The rolling Yangtze River is passing away, and the waves are sweeping away the heroes. In history, it can be said that there has never been an era in which China has not only been talked about by ordinary people in its own country, but also fascinated Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Vietnam for more than a thousand years.
Because of this, the ancient battlefield of "Three Kingdoms" has always been a battleground for major mobile game manufacturers. However, with the increasing phenomenon of homogenization, many works appeared on the market like a flash in the pan and then quickly disappeared. Therefore, in the eyes of many people, "Three Kingdoms" has become a "rotten" IP, and in the past two years, there have been few new games with the theme of the Three Kingdoms.
But is this IP really worthless?
According to the "2023 Mobile Game Industry IP Development Report" recently issued by Gamma Data, a third-party data agency, in January ~ September 2023, China Mobile (99.190, 1.29, 1.32%) game IP market revenue accounted for 77.7% of the mobile game market, reaching 132.206 billion yuan, of which domestic IP products accounted for 60%. The revenue of China's original IP mobile game market in the first three quarters was 72.629 billion yuan. The overall number of mobile IP users exceeds 420 million.
These data mean that IP-adapted games can still be favored by many players in the industry, and the Three Kingdoms IP, which can be called "the loudest IP and the highest revenue of all IPs in China", is also dynamic.
In such an environment, how should the traditional "Three Kingdoms + Strategy" mobile game cater to the market, and how to attract core users in the fiercely competitive game industry? In this regard, we talked with Wang Miao, the producer of "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream", standing in the position of a start-up company, he analyzed from a professional perspective how "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record" can compete and break through, as well as the market competition and future development of card games.
Light games are all the rage, but what's the value of heavy cards?
At the beginning of the interview, Wang Miao first talked about his understanding of the current card game track and his personal entrepreneurship based on the current environment. For the future of the card game track, Wang Miao seems to be more optimistic about light card games, on the one hand, he believes that with the improvement of social civilization, light content will be more popular, on the other hand, the content of heavy card games is too difficult to develop and operate.
"I think hardcore cards are going to be very challenging in the future, and from a development standpoint, they need to have enough content to support gameplay in the first place. This comes with a huge amount of work. If you don't have enough resources, you won't be able to solve even the most basic amount of content. Therefore, we often see many card games being eliminated from the market after being launched for a short period of time. Because they often rely on direct and brutal iteration to further accelerate content consumption, resulting in the game not having the possibility of medium and long-term operation. Wang Miao said with some embarrassment
"On the other hand, the gaming market is changing very quickly, and three years ago, we saw a lot of pure buying products on the best-selling list. Today, most of them have become big DAU casual competitive products. Heavy-duty card games, on the other hand, tend to have a long development cycle due to the large amount of content they need. This requires the R&D team to constantly follow the pace of the times to make dynamic adjustments. But this is very difficult to do, and for 99% of R&D teams, this ability is not available.
It's hard to find card games on the current best-selling list
However, this does not mean that light card games will stabilize the heavy card head, from the perspective of the game's long-term operation, although light card games can allow users to get more cool in a very short time, but often lack depth and precipitation in content. Players can be easily attracted, but naturally they will be easily lost. In contrast, when the R&D team overcomes various difficulties and polishes a heavy card game with gameplay and depth of content, its value will naturally be bought by players, and it will perform better in terms of retention and activity.
After three years of overcoming unimaginable difficulties in the development of light card games, Wang Miao and his team also recognized the unique value of heavy card games, and after three years of overcoming unimaginable difficulties in the development of light card games, they aimed at the heavy card track and brought "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record" to the front of the stage.
Anchoring "Strategy + Social", "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record" is a heavy card that rushes against the wind
For the choice of this track, in addition to the recognition of the value of heavy cards, Wang Miao also said that this is largely related to his previous personal experience. Before becoming the producer of "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record", Wang Miao was already a senior practitioner who has been deeply involved in card games for 12 years. The previous "Legend of the Three Kingdoms Killing Famous Generals" was written by him. It is based on this personal background that he seems to empathize with the needs of a strategy card player more than anyone else, and how to do a good job in the theme of "fatigue" in the game circle - the Three Kingdoms.
Some time ago, the national server of "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record" also opened the test
In Wang Miao's view, card games like "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record", especially heavy card games, want to fight their way out of the encirclement, their core competitiveness lies in two points - "strategy" and "social".
At the strategic level, Wang Miao said that when building strategy, they pay more attention to the fun of the underlying strategy than the strength of the lineup.
"When we are doing game strategy, we want to show the players the fun side rather than the strength of the lineup. Under this line of thinking, we only do the underlying strategy structure. Then let the players combine and match to invent and create, which is the core idea of our strategy. ”
This is also evident in the game, where the Heroes faction has created three different skill status settings. Burn can cause damage, poison can cause control, and Freeze can heal. Burn & Poison, Burn & Freeze, Poison & Freeze can create new combo status effects. After building such an underlying structure, Yunmenglu does not impose too many restrictions on how players can use them. Instead, players are encouraged to build their own lineups and explore collocations. These three different states are like the three primary colors of red, yellow and blue in real life, and in the process of combining, find more fun.
