NetEase planted a new "cash cow", even NetEase CEO Ding Lei did not expect.
Since the end of last year, the mobile game "Egg Boy Party", which focuses on casual competition, has quietly become popular, and after the Spring Festival in the Year of the Rabbit, the production team behind NetEase Games has increased its full power to publicize and launch, making the game even surpass the mobile game evergreen "Honor of Kings" and "Peace Elite" on the download list, and won the download championship for a consecutive time.
According to data disclosed by NetEase, during the Spring Festival, the number of daily active users of the game has exceeded the 30 million mark, and even became the game with the highest number of monthly active users in NetEase Games' history.
It is difficult not to make Ding Lei proud of such achievements. At the recent earnings conference, he specifically praised "Egg Party" alone: "Our "Egg Party" has made a major breakthrough in the field of casual games", and also said with confidence that more efforts will be invested in the long-term service of this game in the future, "Long-term refers to at least 10 years." ”
For NetEase, "Egg Party" may be a fork in the road.
Some insiders said that it is not so much that NetEase sees the short-term revenue brought by "Egg Party", but that they have found the possibility of a national blockbuster game from "Egg Party". And this will also be a new way of survival for NetEase Games after light production and heavy social trends.
Why is it on fire?
The birth of "Egg Party" can be traced back to 2021, at the NetEase 520 game conference that year, "Egg Party" debuted, and was called by NetEase as the first trendy casual competitive mobile game. Two months later, "Egg Party" successfully obtained a version number, becoming the last mobile game to get a version number in 2021.
In terms of gameplay, it is similar to the popular "Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout", players need to control the "Egg Boy" to race through a variety of maps. Due to the similar gameplay and similar art style, "Egg Party" has also been criticized by many players as the "ultimate stitching monster" (refers to stitching a variety of game elements).
"Egg Boy Party" suddenly became popular at the end of last year. Player @Rich Z Xiaolongbao, who started playing "Egg Boy Party" shortly after the server started, told "City Boundary" that she noticed that at the beginning, good maps would only have more than 100,000 plays, but after entering December, the number of players suddenly came like a tide, and some good maps could even reach millions or even tens of millions of plays.
According to statistics, the MAU (monthly active users) of "Egg Party" approached the peak of MAU of "League of Legends Mobile Game" in December 2022. Seven Mai data shows that in the download list in January 2023, "Egg Party" directly surpassed "Honor of Kings" to become the champion, and the revenue ranking squeezed into the Top5. In the context of last year's tight version release and poor performance of new games, it is also the only new face in the top five to be launched in 2022.
"Overnight, all the peers were discussing "Egg Party"", industry insider Wang Li told "City", "Everyone disassembled the gameplay, studied marketing, and analyzed for a long time and agreed that it was luck." ”
Li Xiang, another veteran of the game industry, told "City Boundary" that the popularity of "Egg Party" can be viewed from three dimensions: first, from the perspective of time, the Spring Festival holiday is a good time for light casual games to be easy to explode; Second, from the perspective of mobile game categories, players have been suffering from "king" and "chicken" for a long time, and new games are urgently needed to mobilize freshness; Third, at the level of game research and development, the research and development quality of NetEase games is high, and there are some experience accumulations of party games in the early years, which can fully ensure the game experience of players.
▲ (There are a lot of "Egg Party" gameplay recommended content on platforms such as Xiaohongshu)
In addition, "Egg Party" has a 180-degree turn in operational strategy, making it a game that was born out of "Jelly Guys: Ultimate Knockout" but surpassed the latter.
Unlike Fall Guys: The Ultimate Knockout, players in Egg Party can not only participate in the official map, but also attract other players to participate through the editor's own map. For a time, interesting UGC (user-generated content) such as "Old Six Map" and "Spoof Map" emerged one after another. In addition, there has also been a wave of second-creation craze on social platforms, and players have even restored elements of other game worlds such as "Honor of Kings" and "Love of Light and Night" in the world of "Egg Party". Gradually, the proportion of user time spent on UGC content once exceeded mainstream gameplay.
