01
Just two days ago, NetEase's "Seven Days World" filmed a large-scale PV, dissecting the unfairness of the industry in a circle - the game company made the planning go against its original intention for money, and tortured players to the point of disgusting.
In the past, NetEase was still mostly hard-hitting in marketing, saying "How good am I compared to competing products, it is right to choose me"...... But this time it's not the same, these people directly hung up the kryptonite behavior of the entire industry and scolded the rules for being unfair:
What does "Seven Days of World" specifically dissect unfairness? There are two key points:
1. Players want to play the game and have fun, as soon as they meet Kryptonian, they will be beaten as grandchildren. If you defend yourself a few words, you will be ridiculed by Kryptonite and the planner "no money to play a der", which is very popular.
Second, I also wanted to do a good job in the game at the beginning of the planning. But the boss thinks what's the use of not making money, so you start researching induced payment, staring at DAU, ARPU, and ROI every day and knocking on the calculator.
You don't want to do it, the boss tells you to get out of the house early, saying that some people do it, you do it, you can't come back after the data declines, you and your colleagues who opened champagne together to celebrate the flow of water, you have to get out one by one with the boxes in your arms.
This film was filmed realistically.
I knew a producer of an IP change project before, and there was light in people's eyes, saying that they wanted to be authentic, so they cut all kinds of paid ...... As soon as the game was launched, the boss was dissatisfied, the producer left, and all kinds of castration payments returned.
There are even more player cases. Before an SLG player said that he didn't charge much money, and now the game is really suspected everywhere in the late stage - the combat power is not enough, and he is treated as a burden - there has been a period of time when the game has been updated, and he is not even qualified to participate.
To put it bluntly, it's unfair that domestic games are too fond of it. But the reality is tired enough, why do players still come to the game to be dogs?
Therefore, NetEase is tearing the fig leaf and lifting the table - at the end of the short film, "Seven Days World" took office, saying that they only do three things: "fair, fair, or fucking fair".
However, I personally prefer the last sentence of the trial plan: I plead guilty...... But what can you do?
02
After all, anyone can draw cakes, but the trend is here, who can stand alone? And isn't NetEase one of the big manufacturers carrying the banner of F2P commercialization and leading the entire industry?
As a result, "Seven Days World" is trying to design two kinds of game fairness, one is commercial fairness and the other is gameplay fairness.
Talking about commercial fairness, the idea of "Seven Days World" is very simple: that is, de-numerization, so that all payments cannot affect the core gameplay.
Players will not be proud of the crowd and bully people just because they have money, nor will they be unable to move an inch because they have no money, and there will be content that they can't experience.
At present, there are only two places where games can spend money, one is the dress on the body, the interior decoration of the house, and the other is social resources (such as gifts to friends). Want to play pure SOC? In fact, you can play all the gameplay content without spending money.
This decision to de-quantify sounds very unconventional, right? But it actually has its own basis for judgment.
The first is player demand. "Seven Days World" is positioned as a global product, so it will use pure core gameplay + appearance payment to face users in more countries and regions. And recently, the player's patience with numerical payment has reached the limit, and if you do this again, you are unconsciously standing on the opposite side of the player.
The second is category foundation. "Seven Days World" is a SOC+ season gameplay: SOC needs a fair resource environment, and the season will continue to reopen...... Therefore, the game has limited value space, and if you force the value to pay, the underlying gameplay of the game will not be established.
The third is the paid trend. Recently, the proportion and data of appearance payment have been much better, proving that appearance payment can meet the benign social needs of players;
The point is that the appearance of this game is not the kind of fool. Look at the first test benefit just announced by the game, players can directly get a set of "Red Dragon Costume" for free......
Therefore, there are player needs, design foundations, market trends, and the SOC of "Seven Days World" has a more stable social relationship than short-game games, which gives them the confidence to do commercial fairness in numerical terms.
And in order to play fairly, "Seven Days World" waved a big knife, chopped the SOC into a season system, and then added a "Eternal Island" like Kinemori.
The biggest injustice of F2P games is actually time. After a long time, the old birds naturally accumulate and crush, and do not wait to see new players. New players come in and take a look, and the new version of the game is all for the old bird to test the combat power, so what am I playing?
Therefore, this knife has been changed to a season, firstly, there is less pressure for new players to enter the pit, and secondly, a single game naturally does not need high-pressure numerical verification;
Doesn't it sound sci-fi? I think it's outrageous anyway. How can this still be a little bit of F2P+SOC games, isn't it the model of many buyout games?
So if you want to do this, "Seven Days World" may need two foundations to support it.
