What kind of community can help a mobile game that has been in operation for 10 years stabilize its player community, and boost it in the hot cycle to help the game rush to the top of Weibo's hot search?
Behind "Subway Surfers", iDreamSky's Fanbook has played such a role.
The mobile Internet traffic dividend is gradually disappearing, and the content marketing of the community is becoming more and more important and is becoming an industry trend. How to feed back games through reasonable community ecology and content marketing is a major issue that game manufacturers attach great importance to.
On December 14th, the Fanbook Community Ecology Conference, a sub-forum of the China Game Industry Annual Conference, was held in Guangzhou, attracting many game companies, academics and media representatives to discuss the development and transformation of the user community in the game industry.
The theme of the conference focused on the challenges faced by traditional community operations: slow information transmission and complex management processes. They discussed how the industry can leverage the potential energy of the community to improve the number and quality of users, and use AI technology to drive long-term development.
01 A new form of community in the future: AI that understands "words and looks" and can accompany players
It's not an unfamiliar concept to the gaming community, but the key to operation is how to connect the production and consumption sides of content.
At the conference, Guan Song, co-founder of iDreamSky, gave a detailed introduction to the latest development of Fanbook, as well as their understanding and practical operation of "double-end reconstruction".
Guan Song revealed that the number of new users of Fanbook in 2023 will be close to 10 million, and the growth rate will far exceed last year's level. In the second half of the year alone, 25,000 new communities were added, an increase of more than 10 times compared to the first half of the year. More than 5,000 content creators have been certified, an increase of 66% over the first half of the year. The content created by these creators has been exposed more than 1 billion times on major platforms.
Guan Song further explained how Fanbook achieves "double-end reconstruction". Fanbook was the first to put the concept of "channel community" into practice. Fanbook connects producers at one end and consumers at the other end, achieving efficient collaboration between the two ends through deep interaction and connection. Producers can focus more on producing high-quality products and providing high-quality services by listening to users' feedback and needs. Consumers can interact more directly with game manufacturers through the Fanbook community, find like-minded fans, and have the opportunity to deeply participate in the production and distribution process of games, and gain a higher sense of participation.
With the continuous expansion of Fanbook, the "channel" function has gradually gained the recognition and following of more and more game manufacturers.
At the conference, Fanbook officially launched a new version, which provides a comprehensive and efficient solution for common problems of game manufacturers in user operation, operation activity creation, content secondary creation and dissemination fission, AI empowerment, etc.
The new version of Fanbook will support the operation of 10 million users and achieve more efficient user reach. Through the construction of operation building block modules, it assists manufacturers to improve operational efficiency. Centralized creator management helps you create more hits. The rapid deployment of AI tools can achieve multi-dimensional application innovation.
This series of new features will not only provide a new interactive community for game manufacturers, but will also better connect producers and consumers. Fanbook quickly built an item mall page through building blocks, and then held regular promotions in the game's Fanbook community to guide users to participate. At the same time, it also supports the distribution model, so that game KOLs can help "bring goods" and further expand sales channels, and KOLs can also get revenue from it.
"The advent of the AI era has improved operational efficiency and enriched community gameplay, but developing an AI application requires a lot of industrial resources, including training models, GPU resources, etc., which is difficult for many vendors to get started quickly. Therefore, Fanbook can provide AI empowerment for the whole process of game development, especially game operation. Through lightweight training and personalized fine-tuning, you can quickly deploy a new type of AI-integrated game community on Fanbook.
Looking back at ChinaJoy, we introduce to you the common AI gameplay and cases on Fanbook. These include the use of AI capabilities to allow players to create content based on game IP, as well as AI public opinion management and monitoring, AI customer service, etc. In the latest version of Fanbook, we are intensively developing and testing it, hoping to bring a new ability such as AI companionship to all communities and partners.
Let me explain the concept of AI accompaniment. When players come to the community, they already recognize and love the game, the worldview, and the specific character. At this time, if the AI character of a game is deployed in the community, helps players solve daily problems in the game, or even becomes an emotional companion and connection in daily life, this will have a positive impact on the stickiness of players and enhance IP loyalty. We also look forward to making this capability available to our partners as soon as possible." Therefore, we are testing the characters of Calabichu internally as examples of AI companionship. Guan Song described it like this.
02 How to start from scratch and how to do a good job in community maintenance
iDreamSky has its own set of understandings about the establishment and operation of Fanbook, and other practitioners also have their own opinions on this work. In the subsequent keynote speech session, several practitioners also shared their views from the perspectives of "why to be a community", "how to build a community from 0 to 1", "how to achieve community user growth", and "how to use AI technology to empower the community to play more".
