On March 31, Dream World released its 2022 annual results announcement, achieving a total revenue of 2.73 billion yuan during the period, a year-on-year increase of 3.7%; Among them, the game business grew strongly to 2.53 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.2%. It is worth noting that in the categories of parkour, elimination and horizontal action fighting RPG games, many of the company's games ranked first and second.
Under the influence of strict regulatory policies, repeated outbreaks of epidemics and other factors, Dream World has given full play to the unique advantages and anti-risk ability of long life cycle, large number of active users, and high user stickiness, and its comprehensive development is stable and improving, and its own intrinsic value is gradually released. Dream World said that in the future, the company will continue to focus on and deepen the main business of games, and continuously improve innovation capabilities and product profitability; At the same time, finer granularity and pre-test verification of game development are realized through digital tools to improve product certainty and player experience.
The long-term operation is full of power, and the exclusive "secret" makes "Metro Parkour" return to the top
In fact, based on the cooperation of source code, Dream World has successfully mastered the "traffic password" of long-term operation. Its "Metro Parkour" has successfully returned this 10-year-old parkour mobile game to the peak through the team's repeated optimizations and revisions and hard work to improve the player experience, coupled with the promotion of the summer co-creation activity initiated by Fanbook. This game has dominated the iOS download charts for 33 consecutive days, creating a rare achievement in the history of domestic mobile games. During the Spring Festival in 2023, the highest single-day active users of "Metro Parkour" exceeded 10 million, and the monthly active users exceeded 100 million.
It is worth mentioning that "Metro Surfer" is not only very active, but also has strong social attributes. According to statistics, in January 2023, the total number of players sending dialogues and emoticons in the Subway Parkour game exceeded 30%, with more than 870 million times sent and more than 1.25 billion battles.
According to Dream World, games with high social attributes mean that users have social assets deposited in the game or product, with higher sunk costs and less potential for churn. At the same time, social networking also brings more possibilities for communication and fission, and the company is full of confidence in the future of "Subway Surf".
In addition, long-term games such as "Garden of Dreams", "Dream Home" and "Temple Escape" have still achieved good results in the past year, not only maintaining good player recognition, but also bringing solid profit contributions to the steady rise of Dream World.
Taking "Garden of Dreams" and "Dream Home" as examples, DreamWorld has improved the sensitivity and accuracy of product iteration direction by maintaining high-frequency and close communication with core users in Fanbook. At the same time, it has launched high-quality content such as Changcao Yandanzi and Monet's Garden to accurately meet the deeper emotional experience demands of female users, and the paid contribution of daily active users throughout the year has reached a new high, which has become one of the most popular games for women.
Solid self-research and delivery of high-quality products, reserve games such as "Calapichu" open up incremental space
Judging from the announcement, the highlights of the company's self-developed products are frequent. The independent self-developed game "Glory All-Stars" was launched in August 2021, and in 2022, it created a turnover of up to 1 billion yuan for the company, ranking first in the horizontal board action fighting RPG game category.
As a game with long-term operation value and strong content, "Honor All-Stars" has always maintained strong user growth and revenue growth. This achievement is mainly due to the in-depth cooperation between the game and stars and IP, which accurately matches the user's interests. For example, the linkage of "Glory All-Stars" with stars and IPs such as Jay Chou, SNK and Douluo Continent has injected richer and more attractive content into the game, which has been favored by the majority of players.
According to Dream World, "Glory All-Stars" is an important addition to the overall game product matrix. It not only successfully proves the company's research and operation capabilities beyond casual games, but also proves that the company has the ability to make it a long-life product that continues to contribute high user numbers and high revenue to the company.
It is worth noting that the two-dimensional competitive shooting game "Calapichu" custom-developed by Dream World has opened medium-scale closed beta, and players have high expectations. During the test, the game received double praise from professional TPS players and two-dimensional players, and continuously topped the TOP1 in the B station new game reservation list. According to reports, "Calapichu" was approved on March 23 this year, and it is expected to be launched in the second half of this year.
Another highly anticipated game, Ni no Kuni: Interlaced Worlds, has also made important progress. The national server version of the game was jointly developed by Tencent and Dream World, optimized for the problem of overseas servers, and added a large number of exclusive content of national servers. The game was approved on December 28 last year and is expected to go live in beta in the second quarter of this year. With the launch of key games, the proportion of self-developed revenue is expected to continue to increase.
Fanbook incorporates a large number of AI application scenarios, from solving pain points to essential tools for studios
In this announcement, Dream World has repeatedly emphasized the importance of AI to the productivity and production efficiency of enterprises. Among them, the user community tool Fanbook is one of the key products that are highlighted. The core of the tool lies in the production and distribution of content, as well as the social network and social capital formed based on this content, which in turn stimulates users' willingness to trade and forms user-centric transaction scenarios.
Dream World introduced that in the current environment of losing traffic growth dividends, how to better serve the existing users obtained is particularly important. Different from the traditional advertising volume-led growth, community-led growth is being paid attention to and practiced by more brands, and this new operation logic is also an effective leverage for brands to transfer private domain traffic, thinking about how to refine operations and improve the stickiness of existing users, so that the product fundamentally has the ability to have a long life cycle.
Take "Metro Surf" as an example, it builds the base camp of game content creators in Fanbook, takes the core creators in the Fanbook community as the starting point of the "flywheel", encourages players to create some brain-opening videos, and then boosts through the media platform, and the video playback of some "high-end bureaus" skyrockets.
Today, Fanbook is a must-have tool for studios. Not only has Dream World moved its own games to Fanbook, but well-known games such as "Black Desert", "Love of Light and Night", "Ball Wars", "Mini World" and so on have opened their own user communities on Fanbook.
DreamWorld also said that Fanbook has actively embraced the industry's advanced AIGC technology and landed applications, and has access to the capabilities of OpenAI. In 2023, the company will apply such technologies to more Fanbook content creation scenarios, cooperate with more excellent AI companies or products at home and abroad, form a wider range of application products, and improve the productivity and production efficiency of enterprises through Fanbook + AI.
With the recovery of the economy and the recovery of the industry, the overall external environment is gradually improving, two blockbuster new games are planned to be launched in the second half of the year, coupled with the company's long-term operating experience in the game business, combined with Fanbook's efficiency in large-scale user management, it is believed that the overall business of DreamWorld will return to the track of rapid growth in 2023.