In the editor's authoring mode, the player feeds back to the player. @Rich Z Xiaolongbao Memories, who has already made 23 maps on "Egg Party", and his first map out of the circle is called "I want to go to the toilet!" Inspired by "people have three hurries", she made a map for the purpose of more than one toilet, whenever she felt that the toilet was close at hand, but the toilet would quickly go away after the distance was closer, and players with "urgency" had to cross four levels to get to the toilet as they wished.
This fun map is also her first work to enter the top three of the popularity list, and she admits: "When you see the number of players on your map growing in the background, it's a very fulfilling thing. ”
The birth of "Egg Party" was not all smooth sailing. In an interview with the media, Kwan, the game's producer, said that the team originally wanted to create a UGC game editor "Beaver Project", which allows users to make, share and play homemade games on the platform, so as to create a highly free community of original games. However, due to the lack of creators and player accumulation in this gameplay, the team chose to do "Egg Party" first to make a competitive core gameplay for subsequent editors.
In the early days of Egg Party, the team also tried to focus on UGC to cultivate users' interest in editing, and the data "fell particularly badly", until the official map was more involved, the data picked up.
According to Kwan, Eggboy Party currently produces millions of UGC maps per week, and they regularly select excellent maps to enter the official casual gameplay and ranked matches. This will also become one of its methods to improve user stickiness.
NetEase's tastes have changed
Inside NetEase Games, this "egg" is very different.
Many industry insiders believe that NetEase Games has always been bad at the game field dominated by pan-player users, high daily activity, and low ARPU (average revenue per user), and "Egg Party" breaks this rule to a certain extent. "NetEase Games' consistent style is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a game, and then use a few months to earn it back, and the subsequent popularity will slowly weaken," Li Xiang pointed out.
"Open high, go low, thick tail" has always been the characteristics of NetEase games, with its core product "Fantasy Westward Journey" as an example, the game has been online for 20 years, but relying on high ARPU and deep social gameplay has always had a good flow. In the fourth quarter financial report, NetEase still gave it a high affirmation, commenting that the flagship products represented by "Fantasy Westward Journey" "maintain extremely vigorous vitality".
Before "Egg Party", the highest revenue in the NetEase mobile game series was also the mobile game version of "Fantasy Westward Journey", which was launched eight years ago. According to the 2022 global mobile game revenue list released by third-party data website Magic, the annual revenue of the mobile game version of "Fantasy Westward Journey" is about 600 million US dollars, ranking seventh, and it is also the highest ranking achieved by NetEase mobile games.
"Open low and go high" "Egg Boy Party" has become a strange flower bred under the long-term operation matrix. In May last year, this product was officially put in beta. When it first launched, the data was not good: after briefly reaching the top of the download list, the ranking fell all the way to about 200, until half a year later, it gradually rushed back to the TOP50 list, and then sang all the way to the position of download champion.
"Egg Party" no longer makes NetEase enclosure self-cute, but attracts a wide range of people from outside the game circle. Wang Li believes that the game's low threshold and weak competition have attracted many white players or pan-players, who have brought a lot of daily activity to the game, and also explored the possibility of hardcore players and pan-players coexisting in the same game.
Specific to the player group, "Egg Party" took the lead in capturing the attention of post-00s players. Ding Lei mentioned in the conference call that the users of the game are mainly students, and a large number of post-00s have become loyal players. A research report by CICC also pointed out that the core reason for the popularity of party games such as "Egg Party" is to meet the shallow social demands of users (especially Generation Z) for diversified and high immersion online.
At the internal meeting of the game company Giant Network a few days ago, founder Shi Yuzhu also said that he wanted to make the company's new game "Original Journey" "must attract the new generation of post-00s to come in." Game industry analyst Zhang Shule stressed that the harvest of 00 has become a common goal of current game companies, and at present, NetEase is ahead of another major game company Tencent with "Egg Party".
