In the past two years, both the industry side and the player side have generally paid attention to the long-term dynamics of old products/head products. In the changing environment, these products are a bit like the anchor of the big ship of the game industry - to a certain extent, their changes are likely to symbolize the direction of the industry, and whether they are stable or not is also related to the confidence of practitioners and players.
But at the same time, everyone's understanding and analysis of these products is often superficial. Here can be taken as an example: its mobile game "Fantasy Journey to the West" has been online for 9 years, and most of the time it has been within the top 10 best-sellers, which is terrifyingly stable. When asked why, most people will say that it has formed a highly mature player base and game system, and it can't learn it if you want to.
This is indeed a no-fault answer. But you must know that even if the old product is stable, it is impossible to make money lying down. Behind these factors, there is another reason that is easily ignored by the industry: old products often know how to pay attention to the ideas and needs of players, and have formed a tacit understanding through long-term response.
On March 30th, the 9th anniversary ceremony of the "Fantasy Journey to the West" mobile game was just held, and various opinions were exchanged with players offline, ranging from a gameplay rule to a UI function. Less than three days later, the official listed these feedbacks one by one in the maintenance announcement, and attached solutions, promising to verify and optimize them within 4 months.
Looking at the whole announcement, it is the main "listening to persuasion". Being able to listen directly to the players, communicate with them face-to-face, and make detailed responses and commitments is already a rare thing for the game team. Nowadays, everyone likes to emphasize "every word has a response", and this also applies to the communication between game companies and players. The crisis of trust in the industry may have to be solved from this attitude.
The above is a level that is easy for everyone to notice, but difficult to do well. On another level, I would like to give a tricky example: at the anniversary celebration, the mobile game "Fantasy Journey to the West" released a mobile version of the AI creation tool "Dream Pen Shenghua" for players to use. This is a highly customized AIGC tool for content creation around the "Fantasy Journey to the West" mobile game, which can generate character pictures of various styles as long as the text input is required. It's good to use it as an avatar, picture, and emoji.
From the technical level, Mengbi Shenghua is not particularly cutting-edge and profound, but more of a targeted integration of AIGC technology. In the previous web version of the mobile terminal, in addition to AI drawing, it also had functions such as generating video storyboards and dubbing. It is not difficult to see that this is a toolbox that is convenient for players to recreate.
For game manufacturers, especially large manufacturers, it is not particularly difficult to make such a set of tools. However, before the "Fantasy Journey to the West" mobile game, there was really no team dedicated to doing this. In other words, Dream Brush Shenghua is the first game painting tool based on AIGC technology in China.
First of all, we should be clear: not all player needs can be directly received by manufacturers. There are some sounds that naturally belong to different bands.
And "having such a low-threshold creative tool and using it to create the content you want" is a very common but not easily noticeable demand among the player base - after Mengbi Shenghua was launched last year, nearly 50,000 players have used it and created more than 110,000 pictures, which is a good proof of this.
The logic behind this is simple: today's gamers have different definitions of "love" for something, but they always have to "give" something. The most basic is to "pay time to play", and the most direct is to "pay money to recharge". In addition to these two most common efforts in the past, the creativity of the whole people has been improved, and "paying energy to engage in secondary creation" has naturally become a mainstream trend.
That's why you can see that in a large number of ACGN work circles, there will be fans who take the initiative to ask for contributions from creators with strong creativity. However, the cost of the manuscript is obviously not affordable for everyone, so how can the creative desire of these "tail creators" be dissipated? Perhaps most people can only choose to watch, and gradually wear out this idea. In the end, this demand may not even be noticed by this part of the players themselves.
Looking at it in this context, I feel that the mobile game "Fantasy Journey to the West" is indeed very sensitive to the thoughts of players. Because for game companies, AI-generated images/videos also consume computing power, and it is very difficult to measure the ROI behind making them for players to use. And it's not a big deal to tell a story, and it's even fair to say that many teams don't bother to do it at all.
After AIGC became popular, the general trend is like this: the industry generally wants to use it to reduce costs and increase efficiency, or to make a big deal, but it is easy to ignore this general and subtle demand at the user level.
If you understand this demand, you will find that it has great possibilities in the construction of UGC and user ecology.
On the one hand, it has the possibility of raising the ceiling. For example, miHoYo's "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" has previously launched a marketing campaign "Endless March 7" combined with AIGC. Although this ingenious idea is not easy to replicate, it still has hope to plant a seed for the game to go out of the circle.
On the other hand, its greater role is to raise the lower limit. The reason why the above-mentioned manuscript request behavior is prevalent is that the biggest "creative right" is in the hands of the head creator. AIGC technology, on the other hand, can popularize part of the creative rights to the public - of course, on the premise of not infringing or excessively influencing other creators - so that those players who want to create, but are not strong in creative ability, can produce a large amount of tail content at a low cost to fill the gap of UGC content.
For the game team, this is also a sense of cost reduction and efficiency increase. In recent years, everyone understands that "those who win UGC win the world", but it is definitely more difficult to build an ecosystem. Just doing PUGC and guiding waist creators in the early stage is quite time-consuming and laborious. If there were handy tools that could mobilize the enthusiasm of the tail creators and bring some tap content, maybe the situation would be much better. Whether it's a new or old product, this content can make a big difference.
In the next phase of the industry's development, I believe that there will be more teams that understand the needs of these players and continue to invest in them.
Maybe the old product is here. "Fantasy Journey to the West" mobile game seems to have realized this in the past few years: players already have the need to create content, but many people sometimes need some appropriate guidance and incentives. Although creation is a difficult thing to adhere to, there may be a small number of people who will be ignited because of these guidance, and even develop into head creators step by step.
In everyone's subconscious, this may only apply to content-based games such as the second game - those products that emphasize values and cultivation, how can the player group have the heart to create?
But this is certainly a bias - just like there are many MMO players who spontaneously insist on creating, and on the contrary, many game companies have some gaps in these guided actions.
Since last year, they have announced the UGC creation support program "Dream Creation Project", which collects videos, graphics and other UGC content from all players in the form of cash and traffic support.
This kind of activity is not uncommon in game promotion, but the difference is that the mobile game "Fantasy Journey to the West" is done vigorously enough and is very detailed. For example, there are special tracks for videos/graphics and texts, and there are popular creators to lead the team and community guidance, if you really like to create, this process will be very comfortable.
Another key point...... It's that they send out a lot of money. In terms of system, the Dream Making Plan has different gradient returns according to the number of broadcasts, special support for newcomers, and incentive bonuses for the team, so that some creators feel that this is the official encouragement of "wool".
But it may be because of such a large-scale and large-scale incentive activity that the mobile game "Fantasy Journey to the West" has really unearthed a lot of truly enthusiastic and talented creators. So far, the total number of player contributions has exceeded 500,000, and the total number of views has exceeded 2.8 billion. Now, with such a convenient tool as Dream Pen Shenghua, the Dream Plan 2.0 with a more detailed plan and more bonuses may be even more effective. It's a win-win in every sense of the word.
After talking about the example of the mobile game "Fantasy Journey to the West", and then looking back and thinking about the changes in players' needs, we may find that although the industry emphasizes the importance of players' needs every day, it is not so easy to really substitute the player's perspective. So today's game companies probably can't easily say that they understand players.