Written by Chen Dengxin
Editor / Li Ji
排版/ Annalee
Recently, "Egg Boy Party" has continued to attract attention.
According to a number of mainstream media reports, on the evening of April 8, 2024, a father posted a video saying that his 9-year-old son recharged 6,400 yuan in ten minutes when he was playing "Egg Boy Party", and the cumulative recharge reached 13,800 yuan in a few days.
In this regard, NetEase said that it has arranged a full refund.
Despite this, the controversy has not disappeared, but has moved from individual case condemnation to phenomenon research, why does "Egg Boy Party" always hold on to minors?
This problem urgently needs to be reflected on by NetEase.
Increase the amount of buying, krypton gold has become a "hard-hit area"
At present, NetEase is becoming more and more "strange".
Many years ago, "making a fortune with a muffled voice" has always been the label of NetEase, but in recent years, it has become more and more high-profile, especially after entering 2024, and has repeatedly become the focus of the Internet.
Shouting out the slogan of the anti-numerical payment revolution has the meaning of smashing the jobs of peers; "remarrying" with Blizzard and staging a drama of "eating back grass"; increasing the amount of purchases and posing to compete with Tencent; provoking a "war of words" and constantly rubbing with competing products such as "Sword Network 3......
For example, the March 2024 APP game promotion intensity list shows that NetEase has become the biggest variable, with 3 seats in the TOP 5, namely "Against the Water and Cold Mobile Game", "Fantasy Westward Journey Mobile Game" and "Egg Boy Party", and the purchase volume of these three games is estimated to invest more than 500 million yuan.
This can also be seen from its financial report.
NetEase's financial report shows that its revenue in 2023 will exceed 100 billion yuan for the first time, and the proportion of games will increase to 78.8%, further consolidating its position, and in the fourth quarter of 2023, NetEase's marketing expenses will reach 4.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 24%, while the revenue growth rate will only be 7%.
Under the high profile, doubts are everywhere.
Among them, "Egg Boy Party" has been widely criticized and has repeatedly fallen into the whirlpool of underage recharge.
As of April 10, 2024, the cumulative number of complaints is as high as 21,922, 10,010 complaints are filed with the keyword search of "egg party + underage", 11,626 complaints are filed with the keyword search of "egg party + recharge", and 11,781 complaints are filed with the keyword search of "egg party + refund".
According to official data, as of December 2023, "Egg Boy Party" has processed more than 30,000 refund applications related to suspected minors.
It can be seen that the minor krypton gold has become the "hardest hit area" of "Egg Boy Party".
So the question is, under the constraints of the strictest anti-addiction new regulations in history, why are there still endless cases of large-scale consumption of this game?
Channel service, anti-addiction gray area
There are four reasons behind the chaos of "Egg Boy Party".
First of all, there are many underage users.
As NetEase's "cash cow", "Egg Boy Party" has more than 500 million registered users, becoming NetEase's mobile game with the highest daily activity.
Against this backdrop, high hopes are pinned.
Ding Lei, CEO of NetEase, said: "In the future, NetEase will invest more R&D strength, and we are confident that we can run "Egg Boy Party" for a long time, so that it will become a product with 10 or 20 years of vitality like "Fantasy Journey to the West". ”
In layman's terms, "Egg Boy Party" is regarded as a "money bag" by NetEase and needs to carry the banner of revenue.
The problem is that "Egg Boy Party" targets young people such as students, and the boundary between students and minors is blurred, thus laying the groundwork for chaos.
According to data from QuestMobile, the "post-00s" population of "Egg Boy Party" accounted for 26.3%, and the user structure obviously showed a trend of younger age......
Secondly, there are obvious "loopholes" in the game's anti-addiction mechanism.
Strictly speaking, there are not a few games involving student groups, but it is rare to be on the hot search repeatedly, and after clarifying the ins and outs, you will find that this is closely related to the anti-addiction loopholes in the channel server of "Egg Boy Party".
First of all, let's explain what a channel service is. Different from the official server, the channel service is a game version customized by game manufacturers for mobile phone manufacturers and other channel parties in order to obtain more users and revenue, most of which are downloaded from the Android mobile phone app store, and the revenue contributed by players is shared between the two sides in proportion.
In real life, after purchasing a mobile phone, consumers will register their real names in the app store in order to download the app. When the child downloads the game with the parent's mobile phone, he can use the mobile phone account to log in to the game directly, NetEase, as the game developer, directly adopts this result, and will not do a separate real-name verification in the game, and the anti-addiction system will naturally not take effect.
In a word, in-game real-name authentication is a virtual reality.
In addition, mobile phone manufacturers provide "password-free payment" for the convenience of users. Originally, it was to improve the user experience, but in the game "Egg Boy Party" with many minors, this move undoubtedly opened the door for minors to recharge.
