Journey Games may have had its best year in 10 years.
Every time I look out for something new on the iOS bestseller list, I always ignore board and fishing games. They are always less "games" and less informative.
However, it is undeniable that chess and fishing are very profitable, especially in the game of travel. According to SensorTower, Tuyou Games has entered the TOP30 of the global revenue list since November 2021, mainly relying only on the game "Fishing Battle", and this product ranked in the TOP20 of SensorTower's domestic revenue list during the same period.
At the same time, the game is gradually expanding to other tracks. Recently, the company launched a WeChat mini game "Cishin: Awakening of Light", which ranked sixth on the best-selling list of mini games.
Now this chess and card manufacturer seems to be eating at the same time in the old and new categories, while stabilizing the basic plate, on the other hand, it has also achieved good results on the new track. If there is any methodology in common between the two tracks, it is probably the sensitivity of market movements.
Eyeing the explosive gameplay
Tuyou Games came from board games, and it was not until 2017 that the team in charge of the mini game section was formed, which is the 6th year of layout. Over the years, Tuyou Games has not been innovative in mini-games, but at least when there is a hit in the market, it will be quickly perceived.
The gameplay prototype of "Subgod: Awakening of Light" is based on the once popular "Legend of Slime", which was once popular overseas, and adopts the gameplay of placing RPGs. Characters in the game will automatically attack enemies, and players need to spend gold to improve their attributes, and there is basically no threshold for operation in the process.
The game is not much different from "Slime Legends" from core gameplay design to mining gameplay, copy design, card drawing system design and other links. The monetization method also adopts the hybrid monetization of advertising + in-app purchases, and players can get a limited-time buff effect by watching ads.
"Slime Legends" was developed by South Korean manufacturer LoadComplete and launched overseas in August last year. According to data.ai and Appmagic, the game has accumulated $50 million in in-app purchases and 20 million downloads as of April this year. And according to estimates by foreign game design experts, in-app purchase revenue accounts for less than 40% of the game, and advertising revenue still accounts for the majority.
In other words, "Slime Legends", as a prototype of a popular mini-gameplay from overseas, also has the opportunity to replicate the same hot results in the domestic market.
The mini-game track has always been about execution. In fact, the company that fancy this gameplay prototype is not only a game company, as mentioned before when introducing Polk City, that it has a placement RPG "Grinding Mushrooms", which basically uses the same gameplay framework, but does not open the function of in-app purchase payment.
In contrast, the game is not an early starter. According to DataEye's data, "Sub-God: Awakening of Light" has gradually increased its purchase volume in the past month, focusing on the "no need to hang up" mini-game feature. If you look at the recruitment information of the two-year Journey Game, you will find that the game "Subgod" was mentioned at that time, and it is speculated that the company officially launched it after making changes to the gameplay.
Tuyou Games did not start out in the development of medium mini games. At the end of 2017, WeChat Mini Game was launched, and the company soon opened a branch in Shenzhen to follow up the research and development and distribution of Mini Game.
By the second year, Tuyou Games had made a lot of casual games, and its profitability was estimated to be relatively limited, and its main role may be to attract traffic to its fishing games ("Game Fishing", etc.). A few years later, WeChat Mini Games increased the regulation of fishing games, and the version of "Video Game Fishing" has been discontinued.
Perhaps this result was foreshadowed in advance, or it may be that the company was not limited to the leisure category. At the end of 2018, Tuyou Games obtained the authorization of "Hulai Three Kingdoms" from Huai Technology and established a project for research and development, and the average daily stay of the game remained above 32% during the test period. As of September 2020, the highest daily turnover of the game is nearly 2 million, and the cumulative number of new users has exceeded 8 million, becoming the first successful product of Tuyou Games on the mini game track.
After that, Tuyou Games also wanted to get involved in some popular categories in the market, but I didn't hear of any results. In 2020, "Sword and Expedition" brought a boom in card placement, and the journey game followed up with a similar "Fengshen Scroll", adopting a turn-based development combat gameplay; At the same time, the game was also suspected of launching another placement card "Eternal Wings", and the official public account was renamed "Awakening of Sub-God Light" 3 months later, and the original Mini Program body was also occupied by the new explosive model.
At present, the main WeChat mini games under Tuyou Games also include "Kingdom Invincible" and "Three Kingdoms Boys", the gameplay prototype refers to the most popular WeChat mini game "King of Salted Fish", which also combines click attacks and card placement gameplay.
At least in the WeChat mini game track, skin changing really seems to be a feasible path. Now "King of Salted Fish" and "Mad Knights" are firmly in the top two of the best-selling list, and the former is similar to "Violent Legion" with 4399, "Fire Source War Chronicle" by Guangzhou Linkage, and "Leaping Boy" and "Mountain and Sea North Wilderness Roll" and other similar games in the latter, these games are ranked in the TOP50 best-selling list.
