Recently, domestic SLG is still in full swing overseas, and the new generation that has been tested is even more eye-catching. Among this group of SLG newcomers, the chess and card company of Competitive World is particularly conspicuous.
It is not that SLG is not worthy of the attention of the transformation company, the example of transformation to do SLG before there are three seven mutual entertainment, after 4399 are quite loud. It's just that chess and card companies have always given people the inherent impression of making a lot of money, regardless of whether there is pressure to transform, in this distant category, the competitive world has exposed three projects, and seems to attach great importance to the field of SLG.
The three SLGs play very differently
1. "King of Septsea": After two years of silence, a new face has changed
King of Septsea is an island-themed SLG that allows players to expand the island by collecting materials and fighting enemies over the sea to obtain materials. After entering the game, you will experience a significant difference from the common SLG on the market, the most significant feature is that the main city can move freely at any time.
Regular SLGs usually start with players choosing an area on the map to build the main city, and then forming troops to expand the territory. King of Septsea takes a different approach, as the island of the main city is more like a mothership, and the formed troops can go to resource points to collect resources, while the main city can also move on the sea.
After liberating the restrictions of the main city, the game's battles are no longer based solely on heroes, but around the islands of the main city.
The first thing that needs to be introduced is the construction of the island. Each island construction revolves around a main base, and the building modules created by the player need to border the existing buildings.
The types of buildings can be roughly divided into production facilities and combat facilities: production facilities are the same as conventional SLGs, which are nothing more than barracks for training troops, resource points for producing food, etc. Combat facilities include forts, cannons and other buildings, and the upgrade method is different from the time-consuming upgrade of production facilities, but the two-in-one synthetic gameplay is adopted.
On the other hand, after Pocket Raiders broke out of the casual road to SLG, it is not difficult to imagine that "King of Septsea" may make a fuss in the direction of synthetic gameplay in terms of buying materials in the future.
The main city's combat facilities will play a direct role in the battle. The battle phase of the game requires the islands of the two sides to be connected, and the respective hero troops will start from the main base, and the party that is the first to break through the enemy's main base will win.
The battle process can use the hero's active skills, but because of the terrain restrictions, it is not conducive to the characteristics of RTS, but it is more like the sandbox + tower defense gameplay. The previously arranged combat facilities on the island will play a role in tower defense, so players need to observe the layout of the islands on both sides before the battle and choose a suitable offensive route.
At present, "King of Septsea" does not find similar products at the gameplay level, especially the change of "main city movable" even derives the trade gameplay, players can buy and sell back and forth on the sea to earn resources, theoretically can extend the player's stay in the game.
From another point of view, "novel" means that "this type is not verified", and the success of the product is difficult to determine before it goes online.
Looking back 4 years ago, Athletic World announced a "Shattered Continent" in 2018, when the official set it as "sandbox strategic tower defense" in the game introduction. The game also has a modular island construction, the island border tower defense battle, it can be inferred that this "Broken Continent" is the predecessor of "King of Septsea".
Shattered Continent
At that time, the game was even embedded in the game, and the shadow of the chess and card company could be seen in the process of transformation and innovation. However, it is estimated that the game's performance is average, and it disappeared after two rounds of testing in mid-2018 and early 2019, and now it has been re-released after a round of upgraded iterations of art and gameplay.
Shattered Continent
2. "Wandering Castle": The most likely to take the lead in the domestic market
"Wandering Castle", called "Wandering Castle" overseas, received the version number when the second batch of editions was released this year. The game was launched in 2021, has now been tested at home and abroad, and should be in the stage of content update and optimization.
The game can even be seen from the naming, "Wandering Castle" and "King of Septsea" have the same characteristics of the main city can be moved.
In contrast, Wandering Castle does more about the content of the main city movement, using it as a part of the system design rather than just a highlight. The castle needs to consume "source oil" during the movement, and "source oil" can be converted from daily resources such as crystals and grain. The game also offers an option to accelerate mode, which allows the castle to move faster and consume more "source oil".
After adding the ability to move to the main city, the game also gives the main city the ability to attack. Within a certain range of the main city, the main city will provide additional combat power when a battle occurs. The specific attack method depends on the cultivation of the three equipment bits, which is equivalent to adding on the basis of hero cultivation, but the depth of content is limited, and it can only be used to increase the richness of the gameplay.
In addition, when the main city ends the moving state and is stationed in place, it will also collect resources from the surrounding area. In order to ensure the regularity of resource distribution, the game map is divided in the form of grids. So although the game implements ROK-like infinite zoom, it is actually a point-to-point marching method, and there is no imaginary RTS free marching content.
Since the movement of castles consumes resources, and staying in place can collect resources, most players will not choose to move castles frequently. Compared to King of Septsea, there will be less adventure fun and more depth of strategy choices.
The game adopts a flat type similar to "Fallout Shelter" in the construction of the main city, which is more suitable for the theme of "Castle" on the one hand, and slightly inferior in screen display on the other hand.
In addition, the game uses placing cards as a PVE gameplay, and also provides content for hanging up to get benefits, and the resources that can be obtained are mainly used to increase the hero level or star rating. "Wandering Castle" does not have a strong casual game color, but in terms of hero cultivation, it is also moving closer to reducing the burden on players.
3. Empire Dynasty: The stepping stone to the introductory SLG is not competitive
Empire Dynasty is called Empire Dynasty: Rise overseas. According to the official website of Competitive World (Chengdu), "Empire Dynasty" has launched an Android version in China, but after trying, it is currently unable to enter the game. Data.ai shows that the game was available on google play late last year and has now been removed.
