Growing data, and signals of change.
Recently, TapTap released its 2022 annual report.
Speaking of feelings, the game industry will be full of challenges in 2022, and the market environment, policy supervision, stock competition and other situations are pressing on the hearts of many game people. As a representative of the new generation of game platforms, TapTap has made unexpected achievements in the face of these problems. Behind this report card, there are also emerging industry trends.
01 A year of contrarian growth
2022 can be said to be a year of growth for TapTap against the trend. According to the report, the total number of annual game downloads on the TapTap platform reached 801 million, a year-on-year increase of 32.33%. In addition to the total growth, we also see two trends:
First, the distribution advantage of head products is huge, and the Matthew effect is obvious. In the past year, there are 4 new games with more than 10 million downloads on the platform, namely "Sausage Party", "Genshin", "Light Encounter" and "Phigros", all of which are the head products that have been online for more than two years.
Among them, the casual competitive game "Sausage Party", developed by Zhenfun Games and published by Xindong, received more than 112 million new downloads in 2022, accounting for about 14% of the total downloads on the platform.
Second, popular products are mainly leisure products, and the categories tend to be diversified. Among TapTap's top 10 popular products of the year, there are 3 Party Game products, namely "Sausage Party", "Egg Boy Party" and "Party Star"; There are also two casual competitive products, namely "T3" and "Subway Parkour". In addition, this year's "new faces" include the audio game "Phigros" and the RogueLike adventure game "Neon Abyss: Infinite".
Among them, "Subway Surfer" may be one of the biggest dark horses in 2022. As an old product 10 years ago, "Subway Surf" returned to the top of the iOS game free list last summer, and dominated the list for 17 consecutive days, this old product opened the "second spring" thanks to the content and creation ecology built by manufacturers and players, which Grape Jun has also analyzed in detail.
The inclusion of products such as "Neon Abyss: Infinite" and "Egg Party" means that there is still a way out for "buyout transplantation". After all, the conflict between buyout representing a pure gaming experience and mobile gaming business models that can get more opportunities has existed for a long time and is difficult to avoid. Just like auto-propelled chess in previous years, "Vampire Survivor" last year... There are not many products that bring high-quality experience, but few can really run through the business model.
In terms of category trends, the popularity of the open world continues to increase, and the download volume of related products still achieved a year-on-year increase of 50.31% in the past year when the number of mobile games launched in this category is limited.
In addition, unlike the inherent impression of TapTap's user preference for independent games and two-dimensional games, TapTap platform products will have a certain improvement in the download of shooting, SLG, idle gameplay and other categories in 2022 - with the growth of the platform's overall user base, the attributes of users will inevitably change, and the distribution capacity for different types of games is ushering in explosive growth.
In 2022, the total number of bookings for TapTap platform products reached 118 million. Among them, the top 3 in the annual reservation list are all action products, with the first place "Zero Zone" with more than 2.68 million reservations, the second place "Eternal Calamity" mobile game with more than 2.67 million reservations, and the third place "Ming Tide" with more than 1.72 million reservations.
"In the Name of Shining" squeezed into the TOP 5 of the list with more than 1.3 million reservations, becoming the first and only game for women to enter the list. Although women's products in the past two years have not had the momentum of the previous large and small factories competing for layout, there is still a large user group.
The performance of two-dimensional products in the TOP 5 reservation TOP5 alone also proves that this category still has potential to be tapped. At the same time, the category distribution and specific content performance of TOP games also mean that the head game products will no longer have a particularly obvious gender trend in the future.
02How is the exclusive business doing?
Paid mobile game sales and exclusive product distribution are TapTap's "exclusive business".
In 2022, TapTap paid game sales exceeded 6.5 million copies, a year-on-year increase of about 5%. On the one hand, new products such as "Tribe and Scimitar", "Dream in a Cage", "Evolution Land 2" and "Youth's Human Adventure" performed well, of which "Tribe and Scimitar" sold more than 420,000 copies.
