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According to a recent report by Dataeye, we found an interesting thing. There are 7 female-oriented games in the Top 99 best-selling list of WeChat Mini Games, and the proportion of male and female users in WeChat game users has reached 50%, which means that female-oriented games are actually an untapped market in WeChat Mini Games.
Among the 7 female-oriented games, 3 of them are simulated business games, 1 is business games, and combined with the proportion of WeChat mini game category consumption in September and October this year, if you only look at the consumption of female-oriented games for WeChat mini games, the consumption of WeChat mini games is not high. However, the consumption scale of simulation management games increased by 1%, which means that female-oriented + simulation management games have a higher probability of obtaining results than female-oriented + other categories.
Among these 7 female-oriented games, we found that the highest ranking record of "Modding Wars" once entered the 6th best-selling list of WeChat mini games. So how did "Modification Wars" get a better ranking with the help of simulated management gameplay in the current WeChat mini game category, when women tend to be blue ocean for games as a whole?
The gameplay has long been traced overseas
"Modding Battle" is a 2-in-1 + simulation management women's game, and the 2-in-1 gameplay has actually been favored by some overseas users since 2021, including "Travel Town" released in February 2021 and published by British developer Magmatic Games, "Merge Gardens" by Futureplay, and "Gossip Harbor" published by Microfun in 2022 , the domestic WeChat mini game side has "Brave Fortress" that won the attention of the industry with synthetic gameplay in the first half of this year. It is understood that since its launch, "Travel Town" has received a total of 420 million turnover as of the first half of this year, while "Gossip Harbor" has earned 340 million and "Merge Gardens" has earned 290 million.
《Travel Town》
The background of the game "Modification Wars" is that the female protagonist ran away from home alone and moved into the warehouse after discovering that the male protagonist was cheating, and improved the living environment by constantly modifying the indoor rudimentary facilities. Players continue to synthesize items through the main gameplay, reach the synthetics required for the mission, complete the task to obtain stars, and upgrade and modify various scenes at home to improve the protagonist's living environment.
Ways to engage users
The gameplay advantages of "Modding Wars" lie in two points: coolness and obsessive-compulsive disorder. First of all, look at the coolness, "Modification Battle" in the single-game level through the "early synthesis to expand the area", "mid-stage crazy click to generate items", "late synthesis items to complete the task" to achieve coolness. By synthesizing to expand the area, constantly clicking to generate new synthesizes, with visual animations, and the slight vibration of the phone when synthesizing high-end items, since the way to achieve user decompression and easily achieve the goal creates a user impression. The level of items required for synthesis in the early stage, the number of stars rewarded for a single task, and the number of stars required to upgrade furniture in the early stage provide users with a sense of achievement.
In the process of completing the task and combining the two gameplays, there is a detail in "Modification Wars": when the user meets the requirements of multiple tasks when composing, the completion of the task can be submitted with one click, and the building upgrade button will appear in the task section above the main one after submission. If the building upgrade button appears at any time, or is only placed in the simulated business scenario, the user's behavior will appear as follows: 1. The user will return to realize the click after obtaining many stars at one time, so that the proportion of simulated business gameplay is too low in the senses. 2. From the perspective of the user's mind, it is impossible for the user to always remember the simulated business gameplay.
After reaching the submission task, you can submit it with one click to get stars, and the relevant red dot button will pop up after the stars meet the requirements of the upgraded building
Optimization ideas under approximate gameplay
From the comparison of the screenshots of "Travel Town", it can be found that although the two products have the same gameplay and similar framework, the distinction between the significant coolness is still relatively obvious. 1. Although they are all 9*7 nine-square grids, the upgrade values obtained by completing tasks are not as strong as those reflected in "Modification Operations". For example, in the early stage of "Travel Town", the minimum gold obtained in a single mission is 6, and the first upgrade of the building is 50, while the first completion of the mission in "Modification Battle" is about 50 stars, and the stars required for the initial upgrade of the building are 170. 2. During the gameplay of the two games, Travel Town has less space than Modding Operations. However, because the unlocked board space in Travel Town is linked to the level, before all the spaces on the board are removed, the player's sense of oppression brought by the less disposable space is more obvious. As can be seen from the screenshots of Travel Twon and Modding Battles, the unlocked space on the 9x7 board is 25 when the player reaches level 3, while the unlocked space for Travel Twon is only 17 when the account reaches level 6.
Comparing the unlocked space of Travel Town and Modding Wars, some of the space of Spider Silk in Modding Wars is still not counted as unlocked space
3. Due to the difference between the two games in the amount of unlocked space, "Travel Town" is not as high as "Modding Battle" on the click coolness and decompression side. The number of 2-in-1 upgrade links adopted by Travel Twon is similar to that of Modding Operations, but the core gameplay brings users more complexity than Modding Operations. Specific performance: When the user completes mission A and task A requires the player to synthesize an item with a level of 6 or higher, Travel Twon will have more rounds of clicking to generate a synthesis than in "Modding Operations".
