In recent years, the rise of national comics has been the focus of attention in the industry, and many influential national comic IPs have also been born during this period. However, the commercialization path of national comic IP adaptation games has not been too smooth. Especially compared with the mature Japanese comic IP adaptation, the adaptation of the national comic IP mobile game will always face various problems, even well-known IPs with a good mass base will encounter Waterloo.
On April 10 this year, the national comic IP mobile game "Fox Demon Little Red Lady" announced that it would stop operating on June 16. In August last year, "Qin Shi Mingyue World", which has been in operation for more than a year, also announced the closure of the server.
According to DataEye's data statistics in 2022, except for a few IP adaptation products such as "Douluo Continent", national comic IP adapted mobile games generally rank relatively low on the iOS best-selling list, most of which rank outside the 300. The widespread emergence of this situation has cast a haze of "IP poison" on national comic IP.
Why is the success rate of national comic IP adaptation games not high? There have been many analyses of failure cases before, and the reasons for product failure are different. The answer to the question may have to be found in the successful products on the market.
In the past two years, the better performance on the market is the IP of "Douluo Continent", and a number of mobile games adapted from it have performed well, especially the self-developed "Douluo Continent: Soul Master Showdown" (hereinafter referred to as: "Soul Master Showdown") developed by Sanqi Interactive Entertainment has had very bright results since its launch in the summer of 2021, with a turnover of more than 700 million in the first month of launch, and has occupied the top 20 position of iOS game best-selling lists for a long time. Even a year after the game's launch, the game has remained within 60. Some people may think that this achievement is not explosive enough, but looking at the entire game market on the track of national comic IP adaptation, there is nothing better than it.
@七麦数据
Taking this opportunity, we found the game producer of "Soul Master Showdown" and talked about the IP of "Douluo" and the difficulties and pain points of the IP adaptation of national comics.
"Douluo"'s national comic IP growth road
The IP of "Douluo" can be described as having a long history. The original novel began to be serialized at the end of 2008 and became one of the representative works of the starting point web novel. In 2011, the original manga of the same name began to be serialized on "Soulmates", and a group of comic fans gathered. At the "515 Book Fan Festival" held at the starting point in May this year, book lovers voted for the "Top Ten Online Literary God-level Famous Scenes", and the "Douluo", which was completed more than ten years ago, still has a place, which shows its far-reaching influence.
"Douluo" is one of the earliest web novel IPs to adapt games, as early as 2013 launched adapted page games, and then launched "Douluo Continent Online", "Legend of Douluo Continent God Realm" and other game products logged on different platforms.
The first batch of "Douluo" adapted games can be said to be games of the same generation as "My Name is MT", "Qin Shi Mingyue" and "100,000 Cold Jokes", which have eaten the dividends of the first wave of national comic IP adapted games.
However, with the passage of time, the once popular national comic IPs have faced a "mid-life crisis", with fan faults, word-of-mouth collapse and other dilemmas, and some IPs have suffered random adaptations that have overdrawn their value prematurely, and have been slumped since then. The reason why "Douluo" can overcome the mid-life crisis is largely due to the 3D animation of the same name broadcast on Tencent Video since 2018.
The broadcast of the animation updated the fan base of "Douluo" in time, and the fan drama mode of Zhou Geng maintained the heat of the IP discussion well. "Douluo"'s IP adaptation game has also ushered in a second wave of peaks since then.
An IP has launched multiple games at the same time, which also reflects the rapid development of domestic game industrialization capabilities. However, the competition of multiple games on the same stage has put new demands on the development team. The current environment is no longer an environment where you can make money by making an adaptation with the help of IP popularity, and the fan base is becoming more and more demanding of the game.
As the producer of "Soul Master Showdown" confessed to us at the beginning: "A good adapted game can't just use IP as a traffic entry, and then simply match a mature gameplay in the market."
The "Soul Master Showdown" team has been thinking about how to design the characteristics of the IP through the game from the beginning of the project. This is not an easy task, and it will significantly increase the development cost of the game. But the production team's understanding of the current market is very clear, that is, it is no longer the blue ocean market of the year, but a stock market, especially for the top IP of the head, there are many related adaptation products themselves. So producers say, "In today's stock market, it's hard to succeed if we can't innovate, and the same is true for IP games."
Why are the fans of "Douluo" the worst to serve?
