Whether you follow the game or not, you've probably been swiped by a flock of geese or ducks lately. That is, the number of online people continues to climb to new highs, memes are flying, and they frequently appear on the hot search "Goose Goose Duck".
Party games represented by "Goose and Duck Kill" have undoubtedly been the category of "key attention" of various manufacturers in the past year. In the first half of the year, there was a heartbeat "Party Star", NetEase's "Egg Boy Party" have been launched. In the second half of the year, Giant's "Space Action" (overseas version called Super Sus) was successfully reviewed in November, and Funny Fighters of Thunder Games began testing overseas. "Party Animals", developed by a domestic team, has accumulated a lot of popularity on the live broadcast platform and is scheduled to land on PC and XGP in 2023.
Since the popularity of Fall Guys: The Ultimate Knockout Tournament (hereinafter referred to as Fall Guys) in 2020, party games have moved from a less noticed category to the foreground and become the center of attention. The out-of-the-loop of party games seems to be accidentally brought on fire by the game anchor KOL "Game Shortage", but in fact, it is an accurate complement to the social needs of pan-gamers at a time when traditional MMOs are declining and the threshold for open world is getting higher and higher.
Another important reason why manufacturers are willing to participate in this competitive "party killing" is that the party game with light gameplay and heavy social is not easy to be monopolized by a popular game. Players are always looking for new fun, moving from game to game, and this gives everyone a fair playing field. This chess game of the party game, no matter when it is too late, is never too late.
"Goose Duck Kill" exploded, behind the anchor game shortage?
"Goose and Duck Kill" can be explosive, inseparable from the innovation of the product itself. The basic gameplay of the game follows Among Us, but the character image is replaced with more recognizable geese, ducks and other animals, and dozens of characteristic classes have been added to the game, divided into three camps. In addition, the game also refers to the business model of mobile games on the PC platform, and adopts the model of ontology free and in-app purchase payment.
The cartoon image of the animal is used all over the world, giving players and viewers watching the live broadcast more space to create terriers and play memes. Featured classes greatly enrich the gaming experience. Especially under the premise that the basic gameplay of the game is popularized, this micro-innovation is often powerful.
To make an analogy, when RTS such as "Red Alert" and "Interstellar" become popular, "Warcraft" with characteristic heroes will inevitably become more popular. In the same way, Valorant is CS with a characteristic class, and Apex Heroes is PUBG with a characteristic class.
It can be said that the reason why "Goose and Duck Kill" did not start to explode until a year after its release and launch, is actually waiting for the taste of the player group to change. When users are tired of playing Among Us without a career system, Goose Duck Kill is the best alternative.
The innovation of the product itself is a necessary condition for the success of "Goose and Duck Kill", but it can not get today's popularity, and it is inseparable from the drive of anchors and KOLs.
The game first became popular in South Korea, which is keen on "escape game". BTS member Kim Taehyung's live stream brings a lot of organic traffic to the game. When the producer attended the Korean Game Development Conference in November, he also expressed his gratitude and celebrated the 80,000 simultaneous online users of the game.
However, by December, the number of simultaneous games online skyrocketed, reaching a peak of 670,000. The main force driving this wave of traffic is the game giants of China's live broadcast platforms.
In the past two years, the ability of game streamers to create memes and bring goods has been intentionally or unintentionally underestimated. In particular, short videos have stolen the limelight of live streaming in terms of creating explosive hits. However, the case of "Goose and Duck Kill" reminds us that game streamers still have great energy in the output of meme content, and the ability of head streamers to penetrate the user circle is still strong. After all, the game anchors who can still be active in the head today are all killed from the sea of blood in the corpse mountain of the "Thousand Broadcast War" of the year, and they all have two brushes in their hands.
Once performative streamers encounter a "Werewolf Kill" type game like "Goose and Duck Kill", which can play to their strengths, it can burst into a large number of famous scenes like cooking oil. These famous scenes will soon turn into memes and second creation memes and spread on the Internet. And festivals such as Christmas and Spring Festival can double the speed of transmission.
