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Full of calculations, the board game has not been issued for 4 years.
According to all the problems in the game industry, the "version number" is the inertial thinking of the main cause, and the board game market should now be extremely shrinking and the ecology is withering. However, this is not the case, and the financial report of Chanyou Technology, the developer of ZenYou Dou Landlord, shows that in 2021, the revenue of ZenYou will increase by nearly 100% year-on-year, and the profit will exceed 125%.
It is worth noting that in the prospectus released by Zenyou Technology in April 2019, Zenyou ranked only 5th in the Chinese chess and card mobile game market.
In the statistics of the domestic App Store best-seller list TOP200 list in May, GameLook also found that the number of board games on the list was as many as 21, accounting for more than 10%, and the third-party data platform showed that the total revenue was close to 600 million yuan, which was nearly 7 times that of the same period before 2019. I have to admit that the board game market has come alive.
In 3 years, it rose nearly 6 times, and the growth rate crushed the market
Affected by the version number, the third-party data platform shows that in June 2019, the monthly market size of Chinese chess and card mobile games was less than 100 million yuan, and then it continued to rise. By June 2022, the total monthly turnover of chess and card mobile games has reached 560 million yuan, and in March this year, it reached a peak of 600 million yuan.
In other words, compared with 3 years ago, the increase in chess and card mobile games is close to 600%.
According to the "2021 China Game Industry Report", the actual sales revenue of China's game market in 2021 was 296.513 billion yuan, and the year-on-year growth rate in the past three years was 6.4%, 20.71% and 7.66% respectively. Obviously, the growth of the chess and card mobile game market has not only successfully outperformed the market, but also exceeded the growth rate of dozens of times that of the market.
According to the data of the three-party platform, 3 years ago, only 9 of the TOP200 products in the China App Store best-seller list were chess and cards, accounting for 4.5%. By May 2022, the number of board games in the best-seller list top 200 products has increased to 21, accounting for 10.5%, successfully doubling.
Among the chess and card products on the list, the number of fishing and chess and card classes is basically equal, and the income is slightly better than the chess and card class, of course, it is only a narrow victory. Such a healthy scale growth and market structure even make people wonder, is this still the chess and card market that does not issue plates and is strictly regulated?
The version number is limited to issuance, and 0 new additions can also be desperate
In June 2018, in response to the problem of card online games, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued a special rectification action notice, requiring strict investigation of brand game products such as advertisements in various Internet access service business premises, providing cash or large amounts of physical redemption, colluding with "coin merchants" to provide channels for realizing points, and "pumping" according to the player's winning or losing amount.
In fact, since the beginning of 2017, board games have been the object of hard work, and there is no sign that the hard fight has ended. The specific performance is that on the one hand, the official media intensively name names, and on the other hand, there are constantly board game teams in prison. As:
- In 2018, the development team of "Longgang Mahjong" "Stegosaurus" was put on a pot by the Police of Cangnan in Wenzhou, involving 14 million yuan;
- In 2018, 6 employees of lianzhong, the former leader of chess and card games, were arrested, involving a major case of 3.5 billion yuan;
- In 2019, the four main criminals in the "All People Zhenjiang Mahjong" case were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 3 years and 3 months to 6 months, and 5.5 million illegal gains were confiscated and fined more than 10 million;
- In 2020, 22 people from Yuheng Internet Company, the developer of "Idle Mahjong", were taken away by the Shenzhen police, and a year later, the court sentenced 7 defendants to prison terms ranging from 10 months to 2 years and 6 months, and the verdict showed that the board game earned a total of 3.5 billion yuan in 1 year and 3 months...
The most intuitive impact of the strike board games is that the game version number is no longer issued, more accurately, only chess has no cards.
According to a 2018 statistic by GameLook, the number of chess and card product version number declarations accounted for 40% of the entire industry. According to the Mob Research Institute's "Preferences and Development Trends of Chinese Mobile Games Under the Influence of Edition Number Restrictions", the edition number began to be limited in March 2018 and ended in December 2018, while the proportion of chess and card numbers obtained before the restriction was one-third, and the number plummeted to less than 2% after the restriction.
These 2% and 100% are made up of board games, and the cards are completely extinct. So the question is, in the case of an important version of the resources almost no grain, how to achieve the card game to bring the dead back to life?
Compliance is a blessing, and change is a new opportunity
- The version number is well stocked
The suspension of the board game version number does not mean that the board game has no version number at all. As mentioned earlier, four of the games that applied for a version number before March 2018 became board games, and before that, board games had already hoarded a large number of game numbers. For example, ZenYou Technology revealed in the financial report that as of the end of 2021, Zenyou has a total of 86 game version numbers, of which 55 are board game version numbers, and 36 games with version numbers have not been put into operation.
Even at the rate of launching a new board game every quarter, Zen Tour will take 9 years to run out of resource reserves. More importantly, the core gameplay of the board game itself has not changed much, and it does not rely on the frequent launch of new products. It can even be said that board games that do not issue version numbers are the categories that are least affected by version numbers.
- Centralized resources after compliance
Due to the characteristics of "one place, one game", board games have the market characteristics of long-tail products, which is also the fundamental reason for the popularity of local chess and cards in that year. The failure to issue board game version numbers is naturally no obstacle to the strength of the strong manufacturers with sufficient reserves, but a large number of small and medium-sized manufacturers with low anti-risk ability have suffered a disaster.
In addition, since the end of 2021, major platforms have continued to increase compliance efforts, including Tencent's platform suspending the promotion and search of all fishing games, and Huawei, OPPO, vivo and other channels requiring board game manufacturers to establish compliance teams and provide compliance reports, which has further raised the threshold for board game access. In this context, market resources are inevitably concentrated on the star products of large manufacturers, and thanks to the advantages of high natural retention of board games, it is not surprising that the market size of head board games continues to grow.
- Statistically significant income increase
In the previous years when the awareness of compliance was not comprehensive, unlike other and channel-like categories, long-tail products were multi-board games and platforms that looked like they were inseparable, and even if they were listed on the platform, they often avoided platform commissions by cutting payments.
Also with the deepening of supervision and the strengthening of compliance awareness, as well as the positive crackdown on payment on the platform represented by Apple's App Store, the revenue of board games that can be counted on the surface has increased greatly. In other words, the reason for the low revenue of board games in the past may be that a large amount of revenue has not been counted, and the actual increase in the size of the board game market may not be as exaggerated as the performance at the digital level.
- Deepening in combination with live streaming
Due to the controllability of input income, board games have always favored the purchase volume of distribution, and are willing to try new marketing methods. Compared with the hammer trading of the past purchase volume distribution, board games are more and more frequently operating traffic and reaching growth line operations with the help of ecological methods. In April this year, "Tuyou Dou Landlord" cooperated with DouGame, the live marketing label of the huge engine, a "chess and card star plan", which is specially used to cultivate its own anchors.
Due to the high penetration rate of board games offline, it is difficult to appear similar to the phenomenon of washing the user pool in the SLG category, which can maintain the user acquisition cost within an acceptable range for a long time, so for board games, it is often lacking in stable access channels rather than worrying more about costs like other categories. This allows board games to continuously obtain low-cost high-quality traffic in an environment of weak market growth and lack of confidence in most categories, achieving growth that far exceeds the industry average.