At the same time, it allows players to focus more on the strategy line of experiencing the game, and in the common character development line of card games, "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record" has also made multi-faceted changes.
First of all, in the multi-character development line of traditional card games, the development of characters, weapons, etc. is mounted on the character, when players get better characters, or want to build different lineups, experience different strategies, players often need to re-train the characters, which undoubtedly increases the player's playing cost, and also allows players to spend more time on resource allocation and query strategies when resources are tight, and it is difficult to focus on strategic content.
Therefore, "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record" has adopted the form of "cultivating a binding grid", whether it is the training degree of the character or the training degree of the weapon, it is bound to its position, and when the player changes generals/weapons, etc., it realizes zero-loss inheritance. This greatly reduces the amount of time players spend on the development line, allowing them to spend more time building a roster strategy.
In addition, in the past heavy card games, in the process of continuous iteration of characters, game manufacturers often let the combat power of new characters crush the old characters in the past in order to get more benefits, and even constantly assign new qualities, new levels, and so on to generals. This also makes it a common phenomenon among players who don't play for a while, and come back to find that the characters they have worked so hard to cultivate in the past are easily crushed by other people's new characters.
In "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record", in order to allow players to focus more on strategy rather than blindly pursuing card quality iteration, Wang Miao made the innovation and iteration of new generals more focused on the skill level, bringing players more changes in strategy rather than generating combat power and attribute crushing.
This also makes the energy and resources spent by players more "valuable", and will not lose their meaning because of the iteration of the general. Taking the Vietnamese server that was launched earlier as an example, after more than 7 months of opening the server, the red generals obtained by players can still play as the main lineup.
In addition to strategy, Wang Miao also summed up a set of successful methodologies in terms of the social attributes that were easily missing in heavy card games in the past. "Most card games tend to have their own lineup on the main screen, which is a big lack of sociality. Our team felt that since we wanted to socialize, we had to make it possible for players to feel the "lively" atmosphere.
"So, we created a main scene on the main screen of the game, where players can see each other, just like in real life, people need to socialize face-to-face, in this form, even if you don't do anything, you can still feel the lively atmosphere, I call this kind of social interaction, which is common in MMOs, but few people do it in cards. “
In addition, at the gameplay level, "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record" has also added a lot of activities with the nature of player competition, such as "alliance struggle" and "cross-server racing". These events also promote social interaction between players through the fun of their individual gameplay and the rewards of the event, which bring players together at specific points in time.
With the continuous implementation of these two strategies, "Three Kingdoms Cloud Dream Record" has achieved good results in the previously tested Vietnam region, and has basically been able to maintain a long-term stable performance of about 30 on the best-selling list, and its half-year turnover can be 5 times that of the first month. In Southeast Asia, where the public beta just started in December, revenue remained strong and stable.
Game producers need to evolve like Digimon
At the end of the interview, we talked about some of the issues that practitioners may be concerned about as a game producer:
First, if you want to become a producer and develop your favorite game, what are the difficulties?
In my idealistic thinking, game makers come out to make games independently, largely because they want to build a game they love. But in this regard, Wang Miao poured a basin of cold water without hesitation.
"I think 99% of producers will never be able to develop a game they love in their lifetime. Because the games they want to do may be more inclined to the little beauty in their hearts, and they are more spiritually oriented. But this is often not in line with the logic of capital. ”
In other words, for a start-up company, or a game producer who has just come out on his own, due to the need to face game competition and company investment, in the current game industry, the bigger problem is how to survive than the pursuit of the game category that he likes.
Just like at the beginning of its establishment, Wang Miao also held a heart to pursue freedom and pursue higher and farther development. The goal of founding the Sword and Poetry Network is glorious and great, ideal and just. At that time, Wang Miao had a strong idealism and wanted to build a platonic ideal country company. But after experiencing the polishing of the market and reality, the situation slowly got out of control. Today, the company's goals are simpler and pureer, more pragmatic and more down-to-earth.
Wang Miao said that from his personal experience, in the past three years of development, the biggest challenge encountered was in the use of resources. Due to the nature of the game, it requires a huge amount of content, and as a startup, the resources at hand are extremely limited. Only by ensuring the accuracy and rationality of requirements can we reduce unnecessary waste of resources and improve R&D efficiency.
As a game producer of a start-up company, Wang Miao also needs to do a lot of things personally, all the development of the game, gameplay, skills, numerical logic structure, and even more than 80% of the optimization points need to be initiated and checked repeatedly. Wang Miao also followed up on the selection of game music, "I personally prefer to listen to some pure music in Chinese style, so in Yunmenglu, all the music is based on my own needs to feedback and follow-up"
"Do you have any advice for students who are in the industry and want to move into the direction of game producers?" I asked at the end of the thread.
He thought for a while and gave the author an unexpected answer-
"First, if you want to be a producer, you must play more games and listen less to the nonsense of industry bigwigs. Second, be sure to think deeply, learn quickly and change. Just like Digimon, it's constantly evolving.
转载开白请联系：jhm999998
Industry exchanges/breaking news/business cooperation/contributions: add WeChat zhizuen95