If you go back in time to a year ago, it is estimated that few people would have thought that "Egg Party" actually stayed in the iOS best-selling list TOP30 for half a year.
"Egg Party" is undoubtedly a phenomenal product of NetEase. The company revealed in its earnings report and conference call that "Egg Party" has become the game with the highest number of daily active users in the company's history, reaching 30 million. SensorTower's data shows that the game has been stable in the top 10 domestic mobile game iOS revenue list since January this year, surpassing "Fantasy Westward Journey" and becoming NetEase's highest-grossing game on iOS, and also ranked second in the iOS mobile game MAU list for three consecutive months.
This blockbuster has become a benchmark for big DAU products, and may even have an impact on the research and development plans of NetEase's other products, including new and old products such as "Ace Racing", "Werewolf Killing", "Mission Zero" and other new and old products have been associated with UGC.
As for "Egg Boy Party", Ding Lei even said that he would operate like "Fantasy Westward Journey" for more than 10 years. In the big DAU game category, NetEase has successfully run a road with few competitors, and is still trying to break through the upper limit.
Blaze a trail
The reason why I feel that "Egg Party" is a dark horse is because there are not many games born under the banner of UGC, and even fewer successful games.
Speaking of the birth of "Egg Party", it is always inseparable from the gameplay prototype "Fall Guys". The two games have similar party game ideas, and both have the characteristics of high-frequency linkage products. In addition to the optimization of gameplay design and image, the most special thing in "Egg Party" is the ecological creation of UGC, which comes from the predecessor of the game - the game editor "Beaver Project".
"Egg Party" can enter the eyes of a large number of users, and UGC plays a crucial role. Even looking back now, it's surprising that the UGC of "Egg Party" has achieved such volume.
Fall Guys also added UGC to last month's new season, with 230,000 player-made levels popping up in the first two days of the season, which looks pretty popular, but the number of player returns or new arrivals is not obvious. To be honest, this is more in line with my previous imagination of UGC, including the predecessor of "Egg Party", "Beaver Project".
The last time the number of players picked up was because the game became free to download
At the beginning, "Beaver Project" positioned itself as "NetEase's first light game original community", and it was also equipped with the game editor "Dream Editor", which was put on the shelves for testing in 2019. The problem with this product is that there is no way to accumulate a traffic base.
At that time, due to the positioning of the editor, "Beaver Project" did not have a core gameplay, and the creative gameplay covered MOBA, self-propelled chess, etc., and the creators were not guided, and it was difficult for the product to determine a clear audience. In addition, "Beaver Project" carries the art resources of NetEase games such as "Inhuman Academy" and "Brawl Westward Journey" in the editor, and it cannot leave visual memory points itself.
"Beaver Project"
Finally, Project Beaver stopped testing in October 2021. The subsequent "Egg Party" intends to face these problems again - the positioning of UGC remains unchanged, the core gameplay is selected as an easy-to-use party game, and the IP image combines blind box elements to create a prototype Q cute egg boy appearance.
In a blog post on Game Developer last year, the article divided UGC into three categories: passive, editor and mod, which have higher creative freedom and a threshold for getting started. The emergence of "Egg Party" is actually a callback from "MOD type" to "editor type", covering as many basic users as possible by lowering the threshold for getting started, and also creating opportunities for going to a large DAU.
At the end of May 2022, the game was officially launched, ranking as high as the 50th best-selling list on iOS. This result was not particularly impressive, and the ranking soon slipped to around 200. According to the interview, the overall decline in data was within the expectations of the production team, because the game content was consumed and the UGC content had not yet grown.
Between mid-June and early August, Egg Party's iOS best-selling ranking stabilized at around 200, which presumably meant that the game had established a base at this time. With the change of season, "Egg Party" returned to the top of the iOS free list after 2 months of launch, coupled with the continuous stacking of UGC content, different player-made maps have been added to the event, and the game has maintained a certain freshness.
