Hi everyone, I'm Dr. X.
Last week, "Bloodthirsty Seal" underwent a "big wave" update, introducing the highly anticipated succubus DLC, and adding two new enemies, Red Butterfly and Black Mantis, as well as a series of new dances and system improvements in the main story, Blood Palace and other modes.
It's not fun, let's not talk about it, anyway, this wave of updates is indeed very "big", and it has also won the support of a large number of new players.
At present, the game's praise rate on Steam has exceeded the 90% mark, and it is second to none under the domestic action game category.
However, who would have thought that when "Bloodthirsty Seal" was first released three years ago, the game's praise rate only hovered around the passing line of 60%, which is a typical flat start.
But after more than three years of adjustment and optimization, this game has gained a firm foothold on Steam, and even attracted a lot of foreign players' attention.
Some people say that its success is based on the tacit understanding between the designer and the player that "you show me Naiko, I will give money", but is that really the case? Today, Dr. X is here to talk to you about this issue.
Key point 1: Domestic slag relied on the shiver, and successfully counterattacked three years later
In domestic action games, "Bloodthirsty Seal" has always been a very special existence, originally game producer Li Chicheng was developed to do domestic soul action masterpieces. As a result, after a year or two, they found it too difficult to make a game comparable to the existence of "Dark Souls" with the efforts of three people in the production team.
This difficulty even reached the point where investors went bankrupt, company accounts were cleared, and producers paid for research and development themselves.
Therefore, they can only hurriedly add some random variables in the early beta version, and call the game the gimmick of "domestic + RogueLike + action" to "cheat" a wave of research and development funds, which has a simple version of "Bloodthirsty Seal" with "only two boss level design, less than 2 hours of game experience a week".
(Early clearance Easter eggs)
Such an unobtrusive game experience, coupled with the quality of the game itself, and the RogueLike gameplay without RogueLike experience, naturally won a bunch of bad reviews for "Bloodthirsty Seal", and was once punished in public by angry players on the sticker forum.
It's just that black and red are also black and red, and it is much better to make some movement on the Internet than to use love to generate electricity all the time, and some people will always doubt curiosity to see how rotten "Bloodthirsty Seal" is.
As a result, under the black and red wave of scolding, the sales of "Bloodthirsty Seal" barely exceeded the 100,000 mark, which was regarded as temporarily alleviating the situation that the production team did not have rice under the pot.
At this time, the project team of only three people came to the crossroads of game development: did everyone divide the money and break up, or did they continue to do "Bloodthirsty Seal" with the funds just recovered under the infamy of the whole network?
Dr. X also doesn't know how many days of deliberation Li Chicheng and them, anyway, from the game update log, the project team finally chose the latter, looking forward to the day when "Bloodthirsty Seal" can be finished and made highlights.
Then, "Bloodthirsty Seal" made a decision to "go against the ancestors", updated a women's MOD for free, and forced the hero Su Yejin, who carried a deep hatred of the blood sea, to give sex to a woman with a belly pocket.
Of course, you can also choose not to load this mod and continue to use Su Yejin's initial image to break into the rivers and lakes, but what LSP can refuse the hormonal stimulation of big, white beauty fierce battle weird creatures?
In the follow-up update process of "Bloodthirsty Seal", the production team also arranged a series of popular uniforms such as JK uniform short skirts, black silk OL long legs and so on, so that many LSP players can "I want them all" in the game.
They also arranged a fairy girl with a water spirit as the gatekeeper boss of the chapter 10 level, and by the way, they drained a lot of LSP's wallet...
In the end, in the process of selling the edge beauty mod, "Bloodthirsty Seal" smelled a sustainable business opportunity.
They reached a tacit agreement with the player that "if you show me Naiko, I will give you good reviews", they reversed the positive rating from less than 60% to more than 90% in just three years.
Key point 2: Official players cooperate in research and development, and collective intelligence opens the counterattack plugin!
However, if you attribute the success of "Bloodthirsty Seal" only to the production team's sideline mods, you are very wrong.
There is no doubt that the appearance of women's mods and some subsequent edge patches is the key to reversing the continued decline of "Bloodthirsty Seal", but the core element that really makes this game reborn lies in the wisdom of the selfless contribution of the majority of players.
Open the changelog of "Bloodthirsty Seal", you can find that the most common sentence that appears in the author's update announcement is "due to some players' reminders, we xxxxx".
And the production team that supports the three people to do the two chapters of the plot from the beginning all the way is also a reliable suggestion from the majority of netizens.
Let's take the character dubbing of the little carp and priestess who are perfected in the game, these are the best voices that have been voted and verified by thousands of water friends from the official dubbing selection of "Bloodthirsty Seal".
In addition, from the summary log shared by the developer before, the emergence of modes such as multiplayer PK, multiplayer battle royale, and hand-to-hand combat in this game are also gradually improved by the production team under everyone's brainstorming.
Especially after "Bloodthirsty Seal" opened the Steam Workshop, the official is deliberately encouraging fan mod authors to have wild brains, and has also carried out several code optimizations and gameplay resets for these private mods to seamlessly change game files, which is a two-way rush.
Of course, limited by technology and engine, "Bloodthirsty Seal" still cannot meet the setting of game producer Li Chicheng's "domestic black soul", and there are also problems of one kind or another.
But for players, as long as the production team can not forget their original intention and are willing to make the mod skin that players want from everyone's discussion, or an interesting gameplay mode, "Bloodthirsty Seal" is worthy of this 91% praise rate.
As for the road behind, we also hope that relying on Naiko's "Bloodthirsty Seal" to sell the game, we can finally make a large-scale update that can be popular one day.
After-class summary:
GHS is never the first productivity of making games, excellent game quality and rich gameplay content are.
After three years, "Bloodthirsty Seal" has long grown from the "RogueLike + Action" little shrimp of the year to a hero who integrates battle royale, tower climbing, cooperative breakthrough, ring kicking gym and other divine skills.
And this just shows the results of the game production team closely connecting with players, united, our power will be endless!