In domestic mini games, due to the characteristics of "open and close" and "run out and go", the user's intuitive feeling of coolness when experiencing it for the first time not only affects the online time of D0, but also affects the player's re-opening rate of the game. In terms of these three changes, "Modification Operation" is undoubtedly more in line with the actual needs of users.
Create trouble to retain OCD users
As we mentioned at the beginning, in addition to the remarkable coolness of "Modding Battle", there is also "trouble-making" for obsessive-compulsive players. In all games, there will be a type of player who will click on the red dot when they see it in the game, and the inventory will be neatly arranged at a glance, and every time there is a little confusion, it will be sorted in time. The biggest difference between the 2-in-1 gameplay and the traditional elimination gameplay lies in this. If the 2-in-1 gameplay is only causing trouble for the player because the player manually generates a single compositor, the condition is not valid. The strategy adopted by "Modding Wars" and "Travel Twon" is relatively similar, but the details are different. Let's start with the same part: Both Modding Ops and Travel Twon use the strategy of "2 types of special synthetics will be generated from spawns of level 2 and above", and the second type of special synthetics has a low probability of appearing among the spawns. The following three figures illustrate each of these. Figure 1 shows the special composition of the water bottle in the quest panel, as well as the player's space and physical state before completing the quest. Figure 2 shows how many levels of the kettle composition are in the "water" type of composition, and where the corresponding product is, the tea set product can be used to form paper cups and water, and the paper cup will be used to synthesize coffee drinks, and water will be water drinks. Figure 3 shows the number of paper cups and water items that are placed in the empty space of the board after Figure 1 has passed the first round of creations.
For Figure 1-3 above, the solution is solved from a mathematical point of view.
As can be seen from Figure 2 above, the number of water cups that need to be synthesized for a single kettle in the task is 2^4=16, and the number of water bottles that need to be submitted for the task is 2, with the 1 level 2 water drink (regarded as 2 water cups) and 1 level 4 water drink (regarded as 8 water cups) that have appeared in the figure, so 22 water cups are actually needed. In Figure 1, the empty grid before the task is performed is 19, which is considered 20 for the purpose of calculation. Each composition in the game requires 1 HP, and ideally, if the player achieves the remaining 22 water bottles, and every 20 paper cups will generate 5 water cups, the player will need to consume 20*5=100 stamina. If 20 stamina is regarded as 1 round, there will be a scene in the actual situation of "Modding Operations": when the player has a probability of generating water cups, there is still a possibility of generating 0 water cups in 1 round of physical strength. In this process, not only is the player's rigid need for in-game physical strength and synthetic items born, but also a large number of "unwanted" items generated by the player in order to complete the task, and these "unwanted" synthetics occupy a lot of space before completing the task, thus forming "persecution-compulsive disorder". In addition, different spawns can spawn different amounts of crafting and have different cooldowns.
As for the difference between "Travel Town" and "Modification Battle", it is more about the consumption of first-level virtual items. The spawns that generate 2-in-1 items vary in terms of cooldowns and the size of the diamonds required to unlock, and the diamonds required are about 10 times larger than in Travel Town.
The CD time is different for different level 1 builds
Another difference is that some of the crafting in Modding Wars has the concept of "crafting spawns and then spawning". For example, in the Bread Machine of Modified Operations, the top-level concoction synthesized by the Level 1 Spawn Bread Machine is: Level 2 Bread Bread Spawn 16 times, after spawning 16 times, the Level 1 Bread Machine will enter the CD, and Level 2 Spawn Bagged Bread will produce 8 times before wheat products and other composites can appear. In addition, in the process of synthesizing level 1 spawns into level 2 spawns, there is a probability that a reward bubble will appear, and opening the reward bubble can only be achieved by consuming a large number of diamonds, and if the player does not open it within the time limit, it will become 1 stamina by default.
If the player does not consume diamonds to unlock the bubble, the bubble will default to 1 stamina after the time comes, and combined with the stamina required to synthesize the item, players often choose to consider spending diamonds to unlock it.
Combined with the above-mentioned above, it can be understood here that: when the user reaches "addictiveness", "Modification Operation" through the two characteristics of "physical strength" and "large consumption ratio of first-level virtual props", for users who have not paid through "special compounds required for the task - the maximum amount of special synthesis produced and CD - the remaining physical strength after the CD is reduced by advertising - the synthesis of special synthesis produces bubbles and consumes a large number of diamonds - the diamond is insufficient to form payment. The binary approach allows users to go from paying to watching ads, and from watching ads to paying.