When talking about the necessity of being a community, Deng Yongjin, vice president of Pasya Technology, proposed that the development and distribution of game products should "start from community marketing".
He explained how to run the community in three aspects: daily promotion, question collection, and player classification management. Clarify the location of the target user and place targeted advertisements to effectively reach the target group. In addition, he pointed out that inviting core players to try each update helps to identify unforeseen problems, thereby increasing the certainty of R&D investment in the product.
Ke Tianyu, the project leader of Youtang Culture Community, shared his team's personal experience of building a Fanbook community from scratch and producing a replicable methodology that does not break and change. He pointed out that the effective "link" between the product and the user has a strong chain effect, although the benefits can be used to attract users to voluntarily join the community in the early stage, but in the long run, to maintain the vitality and stickiness of the community, it is still necessary to build through multi-dimensional construction such as sociality, entertainment, and high-quality content.
Under the transformation from the incremental market to the stock market, how to achieve stable user growth after establishing a community?
Yoyo, head of iDreamSky C1 Studio, shared the changes in the user's operation philosophy and logic, as well as the pain points in it. She said that in the face of a super-large user group, the Fanbook community has achieved a significant improvement in operational efficiency, reflecting the "easy to use" side. On the "useful" side, Fanbook has played a significant role in the growth of game publishing and product data, as well as on the size of the community and the growth of commercialization.
In addition, on the topic of combining AIGC, CEO Jiao Jun of Chengdu Thousand Layer Tower, believes that AI can effectively empower new ways to play community operations and improve the efficiency of community operations. He summarized the "16-word formula" for the success of "Flower Thousand Bone", and emphasized that the pain points of the industry should be solved through community operation. The AI empowerment of "Flower Thousand Bone" in the Fanbook community is mainly reflected in two aspects: IP-based content planning wonderful and diverse activities to attract community users to participate, and the exchange of game product data to realize the community's AI data analysis.
03 "Where have all the users gone?"
In the next roundtable forum, Zhuang Minghao, vice president of Qumaru Technology, Peng Xinlong, producer of the "Next Stop" series, Chi Jianqiang, founder of Mowen Xidong, and Grape Jun had an in-depth discussion on "Community Future: Where Have Users Gone?".
From the perspective of content development, Peng Xinlong said that the current users will be diverted with their interests and "follow the content shift". This model is very beneficial to small and medium-sized content manufacturers, and through the model of channels and communities, the products have more opportunities to operate when users follow the content
Their game used to have 40 or 50 QQ groups of 3,000 people, but as a small and medium-sized content developer, the management cost was not enough to carry out fine maintenance of the customer base, and a community that could be centrally maintained and provided with free templates was needed. This allows users to collect questions and provide activities.
Chi Jianqiang pointed out that the rising stars in the community business have solved this demand well and can "all in one". Manufacturers who can operate their own users and connect content creators and consumers well should have a good chance in the future.
At the same time, he also said that there is great potential for a private domain model like Fanbook:
"I build my own channel, and my own users can reach and play with them by themselves, which I think is a good form of private domain. Why do people want to set up WeChat groups? is because you can talk to users directly. The number of public accounts is also very large, but it is a matter of the public domain. The private domain can grow together for a long time and gain emotional value together. I don't think in the future, if you don't do private domain, you will almost not be able to play. ”
Zhuang Minghao pointed out from another perspective that "the boundary between gaming and social networking is becoming more and more blurred". The flip side of this phenomenon may mean that some large-scale party games can be a huge challenge for these social-minded third-party businesses.
"When the game itself has strong social and community capabilities, what will become of the value, meaning and space of the existence of a third party? This is a question that people haven't thought about much before, isn't it also a huge challenge? Maybe we will see it next year. ”
04 The annual awards were announced, continuing to empower the community ecology
Up to now, Fanbook has 10+ communities of 1 million people, 20+ communities of 100,000 people, and 100+ communities of 10,000 people. In order to recognize such enterprises that have made outstanding achievements in the community ecosystem, Fanbook has set up the Star of the Year Award for the first time, and 16 communities such as "Honor of Kings", "Egg Boy Party", "Subway Surfers", "Light Encounter", "Ball Battle", and "Love of Light and Night" have won this award.
Among the winners of the "Best Operation Community of the Year" honor, there are long-term operation communities with millions of people, new communities that have just started but achieved high activity, and communities that use AI technology to continuously innovate community gameplay.
Fan Yuewei, Vice President of iDreamSky and Head of Fanbook Products, presented awards to these community leaders, saying, "What you participate in is a hit, this sentence comes from Fanbook's vision of community ecology, only when new and old friends participate together and take users as the center, can we make popular games."