Text | Garlic jelly corner
At the beginning of this year, Xiaohongshu took the initiative to promote a wave of its own platform's promotion value for games, and now it seems that more and more games are indeed creating official accounts on Xiaohongshu, such as "Genshin Impact", which was linked to Xiaohongshu last year, and even moved the previous check-in activity on Weibo to Xiaohongshu in April this year.
As a platform with 260 million monthly active users, Xiaohongshu already has a traffic base that is enough to attract game manufacturers, including its UGC ecosystem, which is also suitable as a game community to maintain the stickiness of players and games, but if it is regarded as a new position in game marketing, it may still need some prerequisites.
What are the advantages of Xiaohongshu?
Xiaohongshu has become a new traffic platform in the past two years, which is inseparable from its unique grass planting ecology.
The most obvious difference between Xiaohongshu notes and the content of other platforms is that it is personalized and emotional, and through users sharing their experiences and feelings independently, they can drive others to become interested and complete the planting of grass. This underlying logic of ordinary people helping ordinary people makes realism the key to Xiaohongshu's attraction of users, allowing users to trust the platform and the content on the platform, thereby retaining users and stimulating their desire to share and express.
However, it is worth noting that the premise that this sense of realism can be valuable is that the marketing of most products and products is not "real" enough, especially the user experience side does not have enough voice, so that Xiaohongshu can fight out of the encirclement with realism, but when it comes to content products, Xiaohongshu does not have many special advantages compared with other platforms.
For example, a game content, plot commentary, game strategy, game evaluation and other user experience content is more effective at station B, and entertainment content such as interesting game experience and game memes is easier to spread on short video platforms such as Douyin, while Xiaohongshu may only have a difference in user tags.
At present, the proportion of female users on Xiaohongshu has reached 70%, and the positioning of "life guide" has also made life content the mainstream of the platform, although female users happen to be the group that the game industry did not pay attention to in the past and want to pull the most now, but it is obvious that it is not easy to make these users who pay attention to three-dimensional life interested in games, which are biased towards two-dimensional products.
Users who can be reached by the game on Xiaohongshu will use Xiaohongshu to obtain information on a daily basis, regard Xiaohongshu as a search tool and sharing platform, and at the same time have a certain interest in the game, after all, only in this way will the game content be pushed to users. And such users do not only exist on the Xiaohongshu platform.
Judging from the official accounts of the games that currently have a certain number of fans on Xiaohongshu, "Honor of Kings", "Genshin Impact", "Egg Boy Party", etc., which have more than one million fans, are all big DAU games, and the official number fans of these big DAU games on other social platforms can reach tens of millions. "Love and the Producer", "Love of Light and Night" and other imaginary "Four Great B", which are most suitable for shining in Xiaohongshu, except for "Love of Light and Night", which reached 450,000 fans, are all within 200,000 fans, and there is also a big gap between the number of fans on other platforms.
In other words, the female "traffic" on Xiaohongshu is indeed a new market that game manufacturers can strive for, but in order to convert a large number of female users on the platform into gamers, it is not just by coming to the platform and publishing content.
The big factories are here, why are they still waiting?
It cannot be denied that Xiaohongshu can indeed broaden the communication coverage of some games and tap the user market increment. But one status is that leading manufacturers such as Tencent, NetEase, and miHoYo have already made moves on Xiaohongshu, and there are not many "followers".
At present, the operation of games on Xiaohongshu is similar to other content platforms, which are game-related incentive programs to encourage users to create content on the platform to earn cash and game resource rewards. The logic behind this is that the game-related content produced by users can be adapted to the tonality of the platform, and the official only needs to pay for the content to form a natural dissemination on different platforms.
The cost of such a "free-range" operation is not high, and the operation is not difficult, but why are there not many imitators on Xiaohongshu? The reason is from two aspects.
One is that operational investment on Xiaohongshu is not suitable for all games. According to Xinhong data, in the first half of 2023, games with more popular content basically have the common denominator of being easy to use and relatively mild, and at the same time, female-oriented and large DAU games with social attributes are also easier to have traffic on Xiaohongshu.
In other words, only light games that are simple to learn are more likely to attract non-hardcore gamers on Xiaohongshu, including sociality is also a factor that allows the game to appear in front of Xiaohongshu users from a real-life level. A positive example is that the gameplay of "In the Name of Shining" itself is an extension of the women's focus on clothing, which is simple to operate and can meet the entertainment needs of users, so it is willing to launch a creative contest on Xiaohongshu to attract more potential user groups for the game.
On the other hand, the new game "Persona: Phantom of the Night", which has been in open beta for less than a week, has no social space, and the turn-based gameplay dissuades casual players, although it will start to publish notes on Xiaohongshu in 2023 for operation, and as a result, it will only have less than 6,000 fans when it is officially launched, and the number of fans on its official account of Station B has now reached 1.24 million, and the number of PV views has reached 8.178 million.
The second is that the effect of game promotion on Xiaohongshu is not clear. Last year, in order to promote the commercialization of the platform, Xiaohongshu proposed the "grass planting value" in order to make the grass planting marketing quantifiable and optimized, including proposing the "crowd anti-funnel model", trying to locate core users first and then expand high-potential groups and pan-interest groups. However, at this stage, there is still a big gap between Xiaohongshu's data analysis and algorithms and other platforms, resulting in limited in-depth information that can be provided to brands. Specifically, many games will issue reward questionnaires to new users, and the questionnaire will involve the question of "which platform did you learn about the game from", that is, manufacturers can only understand which platform the publicity on the platform has played a role through this simple way, so as to adjust their own publicity channel selection. Judging from the fact that there are few non-big DAU games that continue to operate on Xiaohongshu, the publicity assistance that Xiaohongshu can provide for the game is not as good as they advertise, or in other words, there is a threshold for the game to eat the traffic dividend on Xiaohongshu.
In fact, in our opinion, Xiaohongshu is more suitable as a community to maintain the relationship between players and games, and players and manufacturers, rather than being regarded as a new paradise for game marketing. At a time when interest has become people's social currency, it is necessary to create a community for the game, compared with short videos with heavier entertainment attributes, as well as station B with a certain creative threshold, Xiaohongshu's UGC atmosphere + grass ecology + low threshold based on graphics and texts is more conducive to increasing the activity of the game community and the possibility of content breaking the circle.
Xiaohongshu is indeed a platform worthy of the attention of game manufacturers at the moment, but what kind of goals to bring and how to make good use of the advantages of the platform still need game manufacturers to carry out more dimensional exploration, after all, with the development of technology and the iteration of users' perception of games, games can still have a larger market space.
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