In the new year of 2023, the industry may start to pick up.
Looking back at the previous two months, 70 editions were issued in November and 129 in December, and the version policy seems to have been relaxed. Chu Wenbo, head of commercial operations in the pangolin game industry, said that they have established a number of game developers who have already obtained version numbers, and most of them will choose to release games this year.
On the other hand, Chen Nanqi, head of Ohayoo customization, said that since the beginning of 21, users' resistance to the real-name system has weakened.
Overall, the game-related policy environment has indeed eased, and several games that exploded at the end of the year have once again verified the potential of the industry. In this case, is there an outlet for the industry to grasp in 2023? On the afternoon of January 11, Chuanshanjia and Ohayoo invited four industry investors and game producers to hold the "TO THE NEXT Future Game Party" live broadcast event.
Together, they discussed some interesting questions: Where are the opportunities for the gaming industry this year? How do we understand the current state of the industry? Is there still the possibility of overtaking in corners for small and medium-sized teams? After the live broadcast, Grape Jun also tried to summarize some of his own thoughts.
Click the link at the end of the article to get a full strategy for mobile game growth at the beginning of 2023, including three reports: "2023 Game Industry Commercialization Trend White Paper", "2022 IAA Project Selection Market Segment Analysis Collection" and "Commercial Data Middle Office Product User Manual".
01 Opportunity: What are the options for developers?
Last year, the "home economy" dividend faded, users' desire to pay decreased, the number of version numbers decreased, the epidemic repeatedly impacted, large and small companies cut projects, laid off employees, and raised the recruitment threshold, and the game industry ushered in "hellish" difficulty. Wang Zilei, CEO of Tianfu Technology, said: "Over the years of entrepreneurship, it is rare to see so many teams that cannot persist. ”
In order to get rid of the influence of the market environment, some manufacturers hope to go overseas. In terms of results alone, many products have indeed achieved good results in overseas markets, such as "Phantom Tower" has topped the download list of 36 countries and regions; According to Sensor Tower data, "Bullet Case Strike Team" has received more than 300 million global monthly turnover.
However, is going to sea really worth emulating by most people? Looking through the monthly list of Sensor Tower and data.ai, you'll find that most of the results are still "old faces". Newcomers to the sea generally face the problem of insufficient cognition, and if they want to enter the game, I am afraid that they will have to pay a certain learning cost.
Large companies may be able to rely on abundant funds to slowly practice and verify and complete cognition, but can small and medium-sized teams really withstand such long-term and high-cost consumption? I'm afraid it's hard.
So, where are the opportunities for small and medium-sized teams? Making Steam single-player games might be one way to go. Coconut Island CEO Wesley has said that compared with commercial mobile games with more than ten times the profit margin, Steam games have lower revenue, but they are less risky, have higher success rates, and can also reap feedback faster.
The other way is to explore new traffic scenarios. Chu Wenbo said that with the emergence of new traffic scenarios such as short videos and H5 mini games, game-related content still has good growth points and flashpoints.
According to the pangolin data report, during the World Cup, some sports games and short video content were viewed nearly 13.4 billion times, an increase of 267% over the same period last year, and the highest year-on-year growth in the game subcategory.
Based on these traffic scenarios, lightweight products may have many opportunities. Taking casual games as an example, "Egg Party" topped the free list for 28 days in the past month, and the overseas game "Goose and Duck Kill" also exploded in China through live broadcast marketing, with DAU exceeding 500,000.
And these blockbuster products all point to the possibility: there are still some new potential users in the existing market, and they may be players that practitioners have not considered in the past.
Wei Haijun, founder of Daguan Capital, gave an example that many elderly users usually fill in blocks in newspapers, so last year there was a crossword puzzle "Wordle" overseas, and the topic of topics exceeded popular works such as "Elden Law Ring" and "Apex", with more than one million DAUs. "They are different from users in the traditional sense, and they also have a certain ability to pay."
Therefore, if small and medium-sized teams still want to try commercial mobile games and dig deep into lightweight products, there is still a lot of room for opportunity.
02 Project establishment: The trick to explosive models is "old bottles of new wine"
Of course, exploring lightweight products is not easy. At the beginning of the project, the question of how to choose the game category track alone may be enough to give many small and medium-sized teams a headache for half a day.