Judging from the player's demo video, the game has a taste of being close to Age of Empires in terms of art style and content design. Empire Dynasty is also the only one of the 3 SLGs that offers a choice of civilizations, and like Age of Empires, each civilization will have its own special class.
The urban construction is relatively simple, as far as the early teaching display is concerned, the upgrade and construction of the building are set by the game, and there is no space for players to place freely.
The specific SLG gameplay takes the type of sloppy like, but the game does not have a battle screen. Overall, the game is relatively rough and less competitive than the first two products.
The field of chess and cards is still strong, and the transformation has been ineffective for six years
According to SensorTower's global mobile game revenue ranking in June this year, Athletic World ranked among the top 100 publishers in the world by revenue, excluding the revenue of domestic third-party Android channels. Although the number of entries is not much, it is already a pretty impressive achievement for a board game company.
"JJ Fighting Landlord" is still the dominant product of the competitive world, and its vitality is becoming more and more tenacious. The game was launched in the iOS version in 2012, and after 2014, it began to enter the best-seller list TOP100 from time to time, and the overall ranking also maintained the upward trend of ranking, and the ranking in 2020 began to gradually surpass Tencent's "Happy Landlord", and it has been stable at the TOP30 for nearly a year.
The uniqueness of "JJ Fighting Landlord" is to maximize the competitive attributes of chess and cards, and the complete competition mode is introduced early in the game, expanding the initial 3-player scale to 300, 3000 or even more. In 2009, the first National Landlord Championship was launched, which is still a differentiating feature.
Taking the douyin live broadcast of the rise of board games in the past two years as an example, according to DataEye's data, in the past three months, 39 of the top 50 live broadcasts with the number of simultaneous online users have been covered by two accounts, "JJ Dou Landlord" and "JJ Gaoyuan". Among them, "JJ Dou Landlord" has been broadcasting e-sports live competitions in the live broadcast room for a long time, and the data in the live broadcast room is also the best. According to the official introduction, the single live broadcast of the S2 season in 2020 has a simultaneous audience of more than 350,000, and the cumulative annual exposure has exceeded 10 billion.
In the field of chess and card industry, the competitive world is not high-profile, but it is not inferior to the game "JJ Fighting Landlord" alone, and smoothly keeps up with the changes in the market wind.
But outside of the chess and card field, the competitive world did not have many definite ideas for a while after entering the field of mobile games.
Since 2011, and "JJ Fighting Landlord" at the same time as the "JJ Fighting Landlord" and other casual games online, under the taste of A lot of H5, casual game categories are not outstanding.
At the same time, the competitive world began to become more active in the capital markets. According to the statistics of Qichacha, J&F and a number of TMT professional investors launched the venture capital fund - J&D Venture Capital, and after successively building incubation parks in the development zones of Beijing, Hangzhou and Chengdu, from 2012 to 2012, they began to invest in startups in different fields such as games, social networking, and consumption, including the early and more well-known 3DM (which withdrew from the ranks of investors in 2015).
In 2016, Zhang Tailun, then the investment director of Competitive Ventures, left the company and founded Nemo Ventures, turning to focus on mobile Internet to go global. In the same period, competitive venture capital has made fewer and fewer shots in the investment industry, and investment in the game industry has only stayed in game services, game portals, and developers of casual games, such as investing in Shanghai Rabbit Network in 2016 and releasing their "Snake for All" (iOS version was removed in 2018), and did not accumulate CP resources in medium and heavy games.
In the end, it is better to seek others than to seek oneself, and the competitive world began to launch its own medium and heavy self-developed games to seek transformation.
In 2016 and 2018, the company launched the fighting game "Gladiator League" and the turn-based card "East Departure Sword Game Of Life and Death Sword", and the number of game updates was only 5 times, and finally it was removed in 2020.
In 2018, the company tested the tactical competitive RPG "24 Hour Survival" and the racing game "JJ Kart", and did not disclose any new information after the test that year.
In 2020, MMORPG "Spring and Autumn Hegemony" was launched, and it was the highest in the iOS best-seller list of more than 600. In the same year, the self-developed "Dawning Heroes" became its first medium-to-heavy game to participate in the buying competition, reaching the top of the iOS free list on the first day of launch, and the best-seller list ranking began to fall from more than 100.
The best commercial performance is Blood Street Basket, which was released in 2020 by Sunrise Lightyear. The game has entered the iOS best-seller list TOP50 at the beginning of the launch, and has basically maintained more than 200 to 400 in the past six months, and there seems to be some warming trend in addition to stability.
It seems that there has been some improvement, in 2021, the company launched a similar to the "Wild Brawl" 3v3 casual MOBA "Ace Tank Battle", and the result was that the game was quickly removed a year later. It has been 6 years since the bumpy transformation along the way, and the company still has not made a name for itself in the field of medium and heavy games.
Now the company is divided into SLG, MOBA, RPG, SRPG, chess and leisure games six business lines, product reserves in addition to the three SLG mentioned above, there are placed cards "Codename: Red Xuan" and match 3 + competitive game "Elimination Battle", with long-term categories there are also shorter return cycle categories, layout ideas are quite healthy.
epilogue
Whether it is to keep up with the trend of going to sea, or simply want to expand the category to share the business wind, for the current competitive world, it can only start to do a good job in the current project, and the SLG that chooses to continue to invest is the most important.