The follow-up game climbed to the top of the best-selling list and became one of the hottest games completely. On the road of UGC, "Egg Party" has successfully become "big", and just like the goal proposed by Ding Lei, they also hope to do more "far".
Stayed at the head of the market for half a year
Since its last report, Egg Party has remained stable – with no significant decline in results and no further progress.
The target group of the game is not unchanged in the slightest, and may become more explicit in the course of operation. At the beginning of the year, when looking up the user portrait of the game on Douyin, the proportion of female users was about 60%, and in recent months this proportion has risen to about 65%, and young users still make up the majority, and they are probably the core users of game revenue.
Since the explosion at the beginning of the year, the game has also maintained a consistent operation strategy, which can be seen from the choice of linkage objects and cooperative KOLs.
As previously summarized, the linkage objects of "Egg Boy Party" are mainly divided into trendy games, domestic animations, and NetEase's games, and the linkage frequency is maintained for about 2 weeks. In the past six months, the game has continued this linkage idea, while launching a linkage encore, it has also added new linkage objects such as "Gobao Special Attack" and "Hundred Ghost Kindergarten".
In the past six months, the type of game linkage has also had more choices. For example, Rosen, Alps, Fun Duoduo and the upcoming Michelle Ice City all belong to the linkage content of life, trying to resonate with players from the aspect of daily diet, and this linkage route is also on the same path as big DAU products such as "Peace Elite" and "Ball Wars". In other words, the game's user chassis is large enough, so it is necessary to cover a large number of users with more well-known linkage content.
In terms of KOLs, "Egg Party" still does not have a cooperative brand spokesperson, but most of the artists it cooperates with have covered many female users. For example, at the beginning of the year, Zhang Zining, a member of "Creation 101", was invited to sing the theme song, and in March, he and Lai Meiyun, who was also a member, were live broadcast and cooperated; Including actors like Liang Jie, Rapper TangoZ and the upcoming Vanida, these are also artists with a large female audience, and the live broadcast platform also covers mainstream communities such as Weibo, Douyin, and B station.
For the recent Egg Party, the challenge was not only to maintain the current results, but also to think about whether there was a chance to break through the ceiling.
Taking the Douyin and Xiaohongshu platforms as an example, the popularity growth of games stalled in February this year and entered a stage of stable operation.
According to Cicada Xiaohong's data, the average search popularity of "Egg Party" before January was about 100,000, and then increased to 700,000 in January and 2 million in February. Xinhong's data shows that the number of game-related notes and interactions stopped rising exponentially in February, and began to fluctuate periodically, peaking at the end of each week. The same trend of data fluctuations is also reflected in the TikTok index.
One of the reasons may be the gameplay of the game that started on Saturday, coupled with the release of "Egg Party" on Douyin as a game publisher plan, and the long-term release of note collection activities in Xiaohongshu. Under the comprehensive promotion, the community popularity of the game fluctuates within a certain level, and the upper and lower limits have not changed much.
During this period of operation, "Egg Party" has also made many improvements to improve the game experience.
For example, in terms of the UGC ecosystem, on the one hand, more functional components and stickers have been added, allowing players to create more levels with different tricks; On the other hand, the WeChat mini program "Eggshell" has been launched outside the game, players can not only get event information and check strategies, but also share and collect maps made by other players, and interact in the UGC ecosystem without opening the game.
For example, the game pays attention to the social needs of players, adding egg rings, photo albums and other functions, and will soon launch the manor system in the subsequent anniversary version, which may further increase the social attributes of strangers. Recently, NetEase also newly registered the WeChat public account "Egg Party News Egg", according to the introduction information, its role is to allow players to receive in-game chat information on WeChat, presumably to increase the activity of users through social attributes.