It is worth mentioning that "Egg Party" also pays a high degree of attention to female players. The city found that in the recruitment requirements of the "Egg Party" project team, "those who are familiar with the female game group" has become one of the requirements in several recruitment positions. According to data from Analysys, on March 10, female players of "Egg Party" accounted for 64.72%. The report of the Academia Sinica also pointed out that women accounted for 48.6% of the gender of mobile game users in China in 2022, which is basically the same as the proportion of male gamers, which also shows that the power of female gamers cannot be underestimated.
At the beginning of this year, its overseas version "Eggy Party" has been closed testing in Android markets in many regions abroad for more than a month, and will launch an official version this year. However, whether this "egg boy frenzy" can be whipped up in overseas markets still needs to be verified.
How to keep the status of the second oldest
"NetEase has essentially become a game-driven company," Zhang points out. Indeed, financial reports from recent years show that NetEase's game business has accounted for more than seventy percent of total revenue. In fiscal 2022, NetEase's net revenue from games and related value-added services accounted for 77.27%, a year-on-year increase of 9.95%.
For NetEase, it is not easy to hand over this still growing report card, especially in 2022, the domestic game industry market size has experienced the first decline in eight years - in 2022, the actual sales revenue of China's game market decreased by 30.629 billion yuan year-on-year, down 10.33% year-on-year; The number of gamers also fell from 666 million to 664 million, down 0.33% year-on-year.
When the industry enters the stock market, it is already difficult to drink soup, and it is even more difficult to eat meat. In the game market, Tencent, NetEase and the rising star Mihayou stand tall. From the perspective of market share, it is too difficult for NetEase, as the "second oldest in 10,000 years", to shake about 50% of Tencent games. On the other hand, the revenue of Mihayou with "Genshin" has also been growing rapidly, in 2020, Mihayou's revenue has exceeded 10 billion, and there are market rumors that Mihayou's revenue in 2022 will be between 260-30 billion, which is getting closer and closer to NetEase Games' 74.5 billion. In the monthly manufacturer revenue ranking compiled by Sensor Tower, Mihayou has surpassed NetEase to rank second many times.
Therefore, as a dark horse killed at the end of 2022, "Egg Boy Party" has become a "cash cow" that appears just right. NetEase, which has been criticized for lacking blockbuster games, is also eager to hold this cash cow longer. At present, "Egg Party" is still recruiting new positions, including planning, operations and engineers, etc., while "War Roar" and "Cloud Lobby" launched at the same time as it have almost no job demand.
However, from the data in February, the lack of stamina of "Egg Party" has emerged, and Sensor Tower's February global mobile game publisher revenue list shows that "Egg Party" has slipped from fifth place in January to sixth place.
"Due to the limitations of their own gameplay, mobile games in light casual categories are destined to fail to do a good job in long-term operation, players are prone to aesthetic fatigue, and they will quickly lose their sense of excitement to the game, at this time, it is not much point to rely on subtle creativity," Li Xiang said.
In Li Xiang's view, the ideal path of "Egg Party" will be to move towards platform operation, precipitate players' social assets by creating scenes, innovative gameplay and other means, so as to derive into a social-oriented community platform, "but it is really difficult to capture the chemistry generated when players socialize," he said.
For NetEase, if you don't catch "Egg Boy Party", the time to wait for the next national hit seems to be far away. According to its latest disclosed progress, the mobile game versions of the two end-game games "Against the Water and Cold" and "Eternal Calamity" are about to be unveiled in the future, and these two big-production, time-consuming games will once again bring NetEase back to Shu's previous routine.
In 2022, the domestic game industry has collectively experienced a throes of cost reduction and efficiency increase, and the game market has gradually heated up as game version numbers resume issuance. Under the big waves, whether the vacated "Egg Boy Party" can take a new path for NetEase, everything remains to be verified.
(At the request of interviewees, Zhou Lin, Wang Li, and Li Xiang are pseudonyms)
Author | Zhang Jikang
Edit | Dong Yuqing