
Kaiying Network wrote in this annual report: "The company's star page game "Blue Moon Legend" has been at the forefront of the best-seller list for a long time since its launch, and by the end of the reporting period, the cumulative flow of "Blue Moon Legend" exceeded 4 billion yuan. The game's use of precision marketing and publicity has become a classic case in the field of page games, and it is one of the most successful web game products in the market. ”
Today, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, which has made great efforts in the overseas game market, also made its fortune by legendary page games at the earliest. The main business of brand 37 online games is the development and distribution of page games, and it still operates several legendary page games.
Source: 37 online game official website
It is worth mentioning that Tencent, Baidu and other large manufacturers have entered this market. According to game statistics, there are 8 legendary games in the 2020 iOS best-seller list TOP300, of which 3 are represented by Tencent. In addition, Tencent has also developed legendary mobile games such as "Legend of Blood" and "Legendary World".
Image source: Seven-wheat data
The head of the big factories have entered the game, and the competition in the legendary game market that wins by volume is not fierce. But unlike most other games, they are not grabbing the user base, nor are they living every day: legendary games all over China are grabbing the "1% of krypton users".
It should be known that the player group targeted by legendary games is those heavy "legendary" players 20 years ago, and it is precisely for this reason that the game graphics and publicity have always been intentional to create a retro style. Time has come to the present, most of the players of that year have entered middle age and become a group with stable consumption ability.
In this group of players, there will also be differences in spending power. For the game side, is there not much money? It doesn't matter, the more the merrier, but when players with more than five figures of money show up, there will be a dedicated "childcare" follow-up service.
Customize the best dragon slaying sword for the big guy, private customer service 24 hours to meet any needs... However, if there is another big brother who charges more money, the "glory and wealth" that has just arrived will immediately disappear without a trace. This also leads to the small number of kryptonite players who will poison inwards in order to keep their position at the top of the list.
"You laugh at the legendary soil, the legend laughs at your poverty", their target population is not most people. But it is precisely because of this that under the brutal competition of the market for a small number of users, the legendary game has also caused some problems with the changes of the times.
How long can the strong "legend" of the game industry last
According to the annual report of Kaiying Network, legendary games still make money, but they are not as easy to earn as before.
Although the cumulative turnover of its "Legend of blue moon" exceeded 4 billion as of the end of the reporting period, the cumulative turnover of the game in the 2020 financial report has exceeded 3.9 billion, and the growth rate is close to stagnation compared with the past.
The same goes for other legendary page games. According to the 2021 annual report released by 37 Interactive Entertainment on April 26, in 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's web game market was 6.030 billion yuan, which was 1.578 billion yuan less than in 2020, down 20.74% year-on-year, and the market continued to shrink.
Source: 37 Interactive Entertainment 2021 annual report
The main problem of legendary games today is that its two swords that originally swept the world: buying marketing and celebrity endorsements, are not very good at the moment.
In 2020, He Han, deputy general manager of Tianshen Entertainment, said, "The scale of the domestic traffic market this year is close to 800 billion, of which the traffic purchase of the game industry accounts for 15%, and the cost of Internet traffic has risen nearly 10 times in ten years." ”
For early page games, devop and maintenance costs were low, and most companies used buying volume as a means of customer acquisition. Since the average cost of customer acquisition is not high, a few big players in the fishing can make a profit. But now that the Internet traffic dividend has disappeared, the cost of buying is also unbalanced. At the same time, even if the focus is shifted to the mobile terminal, the impact of the purchase volume on the user is greatly reduced without improving the quality of the content.
Until 2021, legendary games have been the largest buying genre in the game market. However, the "2021 Mobile Game Annual Purchase White Paper" released by the DataEye Data Research Institute shows that the purchase volume of legendary games has declined from the beginning of 2021, and has been lower than the Xianxia genre in the middle of the year, ranking second.
Source: DataEye Data Research Institute "2021 Mobile Game Annual Purchases White Paper"
In the case of the setback in the purchase volume, the simultaneous star endorsement is not optimistic.
Looking at the official websites of major legendary page games, it can be found that most companies have rarely updated their appearance stars since 2020, and they are still reusing materials. The reason is likely to be that they themselves have also found that the dividend period brought by the scum has passed, and the legend of celebrity endorsement has brought no freshness.
In May 2021, Greedy Games released the legendary mobile game "Blood Strike", and invited Liu Yifei as the first official spokesperson. According to Qimai data, the spokesperson's official announcement did pull a wave of downloads on the same day, and even reached the top of the Free List of the App Store on the day.
But in the following days, the number of downloads was "diving" off a cliff, and there was no improvement after that. At 3:00 a.m. on April 24 this year, this legendary mobile game endorsed by "Little Dragon Girl" was officially removed from the AppStore.
Image source: Seven-wheat data
In addition, due to the deep binding of the legendary game mechanism and Krypton gold, negative events such as complaints and disputes occur frequently. In the black cat complaints, there have been nearly 3,000 "legendary" related complaints, most of which are suspensions, refunds and other matters.
Source: Black Cat Complaint
The head company trend is also the most sensitive weather vane of the industry.
At the end of last year, the game was reported by many media to cut welfare benefits, large layoffs and other news; Kaiying Network has now shifted to "Sword Art Online", "High-tech Hand Group" and other two-dimensional mobile games that are closer to young people. Coupled with the increase in the supervision of the shrinkage of the game version, the legendary games with thin cores in the general environment may be more difficult to survive the winter.
Legendary games are not without self-help, such as shifting from marketing channels to short videos, celebrity endorsements to MCN celebrities appearing. But under the trend of younger Internet users, their future still has to be a question mark.
Then again, since 2001, when Shanda Network introduced the agent "Legend" to the young people, these two words are no longer simple games. Now that 20 years have passed, the legendary games that have survived to this day have been a miracle. Perhaps one day, such games will disappear completely, but the "teenage brother dream" that they have continued for countless middle-aged uncles still exists.