Last year, everyone witnessed how new products with a two-dimensional theme hit the streets one after another.
But the products in the hands of the manufacturers are obviously not yet finished. After the Lunar New Year, there are now a large number of second tours online or announced.
Compared with last year's products that were caught off guard by the market environment, this year's batch of products looks more like they came prepared. In just these two months, we have seen the official launch of "Resonas", "P5X", "Wuhua Mixin", the last test of "Ming Tide", "Return to the Dragon Tide", and the new round of testing of "Jeopardy Zero" and so on.
Since "Genshin Impact" set off this two-dimensional trend, there are actually not many popular second games that have achieved amazing results. This is of course directly related to the fact that Genshin Impact has raised the horizons of users. Even if it is a product that is good from a traditional point of view, it cannot meet the requirements of users today, which is one of the reasons for the product rout last year.
So in this "post-Genshin Impact" era, can this year's batch of products succeed, or at least survive? Today, Grape Jun will simply take a plate.
01 The soldiers are divided into three ways, each with a strange move
Overall, we can divide this year's two-dimensional products with edition numbers into three categories.
The first type of product chooses "Hard" and "Genshin Impact". They also feature a 3D open-world structure, action-oriented gameplay, and a cartoon-rendered style. But in addition to that, they also incorporate differentiated content such as special gameplay.
For example, the upcoming Kulo "Singing Tide". Compared with "Genshin Impact", it pays more attention to the depth of gameplay of the action, and has higher requirements in terms of skill matching and specific operations. But its specific performance will not be verified until it is officially launched.
In terms of the trade-off of action gameplay, Eagle Point's "Ark of Tomorrow: The End" chose the opposite direction. They are more strategic than traditional real-time actions. In addition, they have added a building system to the game, which may mean that the game will offer a more creative world. However, considering that the product still needs to be tested many times, the launch time may not be announced too soon.
The brutal tweet "Blue Star Plain: The Ballad of Travel", which was just released last month, has actually already received a version number. The most noteworthy thing about them is that the game just incorporates the pet collection gameplay that was popularized by "Phantom Beast Palu" at the beginning of the year, and the other is that the product has chosen a narrower, but more core user base in terms of positioning. Whether this strategy of targeting deep cultivation in subdivided fields can enable them to gain more loyal users is also a topic of debate among many practitioners.
Judging from the appearance, these products are all top productions. In the case of no major mistakes in product operation and content, they may be strong competitors for the future domestic second game cards.
The second category of products is "eclectic". They did not adopt an aggressive and money-burning strategy like the first type of product, but improved the visual quality and gameplay of the project according to their own abilities and advantages.
For example, P5X, which was recently launched. If you want to explore its essence, maybe this is just a turn-based second game in the world of Hakoniwa. But it comes with enough buffs: well-known IP, ATLUS's gameplay mechanics inherited for many years, and high-quality and strong style visual expression...... Judging from the results of less than a week after its launch, "P5X" has broken into the eighth place on the App Store's best-selling list, which is a good start.
Another example is "Returning to the Dragon Tide", which is being tested recently. The design of this product is relatively unique, their out-of-game city adopts a 3D behind-the-scenes perspective similar to the big world experience, and players can explore freely, but in the game, the game adopts a side-scrolling perspective, with action combat as the main axis, and integrates various other side-scrolling gameplay, making a "side-scrolling game encyclopedia".
Also in this category is miHoYo's own "Jeopardy Zero". Compared to "Genshin Impact" or "Star Iron", its product form is closer to "Honkai Impact 3". Recently, they also started a paid beta, and today the Apple Store also showed that the game will be available on July 4.
Among this kind of products, "Jeopardy Zero" is definitely the one with the biggest win in the second game at present. This is not only because it has miHoYo's signature, but also because it is miHoYo's third 3D action gameplay game – they have enough experience and ability.
The third type of product is the type that seems to be more similar to the "pre-Genshin Impact" era, but is actually on the cutting edge.