In fact, "Egg Boy Party" also admitted frankly: The user in the "Slap Yourself 10 Laps" video is a well-known mobile phone brand channel account, and the adult identity is used for real-name registration.
As a result, a "gray area" has been formed between NetEase and some domestic mobile phone manufacturers.
The revenue of channel services is shared proportionally between game manufacturers and mobile phone manufacturers, but it is unclear how to share the responsibility for minors' addiction to games.
The result of unclear rights and responsibilities is prevarication on both sides. For example, when parents are looking for refunds from game companies and mobile phone manufacturers, they encounter "kicking the ball", and the game party refuses to refund on the grounds of payment channels, and the channel side is directly invisible.
According to a report by Future.com, the relevant person in charge of NetEase said that the responsibility for the one-click login problem of mobile games mainly lies with the mobile phone manufacturer, which is not difficult to understand why in this "parental self-slap" incident, NetEase quickly replied that the account involved was a well-known mobile phone brand channel service account.
Again, blind boxes are addictive.
After the novice tutorial enters the game hall, the first step is to guide players into the egg boy blind box store and cultivate the player's "stamp collection" habit, and the cost of a skin draw ranges from a few yuan to hundreds of yuan.
Unfortunately, blind boxes are naturally addictive, especially for minors with weak self-control.
Qin Shuo, head of the juvenile court of the Haidian District People's Court in Beijing, said: "The charm of the 'blind box' is difficult for many adults to resist, and minors will have more curiosity and interest in this sales model with lucky shooting. ”
Finally, it has historically relied on heavy krypton.
Looking back, NetEase pays more attention to the depth of realization in krypton, and the summary of "Tencent can make 600 million people charge 6 yuan, and NetEase can make 6 people charge 6 million" has been widely circulated.
Different playing styles naturally have different impacts.
An industry source told Zinc Scale: "The recharge problem of "Egg Boy Party" can actually be prevented through face recognition, recharge warning and other means, but NetEase's dependence on heavy krypton is relatively stronger, and there is no internal drive to completely change, once it is not handled properly, the vitality of the game will be reduced. ”
There are pursuers in the rear, and pacesetters in front
In addition to the chaos, the overall competitive situation of NetEase Games is not optimistic.
The game "second" has always been synonymous with NetEase, although as the second child can enjoy the benefits of "making a fortune in a muffled voice", but for a long time in the shadow of the industry's "first brother" Tencent, NetEase also has its own ambitions.
In recent years, the game market has entered the era of stock.
According to the 2023 China Game Industry Report, the number of game users in China was 668 million, a year-on-year increase of 0.61%, of which the number of mobile game users was 657 million, a year-on-year increase of 0.38%.
In this context, the head-to-head confrontation between Tencent and NetEase in party games and racing is becoming clearer.
For example, although Tencent's "QQ Speed" and "Running Kart" and NetEase's "Ace Racing" and "Peak Speed" are on the same racing track, they are misplaced competition, and the user overlap rate is not high, but Tencent's "Need for Speed: Assemble" will start the "sprint test" on March 14, 2024, cutting into the subdivided realistic racing track and attacking NetEase's basic disk.
An Internet observer told Zinc Scale: "The dividends of the domestic game market are almost exhausted, your stock is someone else's increment, your increment is someone else's stock, and the previously ignored segmentation track will become more important." ”
The above-mentioned Internet observer further said that NetEase does have a unique way of looking for popular games, but it often lacks stamina to open high and go low, and the only game that can really be described as evergreen is "Fantasy Journey to the West", and Tencent is good at protracted war, and "Peace Elite" came from behind to replace "Wilderness Action" as the representative of "chicken game" is the best example.
In a word, grappling is not good for NetEase.
On the other hand, miHoYo "overtakes".
Tencent and NetEase are just a conflict of interests, while NetEase and miHoYo are a battle for the status of the rivers and lakes, and there is no room for mistakes, so the contradiction is more acute.
In fact, miHoYo's momentum continues to rise.
According to the 2022 China Internet Enterprise Comprehensive Strength Index Report released by the Internet Society of China, miHoYo ranks 13th, second only to Tencent among game companies, and NetEase ranks 15th.
According to the "Top 50 Global Publishers in 2024" released by Data.ai, miHoYo's revenue in 2023 surpassed NetEase, ranking 8th, followed by NetEase in 9th.
It is not difficult to see that the qualifying competition between NetEase and miHoYo will be more intense.
All in all, NetEase is becoming more and more "high-profile", reflecting the intensification of competition in the industry, and it has to increase marketing and play more "food", but it can no longer roast minors on the fire, and how to seek a balance between the pursuit of interests and healthy development will be a thorny problem that NetEase must solve in the future.
After all, money is a double-edged sword.