In fact, the influence of game streamers has always been there. Go further, back then, domestic stand-alone machines such as "Taiwu Picture Scroll" and "Chinese Parents" all relied on the "tap water" promotion of game anchors to have sales miracles. Closely, last year's popular such as "Backrooms" and "Contempt for Scorn" are all inseparable from a large number of anchors participating in the spread of memes.
As a profession that requires 5-8 hours of regular live streaming every day, game streamers actually have a very large demand for content from fresh games. Mainstream big DAU games such as "League of Legends" and "Peace Elite" are long-life life games, and it is difficult to meet the needs of anchors performing daily lives. Streamers, especially top streamers, urgently need to develop new content.
For example, in the past year, "Genshin", which has its own traffic and circle-breaking effect, has been frequently targeted by e-sports anchors such as LOL, which has become a lifesaver for them to save the rice pot in the live broadcast room. This mobile game matrix has existed before
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At festive times such as Christmas and Spring Festival, finding some suitable games to liven up the atmosphere in the live broadcast room has become a rigid need for anchors. This rigid demand has formed a flow depression. Once a suitable game appears, it is easy for streamers to start PK linkage, form a wide spread, and give birth to a hit.
Just like "Goose and Duck Kill" did not go viral as soon as it was released, but only caught up with this wave of traffic explosion at the end of the year a year after it was released. The producer is also well aware of the origin of this wave of traffic, and specially made customized skins for several domestic top anchors to show their gratitude.
Therefore, the explosion of "Goose and Duck Kill" can be described as a combination of time and place. The product itself is polished in place, coupled with the free business model of the ontology, so that it has the ability to catch this wave of traffic. But whether the producer can convert this wave of traffic into real revenue is still unknown.
On the one hand, the producers obviously had no plan for the enthusiasm of Chinese players, resulting in frequent server crashes after the game became popular. The payment model of overseas in-home purchases also determines that many players have no way to pay even if they have the intention to pay. The accelerator that players buy for the game, the developer can't get a share of the money.
In China, merchants who smell the smell of traffic and blood are even faster. According to reports, more than a dozen domestic companies are rushing to register the trademark "Goose and Duck Kill". Game servers have also been subject to unknown cyberattacks.
There is no news from the game national server agent so far, and the official has refuted rumors that Tencent has acquired it, which is equivalent to giving various merchants an excellent opportunity to rub traffic. A number of copycat games such as "Duck and Goose Kill" and "Goose Goose" have also appeared on many platforms, and the number is still growing. Unscrupulous merchants obviously want to seize the opportunity of the Spring Festival and fiercely smack a handful of "goose feathers". Perhaps this is also a necessary pain after the explosion of all traffic games.
"Egg Boy Party" exploded and opened up another way
The success of "Goose and Duck Kill" shows us that a traffic depression has been formed in the cycle of Christmas, New Year's Day, and Spring Festival. If the game products with light gameplay and heavy social are properly operated, they can harvest a lot of organic traffic in this schedule and rely on the spread of the social chain to hit the blockbuster.
Another success story in this regard is "Egg Party", which once topped the free list and was in the top 6 best-selling lists late last year, relying on the Christmas event season.
Similar to Among Us in Goose and Duck Kill, Eggboy Party follows this line of thought, except that it targets another popular party game, Fall Guys: The Ultimate Challenge.
Egg Party has maintained a high level of content updates since its launch in May last year, and has launched 6 themed seasons so far, which equals an average of new content for players to consume every month. The number of maps in the game has also grown from less than two-thirds of the number of Fall Guys when it started, to 1.5 times that of Fall Guys now. In addition, the game also does additions in almost all aspects such as gameplay modes, character skills, daily tasks, skin mods, UGC support, etc. Even the main interface of the game is a miniature social square where players are allowed to play various interactive mini-games.
In just half a year, "Egg Boy Party" has grown from a casual game recruit to an all-around giant. If the essence of a party game is a theme park, then the idea of "Egg Boy Party" is to cram all the rides into their own park, so that players can't play even if they explode every day.