For the production team of "Soul Master Showdown", the first step in setting up the project is to locate the fan crowd. For "Douluo", an IP that has spanned more than ten years, book fans, comic fans, and animation fans are intertwined, and how to accurately grasp the audience is the first problem in front of the team. In this regard, the producers of "Soul Master Showdown" bluntly said that their positioning of the game audience is to find the greatest common divisor of IP, that is, users who like anime.
"Most of the users who like anime are young office workers and students. So we strive to restore the art style of anime in the art of the game. ”
However, such user positioning will naturally bring new challenges to the commercialization of games.
There is a view in public opinion that an important reason why national comic IP adapted games always encounter obstacles in commercialization is that national comics themselves mainly cover relatively young people. This group is often students who do not have independent economic independence or have just started with work income, and they do not have so much surplus funds for consumption, and cannot support a large enough R group, resulting in insufficient monetization of the game.
Observing the successful Japanese manga IP in the domestic market can also support this view. "The King of Fighters" and "Hokage" are all popular IPs twenty or thirty years ago, and the audience of this batch of IPs is now entering middle age with higher average income, stronger spending power, and can support larger revenue with a smaller user base. In contrast, many national comic IPs have only been born for less than ten years, and they do not have such a user composition. This poses a problem for IP monetization.
Although the IP of "Douluo" has been born for more than ten years, the average age of animation fans accumulated since 2018 is not large, and the payment habits and payment ability are not small differences from the middle-aged book fan group. At the same time, this group of young people has been exposed to more games since childhood, and they are more picky about the quality of games. In addition, they have been watching 3D animation, and they also put forward higher requirements for adapting games at the art level. This requires the production team to choose 3D character modeling and full 3D art graphics with higher research and development costs.
During the interview, the producers kept stressing to us that they attach great importance to the quality of the game, and the first thing is the high demand for the quality of the art. "Soul Master Showdown" played the slogans of "true restoration of the original plot of the novel" and "exactly the same as the animation" when it was served. The game adopts character modeling that is highly consistent with animation, and strives to make the modeling and action models of key characters such as Tang San and Xiao Wu consistent with animation performance.
In addition to the modeling of real-time calculus, the game also adds a number of CG animations that recreate the classic plot of the original work. These animated clips are a great way to evoke a lot of empathy with fans and enhance the immersion of the game.
High-quality art performance is not only used in the game, but also used by 37 Interactive Entertainment for publicity. For example, the PV of the game's Qiancheng Xue character has 10+ million views on station B. Open service PV and Jackie Chan endorsement videos have millions of hits.
High-quality game art combined with the publicity that 37 Interactive Entertainment is good at, so that the game will enter the forefront of the best-selling list when it is launched. It can be said that it is the best result of national comic IP adaptation games in recent years.
How to overcome the long-term sluggish operation of IP adapted games?
Thanks to the influence of relevant IP among young people, it is not uncommon for adapted games to gain a good voice in the opening server. The problem encountered by the adaptation of games by national comic IP is that this popularity is always unsustainable. Many games tend to be at the peak of the server, and once they stop publicizing, their popularity will quickly decline.
When "Soul Master Showdown" was just launched, there were also voices that believed that the performance of the game depended on the fact that Sanqi Interactive Entertainment was good at traffic management, and the follow-up would be weak. However, now nearly two years later, "Soul Master Showdown" has hit back against this statement with a stable best-selling score. It can be seen that "Soul Master Showdown" has found a solution for the long-term retention of national comic IP adapted games.
The producer's explanation for this is simpler than expected: that is, to serve the target fans of the IP with high-quality content.
In order to serve IP fans well and strengthen the sense of substitution, the game has put a lot of effort into restoring the plot of the original work. According to the producer: users of web novels will naturally assume the protagonist and hope to become the protagonists of the story. Therefore, when they design the single-player content of the game, they will advance the plot of the game from Tang San's perspective. In terms of game content, priority will be given to players to do a good experience of single-player content.
In terms of numerical growth, the game also revolves around this idea. For example, at the beginning of the game, Tang San is only a three-star character, but as the plot progresses, he will gradually be promoted to a five-star character. Magic artifacts related to the main story will also be given to players in the form of story or event rewards.
This kind of game design can not only allow players to have a sense of purpose, but also meet the sense of substitution of IP fans and players to the protagonist. It is a good design means to retain fan users.
From the world view setting to the details of the scene, "Soul Master Showdown" is trying its best to restore the atmosphere of the original work and meet the player's imagination of the "Douluo" world. For example, the game reproduces well-known scenes such as "Shrek Academy" in the game, allowing players to hunt treasures freely in the original title, which enhances the immersive experience well.