It's just that in the case of homogenization, Tuyou Games has not captured this highly competitive category. Instead, the company wanted to take advantage of the most lucrative blockbuster prototypes, and in March this year, it tested a traditional version of "King of Salted Fish" overseas. At present, the developer of this game, Crazy Games, has released this game in some markets such as the United States and Japan, but excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, which also gives Tuyou Games some room for reverie.
Caught the marketing boom
Chess and cards are the foundation of Tuyou games, and they are still an important revenue-generating category, and the core competition point lies in user grabbing. Either rely on the increase in purchase input, or find new ways to reduce costs and more efficiency.
For narrow chess and card categories such as landlords and mahjong, live streaming is a new model that chess and card manufacturers are the first to pay attention to.
The "Tuyou Dou Di Owner (full name< Tuyou Dou Di Owner (Competition Version) >)", which is the main product of Tuyou Game, was launched in 2020 and took more than a year to gradually increase in volume, and has remained in the top 100 of the iOS best-selling list since the beginning of 2022. According to QuestMobile's report, the compound growth rate of the DAU of "Tuyou Dou Landlord" reached 21.4% last year, ranking 8th on the dark horse list.
When Douyin live streaming purchases began to rise in 2022, "Tuyou Dou Landlord" was one of the earliest products to enter the game, before which the official account of the game mainly used "endgame" as promotional content, and by the beginning of 2022, it would turn to producing live slices of anchors. In April, "Tuyou Dou Landlord" and Douyin launched a "DouGame" super broadcast cooperation, aiming to incubate game anchors.
Soon, the Douyin index of "Tuyou Dou Landlord" rose, and the popularity of the live broadcast also soared rapidly. As of the middle of last year, "Tuyou Dou Di Lord" ranked second in the list of the highest number of game live broadcast buyers, and it was also the best performing Dou Di Landlord game product at that time.
Compared with similar products, "JJ Dou Di Lord" has better results in live broadcast purchase volume and occupies the first place in the category, while "Tuyou Dou Di Lord" has entered stable operation, and now it is probably comparable to Tencent's "Happy Fighting Landlord".
From the mahjong category, we can better see the layout of the live broadcast purchase volume of Tuyou games. The company's two main mahjong games include "Tuyou Mahjong" and "Regal Mahjong", the former was launched in 2016 (it was removed from the shelves in 2019 for a year) and is currently outside the 500 best-selling list of iOS; The latter was launched in 2020, ranking in the top 100 best-selling list after nearly a year, and currently falling between 100~200.
Both games have their own live broadcast official names "Doupai Legend Cup" and "Mahjong Matchless Cup". The live content of the two is similar, combining beautiful anchors and live mahjong groups. The main difference is the fixed live broadcast time period, which is 14~18 pm and 20~24 pm, respectively.
These two accounts are open all year round except for the 3-day holiday of the Spring Festival. According to the data of Cicada Master, the cumulative number of viewers every month in the past six months has reached tens of millions. Among them, "Mahjong Wushuang Cup" has 30 million ~ 50 million cumulative viewers in the past three months, and the cumulative users of the Douyin platform exceed 3.42 million (compared to "Tuyou Mahjong", which has 555,000). Live popularity and game performance do correspond.
In order to ensure that there are enough anchors to expand its coverage, Tuyou Games has opened offices in various places to recruit anchors. For example, in August 2021, the Changsha live broadcast base was established, the initial team was only 2 people, at that time the live broadcast purchase volume had not even risen, last year the Changsha team expanded to 40 offline (excluding other anchors and other partners), and the office expanded from 100 square meters to 300 square meters.
Last year, Tuyou Games set up a new live broadcast incubation base "Jiangxi Tuyou Century", set up an official account and continued to recruit anchors, and the current information directly hired by BOSS shows that the number of companies is between 500~1000 people, which is comparable to the scale of a medium-sized game company.
These places have a background of local board games, such as Mango Interactive Entertainment and Caohua Interactive in Changsha, and Zhongzhi Technology, which has hit the Hong Kong stock market listing in Jiangxi. Now when it comes to live broadcast purchase volume competition, these non-first-tier cities with lower labor costs may become a new battlefield for anchors.
In addition, road games can also be said to be the best in the field of fishing.
The earliest "Journey Fishing" was launched in 2017 and has remained stable in the iOS best-selling TOP200 since 2019; "Fishing Battle", which was launched in 2020, is the main product, and it has been stable in the top 20 of the iOS best-selling list since February last year; The new product "Recreational Fishing" in 2022 has also remained in the top 100 best-selling list since September.