In terms of results, "Egg Party" has well absorbed the player dividends squeezed out by the mobile version of "Fall Guys". The explosion at the end of the year is the result of its continuous content updates. Now that "Egg Party" has stabilized its user plate, the pressure is now given to the agent of the "Fall Guys" mobile game version but has not followed the B station.
Of course, the idea of constantly adding to "Egg Party" is not without hidden dangers. A large amount of seasonal content can certainly improve player stickiness, but it also increases the liveriness and threshold of the game. Many players have played "Egg Party" as a collection and development game, and no longer pay attention to socializing. This will somewhat hinder the further expansion of the game.
Perhaps this is also the reason why "Egg Party" has only been operated in China so far and has not gone overseas. After all, Stumble Guys, who also benchmarked "Fall Guys", has already taken the lead overseas. Whether overseas players can accept "casual" games with heavy liver, "Egg Party" will have to use results to re-prove itself.
During the New Year's holiday, there is always a chance for party tours
From the cases of Goose and Duck Kill to Eggboy Party, we can see some common pain points in party games. As a casual category, party games have no barriers to gameplay (any gameplay innovation can be borrowed by competitors), players have relatively low loyalty to the game, social relationships do not depend on the game, and can easily migrate between different games. This causes many games to fire up faster and cool faster. For example, the Among Us group that I added is now all teaming up to play other games.
In fact, some high-DAU masterpieces, such as Garena Free Fire, have noticed the social value of party games and have begun to add party game-like sub-gameplay to their own games, and use them as holiday events such as Christmas and Spring Festival, with good results. This obviously has a crowding out effect for users of party games.
In this regard, starting with the character image may be a solution. For example, Nintendo's "All Star Smash Bros." and Ubisoft's "Crazy Rabbit" are classic cases of the combination of party games and IP.
A large number of IP linkages of "Jelly Guys", the linkage between "Egg Boy Party" and NetEase's own games are also the products of this idea.
Although domestic party games stand on the same starting line as overseas, they still have some shortcomings in terms of IP of anime characters. On the one hand, there are few ready-made national-level IPs in the hands of domestic manufacturers, which is not conducive to rapid expansion. On the other hand, in order to make a profit as soon as possible, some projects often make some operational accidents that harm IP, making users lose confidence.
Various factors have led to a certain degree of "migratory birdization" characteristics of domestic casual game players, and what game fire migrates to what game. The migration of players has prompted manufacturers to become more eager to achieve quick results, forming a vicious circle. The end result is that players can't play good games, and manufacturers can't make money, creating a lose-lose situation.
Looking back at the party games that have become popular in recent years, you can find a phenomenon, whether it is "Goose and Duck Kill", Stumble Guys or Among Us, all of them are not games that explode as soon as they are released, but they only begin to usher in a traffic explosion a year or even years after the game is released.
Developers did not abandon their projects because the game was not popular, but endured loneliness and constantly improved their products. These products are often polished to a certain extent before they are discovered by the anchor or player and become explosive.
In fact, everyone understands that polishing products is the key to success or failure. However, when a product relies on a large factory to invest money and resources for development, can the production team still have the spare time to slowly polish the product? Perhaps this is why many casual games are always created by small and medium-sized teams. The core development team of "Goose Duck Kill" and Among Us is only 4 people, and the final explosion of their games is something that the producers themselves did not expect.
Big manufacturers are better at incubating IP and integrating IP, and sometimes it is more suitable to hand over the creative work to small teams. Game streamers give small teams the opportunity to bypass big manufacturers and become popular, avoiding the pattern of monopoly of ideas. Of course, the story of "Goose and Duck Kill" also tells us that once it explodes, we must seize the opportunity to expand the circle as soon as possible. No one knows how long they can be popular, multi-platform you don't occupy, there will be other teams with similar products to occupy.
In short, the party game track is difficult to completely monopolize. The nature of the party game determines that players always pursue freshness, which determines that the team always has a chance. As long as the rules of competition are fair, the fiercer the competition, the greater the chance that players will be able to play a good game.