In order to further expand the brand influence and increase revenue, "Egg Party" also tried Douyin live streaming. NetEase has had experience in this area earlier, and in March this year, the sales of "Eternal Calamity" in a single live broadcast on Douyin exceeded 40 million. Last month, "Egg Party" registered the flagship store account "NetEase Game Egg Island" to sell game peripherals and currency recharge, etc., and the sales of gift packs and currencies have exceeded 10,000.
Backed by WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu and other platforms, "Egg Party" has successfully promoted the production of UGC content in the game and spread outside the game in the past period, and has now become an indispensable part of game operations.
For example, on Douyin, the platform shows that the number of people playing the game has reached tens of millions, and the number of downloads continues to stabilize at a certain level. Judging from the monthly Douyin game download index list released by DouGame, "Egg Boy Party" has continuously ranked in the TOP15 list since January this year, and only the Xian Xia MMO "Yin and Yang Double Swords" has also been continuously listed.
If you look at the recent iOS rankings, in fact, "Egg Party" gradually does not have the trend of dominance at the beginning of the year: it no longer occupies the top spot on the free list, and it has changed from TOP10 on the best-selling list to fluctuating between TOP20. Game operations are still stable, but they are also looking for the next growth point.
Ready to go to sea for growth
The overseas market will probably be the next big move of "Egg Party", and the company has also mentioned the globalization of "Egg Party" in its earnings report.
"Egg Party" has finalized overseas partners before its domestic launch, and will be jointly distributed by overseas publisher The 4 Winds Entertainment. According to the official website, the regions of cooperative distribution include Europe, America, South America, Australia, India, Africa and other regions, which are basically relatively unfamiliar markets for NetEase.
According to the Hong Kong App Store information, the game will be launched at the end of June, and there is not much publicity yet.
In addition, NetEase registered several Twitter accounts associated with "Egg Party" at the beginning of this year. This includes accounts in Japan, which is also NetEase's most popular overseas market. So far, the game has not revealed its plans to go overseas to Japan, and the reason for registering an account is mainly to link with "Wilderness Action" at the beginning of the year, presumably hoping to drive "Egg Party" to establish local awareness through explosive hits.
It is worth noting that in addition to the Twitter account in Southeast Asia, "Egg Party" has also established a separate account for the Thai market, plus the aforementioned Indian region will be distributed by The 4 Winds, and you can pay attention to whether the game will have differentiated operation ideas in Southeast Asia.
The game is also intended to be built around the UGC ecosystem. Before the trial operation, Egg Party was recruiting content creators overseas, and in addition to making game levels, they were also expected to be able to spread game content in overseas communities.
The impact of operational experience can be seen in the game's recruitment requirements for creators. For example, the official requires creators to publish at least 4 pieces of related content every month, and the most suitable update rhythm is one per week, which is consistent with the fluctuation trend of domestic community popularity.
In addition to covering mainstream platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, the recruitment campaign also includes the grass growing platform Lemon8. Lemon8 is similar to the overseas version of Xiaohongshu (ByteDance's app, formerly known as Sharee in Japan, renamed in 2021), the content is also based on beauty and trends, and there seems to be no obvious game ecology for the time being, and the application has received relatively good downloads in Japan and Southeast Asia.
It is not difficult to find that "Egg Party" is ready to replicate the successful experience in China in overseas markets. At present, the topic #eggyparty on TikTok has received 3.3 million views, and the topic #eggypartycontest about UGC creation has received 173,800 views, which is a platform for games to be more enthusiastic about creation overseas.
The biggest uncertainty of "Egg Party" going overseas mainly lies in the community ecology. Domestic Xiaohongshu has a case of game marketing before "Egg Party", but there is no precedent for overseas grass farming communities, including Twitter and Weibo's community ecology is not the same, whether domestic experience can be applied overseas needs to be further observed.
epilogue
"Egg Party" is one of the few large DAU products under NetEase, which is equivalent to taking a new path for the company. Although there is not much operational experience to inherit, "Beaver Project" also developed a PC editor at that time, which makes "Egg Party" still have a lot of potential.