For example, "Resonas", which has been online for a month and a half. From the point of view of the game, the game still uses the traditional 2D card battle in the second game. But in fact, the game is constructed in a variety of ways: on the one hand, they build a big world on railroad tracks, and they also use this to cancel the "money copy" that is common in traditional second games, and present it with a more interesting running merchant gameplay. Since the launch of the product, it first came out of the circle with an animation with 4.53 million views, and then because players set up a real-time price viewing website for the sake of running business, and the project team made thank you videos to paying users, which caused a lot of topics.
"Wuhua Mixin", which was launched just last week, is also a representative of this type of product. Although they adopted the game of war chess preferred by a large number of second games last year, they chose the "cultural relics anthropomorphism" that no one has ever done in the game. This kind of anthropomorphic theme has always had a market in China, but there are fewer and fewer products with this theme. Among the products that can be seen so far, they are likely to be "unique" for some time to come.
A similar product is "Echoes of Vision". Although they are also war chess, they are not only the new weird theme of "living to the end", but also picking a lot of details on the in-game scenes and 3D villains, making the product look much more refined than the products with the same gameplay.
These products may not look as disruptive visually as the first two, and judging by the results of the products that have been launched, they don't belong to the head. However, in terms of input, they are usually less than the first two, so they are not as burdensome.
02 Increasingly obvious product stratification
It can be seen from the product forms of these three types that the stratification phenomenon of domestic secondary travel is becoming more and more obvious.
Since the emergence of domestic second games that can occupy the top of the best-selling list, almost most manufacturers are pursuing explosive models. But this year's obvious stratification may indicate that some products are starting to look for more ways to survive.
But with a different way of thinking, can it be done? I think they still have their own opportunities and risks.
Needless to say, the first type of head-impacting products is indispensable, and if you want to go this way, sufficient production experience and sufficient capital investment are indispensable. And even so, there are still many challenges on this uncharted route. Huge costs lead to high payouts, and players are bound to be more picky. The content is not enough to attract players, the gameplay is not polished enough, and the follow-up production capacity cannot keep up...... It may be wasted.
But to put it another way, because the road is so difficult, there are few competitors. Nowadays, when the freshness of players' head products is gradually fading, once they can come out, they may really be able to "reach the sky in one step".
The second type of product seems to be winning through differentiation and compromise, but the actual problem is more complex.
First, some products choose more niche themes to differentiate, which leads to a narrower user base than the top products and lowers their revenue cap.
Secondly, there is no shortage of big competitors here, and it is not easy to get ahead. Some products don't cost much less than the head product. Some products have not yet been launched, and the R&D investment alone has already reached three or four hundred million; after some products are launched, there are still millions of R&D costs every month, plus many elements such as sharing, they need higher income to recover the cost.
This dilemma of not being able to go up and down makes this route more like walking a tightrope, and there are too many issues that still need to be demonstrated and discussed.
The third category of products sounds more like a miracle soldier along the way. They are able to rely on some newer and more out-of-the-box features to win more attention with a small investment.
However, the cost is lower than the first two, which is also the weakness of this type of product. In the case of increasingly disobedient user tastes, even if you attract enough people, it is much more difficult to retain them than the first two.
If the product still has the problem of limited production capacity, then after the novelty has passed, it is likely to usher in the end of a high-speed loss of player base, and finally "a wave".
In the current situation, domestic secondary tours may need to have the concept of "ecosystem". "Everyone makes a hit" is not the state that a healthy track should be, the head of the big production hit the upper limit of the category, but at the same time, small and medium-sized products can also have enough income to maintain development, to make more personalized and stylized products, in order to make this category have sustainable vitality.
Although this year's second-game track is even weaker than in previous years, I think it is also likely to be the best time for the formation of the "second-game ecosystem": on the one hand, the team has generally formed a sense of differentiation and has begun to shape valuable product personalities, and on the other hand, players have gradually begun to recover from the quality shock brought by Genshin Impact and start to look for other products that are more interesting or more in line with their own segmentation needs.
In my opinion, the current enthusiasm for the concept of "main and secondary games" may be a precursor to the imminent formation of the ecosystem.
From this point of view, although today's bottleneck is very cruel to the current product, from the perspective of category, it may not be a bad thing. After this painful period of trial and error, this category may be more dynamic than in the past in the future.