The game also did a lot of details to restore the original character settings, such as setting an action model for the money-greedy Dean Flanders.
For example, the game makes the rabbit run to the blue silver grass in the loading interface and so on.
Although these details are small, they are enough to make fans smile, and they can subtly play a good fan retention effect.
In fact, these designs are very similar to the methods commonly used in two-dimensional games. In the early years, there was no money for research and development of two-dimensional games, so producers loved to work on details to establish a connection with fans, and when done well, they often produced miracles.
When we talked about the topic of quadratic elements, the producer also admitted: "'Douluo' users are mainly animation users, so the main users will have some 'two-dimensional' characteristics." ”
However, on the question of whether "Soul Master Showdown" draws on the production ideas of two-dimensional games, the producer still expressed his opinion, he believes that today's two-dimensional players have experienced the baptism of many two-dimensional games on the market, and have become highly mature, and it has become very difficult to rely on the "love" of the fan group to stimulate consumption.
Therefore, the production team of "Soul Master Showdown" did not follow the commercialization idea of two-dimensional games, but gave priority to doing a good job in the commercialization model that they are good at. It can also be seen from the product form that although "Soul Master Showdown" will have some two-dimensional paid designs, such as the fashion of popular characters, the more core business model is a mature turn-based numerical system.
It's just that the game is very restrained in this numerical system, especially in the early days of the game, the producer tries to dilute the numerical system. The producer's explanation for this is: "Because an IP sentimental user cannot play our game for the social competition of online games." Therefore, I think that non-online game IPs to play games in the direction of a simple value is not a good choice. ”
Talking about this, the secret of "Soul Master Showdown" to do a good job of long-term retention is also clear at a glance. The producer does not innovate for the sake of innovation, but uses the ability to the extreme. Of course, this is also inseparable from the long-term cooperation between Sanqi and Tencent Video, the IP party of "Douluo", and China Literature Group.
For adapted games, a major role of well-known IP is to reduce the marketing expenses of the game, so that the game can acquire users with a lower finished product and obtain better retention. As for how much the retained users will eventually convert, it depends on the quality of the game itself. From this point of view, the market performance of "Soul Master Showdown" can be regarded as breaking the stereotype of "national comic IP is poison". The toxic one is often not the national comic IP, but the quality of the game itself. "Soul Master Showdown" proves that as long as the product itself is of excellent quality, the adapted game can still stand and earn money.
National comic IP is on the eve of the reshuffle
At the end of 2018, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment's R&D brand Sanqi Game proposed to transform, and this company that started with page games is developing in the direction of "boutique, diversified and global", and "Soul Master Showdown" is the first product under this strategic idea transformation.
In addition to the products such as "Douluo Continent" H5 and "Soul Master Showdown" that have been launched, they are also developing the "Codename: Douluo MMO" project.
According to the producer, the project is still in its early stages. They hope to make breakthroughs in combat and map exploration, as well as original storylines. They want to make good use of the core settings of martial souls, soul rings, and soul beasts to make a game experience on a new foundation that is more in line with the imagination of "Douluo" players.
In fact, in addition to Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, the "Soul Street: Born to King" released by the mobile game at the end of last year performed well, and on May 11 this year, another national comic IP adaptation mobile game "New Bad People" was also officially launched in public beta. More and more manufacturers are retargeting the track of national comic IP adaptation.
With the issuance of version numbers returning to normal, national comic IP copyright owners are now paying more and more attention to the long-term operation of IP, and no longer pursue the product idea of making a wave of quick money. This also forces mobile game manufacturers to take the road of industrialization.
In Japan, a major IP country, there are various means of monetization of well-known IPs, and mobile game adaptation is only the end of its industrial chain, and manufacturers can exchange low-cost development for a long-tail income. In contrast, the monetization methods of national comic IP are not so rich today, and mature mobile games have become the best monetization means at present. This is an important reason why national comic IPs have always paid attention to adapting mobile games.
Japanese mobile games don't need to be boutique because they have a mature console game industry. Due to historical reasons, Chinese games have not developed a mature stand-alone/console market like the West, and the task of quality naturally falls to mobile game developers.
It can be said that on the road of national comic IP adaptation of mobile games, the demands of players, IP copyright owners, and game manufacturers have gradually become unified. This will naturally promote mobile game products with 3D graphics, high image quality, and heavy content to gradually replace the old products on the market.
Between the old and new iterations, it will naturally be the time when the old king withdraws and the new king ascends the throne. As for who can finally obtain this reward, it depends on whether the products produced by each manufacturer can capture the hearts of IP audiences.