The metaverse is out, can the dream of Chinese-style Discord still be done?
What can end one carnival is often another.
I'm ashamed to say that until the day Microsoft's new tool Copilot swept the circle of friends, I didn't understand the earlier Internet hotspots. For example, I haven't really understood the beautiful picture depicted by Web 3.0 on the PPT picture, and I haven't seen what landing scenes the meta-universe has other than "QQ show meeting".
Fortunately, things have changed quickly, and these issues are now less important.
Image source network
Nowadays, the topic on people's lips is iterating rapidly, and a while ago everyone was worried about "which occupations will be replaced by artificial intelligence", and this week it was changed to: "When will Chinese Office users welcome the powerful Mr. 'Co-pilot'?" ”
And for the gaming industry, which is so closely linked to new trends, change is taking place. The wind of the metaverse is no longer noisy, but the legacy and whims it left behind continue.
Once upon a time, we imagined gamers' digital twin plans, viewing a virtual social space as an outpost of the metaverse.
Now, the outpost seems to have lost its edgy veil, to the point of retreating into a less fashionable old-school term: gaming community.
Community upstarts in the tide
In the spring of 2023, a new internet hotspot is called ChatGPT. When you and I are obsessed with testing AI with puzzles, it means that yesterday's wind is forgotten.
The metaverse is out. What does this mean in the gaming industry?
Looking back, the games directly related to it over the past two years have yet to surface. After all, the accumulation of technology will not give face to the new concept, and no one can make the "oasis" in "Ready Player One".
But it's not for nothing that stock prices have (for a while) risen, and there are plenty of metaverse-inspired products.
Let's simply take a look at the façade project under the metaverse hot spot.
Roblox can't get around it. As a banner for game practitioners to spy on the metaverse, its user base in North America is exceptionally large. After it was introduced to China, Tencent described it as a "multiplayer online 3D creative community."
Another blockbuster case is Discord, which is also a star project that the capital market has high hopes for. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal released rumors that Microsoft wanted to buy the game social company Discord for $10 billion or more, and the two sides negotiated. The end result is that Discord rejected the rumored alluring figure of "$10 billion to $12 billion."
The next question is, what impact have these two had on Chinese manufacturers in the metaverse wave?
For Roblox-style success, it has (I'm afraid) contributed to several sandbox investments. Yes, the so-called "sandbox" is the answer given by local manufacturers after "chewing".
But subsequently, we have not been able to see enough loud products put into the market. Even Tencent's own Chinese version of "Roblox" did not work very well, it had placed eye-catching large-screen advertisements in Beijing's subway stations, but suddenly announced that "the deletion test is over" five months after its launch.
Since then, the news bulletin on the official website of Roblox Chinese has been suspended for more than a year, including today.
To some extent, local manufacturers have long been aware of the specificity of the Roblox myth – probably as early as the second half of 2021 – and have doubts about the difficulty of replicating it. After all, the creative community with co-creation as the background has many invisible thresholds.
Discord is different, though. If bosses are to choose a path into the metaverse, Discord must be the more practical option, or at least it seems more practical.
Therefore, DIscord has inspired much more Eastern latecomers, involving a larger range of manufacturers, and the activity of new products is not low.
What's more, the game community is a battleground for soldiers. According to the monitoring of gamma data, the game community has always played an important role in the market, with about 14.3% of users obtaining game information through game forums and other forms, which is higher than the recommended ranking of mobile stores and game media apps.
Before we go any further into localization, we need to take a rough look at Discord itself.
First of all, it was born as a social product aimed at the player community, and the overall framework revolves around voice services, emphasizing low-latency, high-quality game voice communication. Secondly, Discord has carved out a community system in the product, allowing players to continue to socialize on large and small servers/channels.
Discord's voice advantage, source official website
Yes, the basic logic is that simple. So as you can imagine, it's not difficult to simulate the general look of Discord at the level of product features.
So how did Discord, which was born and grown early, string it with the metaverse?
In summary, based on a practical and instrumental community system, Discord spawns possibilities for interest socializing, acquaintance communication, and online collaboration. Since then, based on these potential to extend social links, Discord has become a particularly grounded metaverse prototype in the eyes of the market.
Even without Microsoft's tens of billions of dollars, this "American YY" has already attracted the attention of the world and stirred the hearts of countless product managers on the other side of the ocean.
The Chinese Discord puzzle
We usually divide the game market into domestic and overseas.
This is a large local factory, and over there is another set of ecological birds chirping. When the Discord software accumulated a considerable user base overseas, the war of Chinese-style Discord also began.
From before the explosion of the metaverse to after it was extinguished, many well-known companies such as Tencent, Netease, and Dream World launched various Discord products. For example, 360's N World, NetEase's UU Voice, and Dreamland's Fanbook, they solve game social tools in different dimensions, but they all retain the Discord-style channel route.
There are also new faces, such as a voice communication tool that has been renamed from "Kai Hei" to "KOOK". KOOK is not from the hands of a large manufacturer, but because of the "1:1 restoration of Discord" successfully accumulated the first batch of users, and even was once mistaken by many people for "Discord China".
This similar-looking scuffle reached a high point in 2021. That year, Tencent was the most watched and active entrant, and in the second half of the year, it came up with two products in one go.
First of all, the most conspicuous big move is to test the QQ channel. The QQ channel is built into QQ, and users can experience the "new way of entertainment collaboration" in the slogan by joining the channel and other means - like installing a Discord extension for this national social tool, custom channels and chatbots are ready to go.