The first is the foundation of large DAU, which uses the number of players to offset the risk of commercialization. In fact, since last year, many projects within NetEase have stopped worrying about "segmentation" products, and have turned to big DAU products, and "Seven Days World" is one of them.
On the other hand, the project also needs to have strong industrialization capacity to support user consumption. I won't brag about the investment of 100 people and billions, just one point: this game can be brought out in 2 months to bring out the actual demonstration of "Palu", and it is also arranged to be tested, in fact, it is very muscular.
Of course, to say a thousand things and ten thousand, the awesome "Seven Days World" is boasting about now is just preparing for the open beta. In F2P games, the long-term is the key.
However, these foundations for fairness are solid, and many designs do have the possibility of continuing into the long term. At least personally, I'm looking forward to seeing what the game looks like in the future.
03
It is said that there have been a lot of revolutionary games recently, and one by one they have come out shouting that they don't sell values, they want conscience, and they want justice......
The general environment is naturally a factor. First, in the past two years, the market has emphasized content and frequently despised numerical games, and secondly, after so many years, numerical products are indeed too mature, and it is really difficult for you to become famous if you roll in this circle.
Compared with the market, the revolution has a larger background: players have been grandchildren for too many years, and they are really tired - this may also be the underlying logic of the trial of "Seven Days World".
Domestic F2P has been doing it for so many years, and the most familiar thing is to induce payment, which is to make you uncomfortable, delay your time, and pull your combat power...... Then you finally realized at a certain moment: Damn, this grandson is not deserved, I want to spend money to be a grandfather.
F2P,It's understandable.,It's all zero-threshold experience game content.,I'll definitely do some inducement payment design;But the problem is,It's been inducing for so many years.,It's that value that makes people feel bad over and over...... Whoever has been a grandson for so many years and has been tossed for so many years will be tired.
And if you combine it with reality:
I have enough injustice and frustration in my work and life, I originally wanted to relax in the game, but when I went in to see, it was still the same three, six, nine, etc., and fed the dog fairly...... Can the player not be aggrieved?
Everyone also voted with their feet: you see that in recent years, paying for appearance has made as much money, and moreover, more and more players recognize IP, and even recognize manufacturers' brands, and are willing to pay for teams that can continue to produce high-quality content.
So when it came to the SOC, "Seven Days World" did it from the player's point of view, and then followed the trend.
However, this homeopathy is not an easy way to go.
Speaking of the basics, since the prosperity of the domestic game industry, the root is the F2P business model. The business model will affect product design and company decision-making, and for so many years, it has actually changed the talent structure of the entire industry.
Before, the senior management of a large factory discussed how to do 3A, and after discussion, I felt that I still couldn't learn from Europe and the United States to make a stand-alone machine, and I still had to do it towards F2P multi-person single-game products. Why? First, there is no talent, and second, you are still more than ten or twenty years behind others, what do you think?
And in the long run, non-numerical F2P products are too productivity-intensive, and the longer they go, the more money they have to invest in the product......
Take 10,000 steps back, you have talents, a boss to support your decision-making, and enough productivity to support long-term productivity, but the risk of this project is too great, how can you ensure that you can open the market to make everyone like you, win the big DAU, and eliminate the risk?
"Seven Days World" is panicking?
You see, even if they have the support of big factories behind them, have productivity, and successfully transform the SOC into a season system to promote a fair experience, they are still not sure. Take the co-research test as an example, they started the test in July last year, and they have tuned to the current level with hundreds of thousands of players.
SOC is not good for big DAU design. The threshold of this category is too high, not to mention the complexity of the core gameplay, the slow pace, and the special need for team experience (SOC single-player and multiplayer are completely different experiences), which will inherently screen out many players.
Therefore, in order to make pan-users playable, "Seven Days World" has been exploring the core design, removing or simplifying the parts that hinder players, and amplifying the core fun of the game.
The SOC+ season is even more troublesome. After all, SOCs are games that need to be built over the long term, and if you split them, it means that everything that players have built from scratch in each season will disappear and all their hard work will be wasted.
For people to be receptive to this change, you have to give each Season a theme that's interesting enough to convince people to start over, with maps, content, and mechanics that are different from what they've done in the past...... Even the pace of the player's experience of the SOC has to be different.
However, it is precisely because it is difficult to do that it makes it possible for "Seven Days World", which can persist, to succeed.
After all, the demand for fairness has always been there, whether it is a player or a planner, everyone needs the emergence of such a project. If NetEase's "Seven Days World" can be made, it may bring far more than just a hit.