After all, which track you choose is too critical. Chen Nanqi said that now that the version number is scarce, medium and heavy games are destined to become boutique, and the company will also superimpose resources upward. Therefore, "the most important focus of small and medium-sized developers should be the track. ”
Looking back, the most discussed thing in recent years should be category integration. With the combination mode of "lightweight gameplay + traditional content", the game can better solve the cold start problem, and last year's popular "Bullet Case Special Assault Team" is a "roguelike + mowing class" game, and there are countless games such as "elimination +" and "synthesis +".
In 2019, Zhai Jian, CEO of Thunder Games, said, "We found that we built a mature numerical system on a very magical casual gameplay, and this model is now more and more successful." ”
But category integration is still an innovation in the final analysis, and there are also many risks. A producer once said that when you add things together, it's really innovative, but players don't necessarily like it, "it should be the result of thinking." When blending different gameplay, it's a good idea for the team to figure out how the product is positioned and what role each attribute plays.
Therefore, when setting up a project, small and medium-sized teams may want to try a more "restrained" innovation model. Huang Jun, a game producer at Gude, believes that small and medium-sized teams should prioritize what they are good at and adapt to changes in the market, and then consider micro-innovation, "so as to ensure the success rate."
It's worth noting that innovation isn't necessarily limited to gameplay either. Ohayoo's business simulation game "King Blueberry's Commissary" once relied on emotional content to inspire empathy and thus get organic traffic. At the end of the day, the essence of innovation is about how to achieve new wine in old bottles and make players think that the game is special.
So, what exactly is special to players? And what can reach the user's heart and resonate? To find the answer, the development team not only needs to have a clear enough self-knowledge, but also go through a process of trial and error.
Small and medium-sized teams may also not be able to withstand the wear and tear of long-term verification, but it is not completely out of the way, after all, there are many solutions on the market. They can first make what the team is most familiar with and then make iterative ideas based on the market, or they can turn to some relatively mature and systematic external tools, such as Ohayoo, which provides developers with self-testing and self-release support, so that they can improve verification efficiency.
03 Distribution Operations: Content marketing opens up a variety of possibilities
Last year, "Sheep Left Sheep" taught everyone a lesson. Although it has no breakthrough changes in eliminating gameplay, it has repeatedly brushed Weibo hot searches with first-hand viral marketing. Chu Wenbo said that in addition to new gameplay, marketing methods and selling points after launch are equally important.
Judging from the trend of recent years, content marketing is replacing traditional performance advertising. With the transformation of buying carriers, platforms such as short videos and Xiaohongshu have become more dependent on content, and players are also happy to see some more "interesting" content.
On the one hand, the general environment has forced manufacturers to start changing their thinking. Chen Nanqi said that the first half of 2022 was suspended, and advertisers' budgets were reduced, which forced the entire industry to start looking for more efficient ways to acquire customers. In this environment, manufacturers will also find ways to occupy the user's mental high ground as much as possible, which also leads to more and more "volume" content.
On the other hand, pure buying volume is becoming less and less cost-effective. Wang Zilei said that his team tried to cooperate with KOLs, and in a short period of time, it only spent tens of thousands of yuan on the cold start of the game, "Replace it with information flow purchases, which takes a long time and more budget, and the effect is not necessarily good." ”
Of course, if content marketing completely replaces traditional performance advertising, it is not realistic. Overall, most teams are now adopting a combination of content marketing and traditional volume creatives, and have consciously increased the richness of volume creatives, becoming more diverse overall.
For small and medium-sized teams, the most convenient and easy to use is to create buy assets through sub-gameplay to attract players and convert them into users. For example, the idle card game "Holy Soul Conflict" is to directly make some mini-games, import them into the sub-gameplay of the game, and then generate purchase materials.
But there is a risk of "false publicity" - players see the video, become interested, click into it and find that it is an almost completely irrelevant game, and the sub-gameplay they are interested in only occupies a small part of it, and eventually they will inevitably feel disappointed.
Over time, buying volume assets will not only gradually lose the trust of players, but even cause them to resent them. Therefore, the development team wanted to integrate the sub-gameplay and the core gameplay into the overall game loop. To achieve this, the development team often needs to intervene earlier in the release and prepare for the game in advance.