The second is NokNok, an independent game community product launched by Tencent, and the pixel-style art design echoes the audience circle. From the official website publicity, NokNok has three tags, namely "subscribe to the whole network game information", "diversified BOT tools" and "social game cards", and the intention of benchmarking Discord is very frank.
However, from the perspective of download performance, whether it is NokNok from mainstream manufacturers or KOOK, it is actually difficult to stir up enough splashes. They have long hovered around the top 100 in the social or entertainment subcategory, and the overall list has fallen outside the thousand.
In contrast, Discord has long been stable in the overall list of about 30 in the App Store.
Discord's ranking trend in the past year, source Seven Mai Data
In other words, from the practical results, the Discord model is undoubtedly a feasible path, but its upper limit in the Chinese market is far less optimistic than people think. So far, no product has really shown enough first-mover advantage, and similar products can hardly play any differentiation, let alone challenge the old overlord of the voice industry, YY.
What's even worse is that although the local Discord software does not have the hundreds of millions of users of the original Discord, it has to face the same commercialization dilemma as the latter.
Imagination in the digital realm aside, Discord itself is not an elite student in terms of business performance. You know, Discord, which has 140 million monthly active users in 2020, will eventually have an annual revenue of only $130 million, and the landmark revenue item is paid membership. Today, Discord has also been exploring the commercialization field, seeking the possibility of "another distribution" to make a profit.
In China, it is somewhat unrealistic to make a channel that can sit on the revenue and share of Discord software in one go, and only the membership fee is left for reference.
Take KOOK as an example, its paid membership system is called "BUFF". The price of buying a BUFF in a single month is 19.9 yuan, which is about the same as the membership price of the long-form video platform. But when users get a BUFF, the value-added services that the Discord community can provide are really not so attractive, such as uploading dynamic avatars, uploading background banners, shortening the username modification interval and other painless functions.
Image source: KOOK official website
When the aura of the metaverse completely fades, Chinese-style Discord is destined to retreat into highly homogeneous competition, facing the double torture of customer acquisition and monetization.
Is "enclosure self-sprouting the right solution" for the community?
Nowadays, it seems that whether the meta-universe is enough is already an overly luxurious proposition, and just to do a good job in the game community with voice is enough to hurt the mind and sad.
Another kind of community thinking is gradually becoming the new mainstream of the industry.
If the essence of the Discord model is a formal "semi-open", then the choice of emerging forces such as Mihayou, Eagle Point, and Kulo is "fully closed".
The new generation of game communities should do "private domain traffic". Simply put, it focuses on operating its own game community, such as Miyou Club launched by Mihayou and Kulo launched Kublock. A more extreme case is that Tencent's King Camp only operates for the game "Honor of Kings".
The logic of closed communities is very different from the Discord model, and it fundamentally answers the two major puzzles we mentioned above.
First, customer acquisition, the acquisition of customers in closed communities does not depend on external traffic at all, but through its own products.
"Honor of Kings" builds a series of King's Camp functions into the game and attracts users to download the King's Camp App through rewards, while Mihayou has designed features such as check-in rewards in Miyou to lure the majority of Genshin players with the most valuable rough stone props.
Every time a Genshin raiders blogger includes the source of "Miyusha check-in" when counting new versions of rough stones, it is equivalent to giving this closed community a free advertisement.
The second is monetization, the existence of closed communities directly cancels this problem, because they do not need to undertake the task of making money.
As a self-owned tool, the value of the closed community to manufacturers is mainly reflected in two aspects. On the one hand, the closed community builds a hobby ecology, which can help game manufacturers collect core users, thereby maintaining user activity, and conducive to promoting the reproduction of content such as Erchuang.
In this case, Miyou Club is another form of "Genshin", the King's Camp is the extended "Glory of Kings", and NetEase God can be any member of NetEase's family barrel. They're all wingmen for gaming products that help their families win more attention in the brutal battle for attention.
Compared with constantly updating game content to retain customers, closed communities are undoubtedly a more economical and long-term viable way to operate stock.
On the other hand, while retaining players, the closed community has built a cheap and efficient publicity path. When manufacturers need to release new games under the same ecosystem, the previous community users are the easiest to reach customers, because the brand consensus has been formed in the minds of community users.
So we can see today that the Miyou Club is creating momentum for the launch of the new work "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", the king's camp is shaking the flag for the newly obtained version of the king IP game, and the new game section of NetEase God is full of players waiting for reservations...
Audiences in niche circles often use the phrase "enclosure self-cute" as a joke, and similar logic applies to game companies.
Looking back, China's local gaming community has gone through a long evolutionary history, and they have always responded to the same question: Why do users need a gaming community?
In the earliest days, this was a spontaneous demand, and scarce game guides were published in ancient forums, NGAs, and Tieba , and people spontaneously sought out and integrated.
Later, players scattered to more pan-platforms, and established one popular tag after another on B station, Tiger Pounce, Douyin, Weibo, Douban and Xiaohongshu. The pure gaming community has retreated to the functional level, maintaining vitality through hard functions such as distribution, accelerators, and microphones.
Now, the player is back in the vertical scene, but this time it is not spontaneously organized, but the game manufacturer has reached out on its own initiative.
Leaving and returning, behind the general trend actually reflects the expansion of the scope of game operations. The community has gradually become a contested ground that game manufacturers are reluctant to cede, and this is not a Discord-style featured channel, but a natural local order.
In the current Chinese game industry, the community itself is the label.
This article originated from the Hedgehog Commune