The task difficulty curve needs to be relatively flexible
If the shortcomings of "Modified Operations" are more of a "jump" on the mission condition curve. The player upgrades the building at the first level to 160, and each upgrade increases by about 15-30 stars, while the starting number of stars in the building in level 2 reaches 290, and the building upgrade growth reaches 180, and the stars obtained by completing a single task are usually about 100-200 ranges.
In terms of level distribution, "Modification Battle" is distributed in chapters, which are currently divided into 18 chapters, saving 10 levels per chapter, and the current upgrade furniture required for each level is 5, and each furniture needs to be upgraded a total of 5 times. If 1 furniture upgrade is considered as a regular progressive level 1, it is roughly estimated to be 4500 levels. In this case, the difficulty of the first and second levels progresses, and the time required to clear the level, under the current difficulty curve, the actual time for players to clear the level is relatively long. Therefore, during this period, "Modding Wars" needs to use other methods to achieve the user's visibility of the completion of a single building in subsequent levels. In addition, the other gameplay aspects of the game require the player's account to reach level 15 to unlock. During the first 3 days of the game, the account level only reached level 12, which takes a long time to unlock Modding Ops for other gameplay, and the higher the level of the main gameplay synthetics, the sub-gameplay is actually needed to divert attention.
Iterative, social side is exquisite
According to our attention, "Modding Wars" has its own ways and methods on the social side and the game iteration side.
First of all, on the social side, "Modified Battle" has a good use and operation of the community function of WeChat Mini Games itself. "Modification Battle" allows sticky users to form a good long-term operation for users through a series of community operation methods of "free & with a certain consumption value reward - developing Xi to pull up the WeChat circle - redeeming codes, activity content output - guiding participation and sharing". Specific performance: Based on the massive demand for physical strength of players in the game every day, players enter the WeChat game circle of "Modification Wars" by liking and sharing, so that these discrete users gather in the WeChat game circle. We noticed that, unlike most similar games, the social features & gameplay of Modding Wars for Acquaintances can only be unlocked after reaching level 16 of the game account (it takes about 7 consecutive days of experience), and it is not available to players early in the game. In addition, the game's settings panel can pull up the player group (including the official communication group and the interplayer community) and the game circle, which not only facilitates the two-way, concise and efficient switching between the game and the game community, but also enables the game official to further directly communicate with users.
As for the actual effect of the in-game community, there are not a few posts that generate 6-figure exposure in this way, and the question here is: why are users willing to participate spontaneously? We found that the daily operation content of the game community of "Modified Operation" is divided into three categories: in-game activities, topical interaction, and creative interaction. These activities not only excavate the user Xi of female Internet users who are "willing to share (including spitting, mood sharing, posting, etc.)", but also make female users have a sense of participation and belonging to "Modification Battle", and "birth temperature" for users, such as pushing short dramas related to "Modification Battle", official posts inviting players to participate in the creation of follow-up level plots of "Modification Battle", daily participation in comments and sharing to receive awards, etc.
Women pay for games and are sophisticated
There are 4 ways to use the in-game Level 1 virtual currency in Modding Wars: speed up the opening of treasure chests, purchase advanced crafts to complete individual missions, buy stamina, and unlock extra spaces in the warehouse. First of all, the four ways of consuming virtual currency are the "most cost-effective" in different scenarios.
For example, in the early stage of the game, due to the relatively low-level treasure chests and direct purchase of items, some items need to wait for a certain amount of time, in this case, using gems to accelerate treasure chests and directly purchase items is the most cost-effective. For sticky users, when they continue to pursue synthetic coolness, the cost-effectiveness of physical strength purchase has been highlighted. In the later stages of the game, due to the large amount of materials needed for synthesis and the limited available space, players have a need for additional spaces to unlock the warehouse. Combined with the limited access to free gems and the low price of icebreaker paid related gift packages, users can form a paid icebreaker. On the continuous payment side, although female users have the Xi of "pursuing cost performance", this premise is limited to "relatively uncomplicated calculations and no need for multiple prop conversions".
It is relatively easy to form a cost-effective gift package
When there are a variety of products, under different conditions, players have the problem of calculation cost and time cost when comparing a single product with a combination of products for many times, so it becomes one of the motivations for the payment of combination gift packs. However, due to the need for "secondary conversion calculation" at this time, players will be willing to try or fully try different combination packages according to their actual payment ability and in-game stickiness.
When comparing the prices of multiple bundles under the conditions of time required for account upgrade, activities, etc., will players still be willing to "compare value for money" multiple times instead of directly trying to buy them?