On this basis, small and medium-sized teams may need to achieve "integration of research and operation flow" earlier, that is, improve the synchronous collaboration efficiency of the three teams of development, operation, and traffic.
04 Commercialization: Find a more diverse path
For products, the most important thing is commercial monetization.
In the case of lack of experience, many small and medium-sized teams will have a worry: after the introduction of commercial content, will players think that "krypton gold" destroys their game experience and then loses? In fact, moderate commercial content is actually more in line with the needs of most players, which can help the product attract more users. Huang Jun said, "A good buying and selling experience is also part of the user experience. ”
So, what makes a good commercial design? This is not limited to how to design the game's payment system, but is a problem that needs to be considered from the beginning of the project.
On the whole, the core of commercial design is inseparable from the four words of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency". As mentioned earlier, many problems may be encountered in the process of project establishment, issuance and operation, and how to solve these problems and maximize benefits is the first step to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
In the absence of market experience, the team can try to use some external tools, such as the Chuanshanjia platform's automated delivery tool, the free and real-time attribution tool, the real-time ROI data middle office, and the aggregation tool GroMore with granular traffic grouping function. They can all provide commercialization support for developers at the data level to achieve refined operations.
At the same time, small and medium-sized teams working with mature large platforms can also improve product success rates and reduce iteration costs. For example, Ohayoo has a fixed project agile iteration process, which is divided into four steps: creativity, project CPA verification and version development, to provide commercialization suggestions for the future gameplay of the project.
In terms of product payment system design, the early leisure products have more volume and less revenue, which has spawned an advertising monetization model, which can increase user activity and promote long-term product operation. But with today's intensified competition, this road is increasingly demanding the creativity, gameplay, and promotion of games. Chu Wenbo said, "The hyper-casual category is not mainly based on rewarded video ads, but also combines a lot of information flow interstitial or patch ads", and the monetization forms are more diversified. In this competitive context, many teams are now trying to join in-app purchases and adopt a hybrid monetization model.
Hybrid monetization also provides more possibilities for the industry. As Grape Jun said before, the hybrid monetization model not only quickly raised the ceiling of the mini game industry, but also helped traditional IAP products further reach the paying and non-paying people. In the short term, hybrid monetization can provide better LTV and higher revenue, and is more secure than pure IAA games; In the long run, it can help products achieve user stratification, promote content iteration, and achieve better market performance, forming a positive cycle. Chu Wenbo and Chen Nanqi both said that hybrid monetization will be the mainstream game commercialization model in the future. At a grape roundtable live broadcast last year, Wang Anjie, head of pangolin medium and heavy game operations, also stressed that hybrid monetization will be an opportunity for the current waist game.
Talking about this, you should also find that the core of the commercialization model is to improve efficiency. Whether it is faster and better project establishment, cost reduction and efficiency increase for issuance operations, or diversified monetization models, it is all serving efficiency. On this basis, the team also needs to introduce more diversified monetization models, which can ultimately achieve higher returns and go further.
05 Conclusion
After a relatively dull 2022, it feels somewhat rare to see investors, CPs, publishers and platforms come together like this. After all, 2022 is like this, no one dares to pat their chests and say that the industry will definitely get better, and many practitioners have become more pragmatic and low-key, and are not willing to participate in various exchanges and sharing.
Now in 2023, it seems that there is finally a warm-up, Pangolin and Ohayoo have also tried their best to bring everyone together and held a rare exchange meeting to share the understanding of the existing market from different perspectives: last year, the global game business revenue fell for the first time in seven years, and it was not only China that suffered from the impact; Casual games are growing even in 2022, and perhaps there are more opportunities lurking; The diversity of game publishing and commercialization will still support more teams to survive... The 23-year game industry is not necessarily Longtan Tiger's Den, maybe we can have more confidence.
After this roundtable, we hope to see more and more practitioners come out again to exchange and share and inspire more new ideas in the new year. It is undeniable that we will miss the highlights of 2021 and regret the decline of 2022, but everyone must look forward, after all, the game industry will not stop in 2021 and will not fall in 2022.
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