On the other hand, older products can also generate a considerable part of long-tail sales. For example, old games such as "Terraria", "Human Fall Dreamland" and "Ash" have achieved sales of more than 1.72 million, 460,000 and 300,000 respectively - it is foreseeable that with the improvement of the performance of players' mobile devices, more high-quality mobile games will be launched in the future.
In 2022, the download volume of TapTap's exclusive games reached 184 million, a year-on-year increase of 109%, and the growth rate far exceeded the total number of platforms, which not only means that with the exclusive support of TapTap, these small but refined products have obtained stronger exposure resources and channel resources, and also means that TapTap's ability to deeply cooperate with manufacturers to operate and publicize has been verified again.
Take the exclusive game "Neon Abyss: Infinite" launched some time ago, TapTap pushed relevant content within the platform and external official channels such as WeChat and Weibo when the game was pre-ordered, and cooperated with the official many times during the game reservation and public beta to livestream, guide players to create, and provide relevant benefits - finally "Neon Abyss: Infinite" received more than 4.13 million downloads in the past year, ranking first in the TapTap exclusive game download list.
A collection of game strategy benefits officially released by TapTap, as well as lottery, co-creation, live broadcast and other activities
With similar in-depth cooperation, "Wuxia Qi" and "Contemporary Life" also rushed to the 2nd and 3rd places in the exclusive game download list, gaining more than 3.41 million and 1.74 million downloads.
At the same time, with the smooth progress of TapTap's cooperation with the above-mentioned game manufacturers, more medium and large game factories have also begun to seek cooperation with them - in 2022, the number of TapTap exclusive game contracts reached 219, a year-on-year increase of 44%.
03 UGC ecology outside the evaluation
In 2022, the number of TapTap annual users exceeded 575 million, and the annual game evaluation exposure exceeded 12.7 billion.
In addition to game reviews, the number of player review content published exceeded 5.86 million, graphic content exceeded 10.36 million, and video content exceeded 824,000. In the TapTap Creation Center, more than 70,000 high-quality videos received 400 million views and 2 billion impressions.
From the above data, it can be found that players are more willing to express product experience in graphic form on the TapTap platform, while TapTap still has spare power to give video creators sufficient exposure resources under the premise of growing game distribution capabilities against the trend, and try to form a new distribution form with content as the core.
04From "what game to play" to "how to play the game"
According to the report, in 2022, TapTap will provide developers with more comprehensive research and operation tools. At present, it includes "Creative Workshop" that lowers the threshold of research and development, "live broadcast" function to obtain initial exposure for auxiliary products, "bonfire test" to recruit beta players, "check-in" and "forum activities" functions to improve user retention and content ecology, and "cloud play" and "Tapplay" functions to realize click-to-play.
Among them, "cloud play" may be the most profound function experienced by players in the past year. In 2022, more than 19 million players have used TapTap's cloud play service, with an average of 8.4 hours per time.
The "Workshop Workshop" is a function that benefits small and medium-sized game developers. Among them, the "Spark Editor" promoted by the platform is a low-threshold game development tool, and its built-in graphical interface, art materials, gameplay templates and other functions can give more ordinary players the opportunity to become game developers.
In 2022, games made with this development tool received more than 14 million plays. Among them, "Unknown: Ascension", "The Twentieth Circle" and "The Legend of Yang Jian: Search for Mountains and Demons" have received more than 7 million, 2.5 million and 1.5 million plays, respectively... The birth of similar tools has also helped manufacturers supplement operational capabilities at zero cost.
Looking at TapTap's annual report this year, in addition to surprising growth against the trend, TapTap's efforts to support the diversified creation of users and the research and development of small and medium-sized developers are more concerned.
After all, under the internal and external environment of the industry, it is more common for old products to operate, new products to establish projects and few exposure opportunities. In the dilemma, long-term and high-quality user and content ecology is an indispensable part of the long-term operation of old products. With the support of TapTap, the inspiration for new product projects will not only be born from a wider group, but also complete the landing and the acquisition of initial product quantities with the assistance of corresponding tools and resources.
To sum up, the new trends shown by TapTap in the past year, such as its solutions to the above industry problems, will also become a form of development in the future.
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