Increasing the intensity of buying volume is one of the important factors. According to AppGrowing, Fishing Wars 3D rose from No. 10 on the promotion list in 2021 to No. 8 in 2022, and it is also the only game to be on the TOP10 list for two consecutive years. This campaign continued until Q1 this year, when "Fishing Battles" and "Recreational Fishing" ranked 2nd and 3rd on the list.
The Spring Festival stall is especially the time when fishing products want to seize. According to data from third-party platforms, "Fishing Wars" ushered in the climb of monthly active users for two consecutive years during the Spring Festival, and remained at a stable level after the holiday, with monthly active users reaching the level of 4 million at one point. Gamma Data estimates that games will grow by more than 150% year-on-year in Q1 2022, raising revenue to a new level after accumulating users.
Since the chess and card category has become a strict target, the version number has become an important constraint. The version numbers of Dou Di Lord's and Mahjong products have shrunk significantly, and the version numbers of fishing products have not been collected since the 2018 version was stopped, including the newly launched "Tuyou Recreational Fishing" of Tuyou Game, which also received a version number in 2017.
On the one hand, it has entered the stock competition, and on the other hand, competitors are also withdrawing. "Fishing is Coming", developed by Ligang Interactive Entertainment and published by Tencent, experienced a decline in revenue in 2021 and was removed from the shelves in early 2022, and then did not enter the fishing category again, and the remaining market was divided by fewer manufacturers.
I didn't think about just making chess and cards
Tuyou Games was founded 10 years ago and became a chess and card company after the launch of "Tuyou Landlord Standalone Edition". Founder Li Jianliang helped make Kunlun Wanwei a scale that could be listed before starting his business, and Cai Qi, vice president of products, was once the main planner of Competitive World and the head of chess and card products in Lianzhong World, and it is not surprising that the company had a chess and card label at the beginning of its establishment.
What is less known is that Tuyou Games not only wanted to do chess and cards, but also thought about crossing over to other categories in the early days of its establishment, but the results were really limited.
The first thing to mention here is another company, Fingerdance, which was founded in January 2014, a year after Tuyou Games was founded. This company is not directly related to Tuyou Games in terms of equity, but from the perspective of comprehensive network information, it is more like a divided studio.
At the end of 2014, Finger Technology launched the first Western fantasy SLG "Legend of Empire", and the best performance was in 2015~2016, fluctuating between 150 and 1500 on the US iOS best-selling list.
In 2016, the company launched "The Ruins" with similar gameplay and different themes, but at this time the gameplay has gradually lagged behind, and in the same year, products such as "War and Order" of shellwood software appeared on the stage. "The Ruins" failed to relay as scheduled, and after a year of operation, it was removed, and "Legends of Empires" never entered the 1500 best-selling list of iOS in the United States.
Legend of the Empire
In 2018, Zhidong Technology launched SLG's new work "League of Lords", and the game was not released in the US market, and its performance in other regions was mediocre. At present, the company's SLG products have been removed, and the company has gradually faded out of SLG competition.
Tuyou Games has also tried to go overseas with elimination RPGs, such as testing "Monster Slayer", which has not yet been launched. The only revenue-generating "Three Kingdoms and Puzzles" will be launched overseas in 2020. It is worth mentioning that this game is named "One Finger Battle Group" in China, and has just passed the software book registration of the mini game version this year, perhaps wanting to return to China to play its residual heat.
In recent years, Journey Games has focused more on the card game category, producing "Endless Journey" and "Magnum Quest", which have not achieved particularly impressive results for the time being.
In the past year, Tuyou Games has more clearly revealed its tendency to expand the game category.
For example, at the end of 2022, it acquired Xinhai Hanyou through its subsidiary. Xinhai Hanyou was previously developing a business strategy game "Huaxia Yingjielu", which was obtained and tested in 2021, but there is no new news so far, and it is not clear whether the project is under research.
For example, earlier Tuyou Games exposed a two-dimensional game "CogniVerse", and last year it publicly recruited talents in the field of two-dimensional fields. Tuyou Games applied for the relevant trademark registration, but after it was rejected, there was no follow-up action, and finally the game left only one PV. According to the announcement of the fan base in November last year, the original game project team members have been disbanded, and it seems that Tuyou Games is only a superficial taste of the two-dimensional field.
"CogniVerse"
At least it's certain that the company has never intended to live solely on chess and fishing products. After constantly preparing, the company ran a small hit like "Subgod: Awakening of Light".
epilogue
It took a year to expand from 800 in 2021 to 1,000. The company started with board games, and now it has achieved good results in other tracks, and it probably has more confidence to try differently.