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As miHoYo's sixth game work, Jeopardy Zero naturally carries the expectations of many players, and the number of pre-orders exceeding 32 million is enough to prove this.
Looking back at the development of miHoYo, before the launch of Genshin Impact, it was at most a young company with a slight success in the field of secondary games, and it was not until Genshin Impact became popular that it became popular by providing a new game experience for mobile users, which made the industry look at this company that succeeded with a "two-dimensional" niche incision.
In the past two years, the game market has always been concerned about who will be the next "Genshin Impact", and the emergence of this question is not only the market's expectation of the next big hit game, but also the curiosity of how the industry pattern will change. However, for the current miHoYo, creating another "Genshin Impact" is not the primary goal, but becoming a mature cultural technology company, and this may be the beginning of changing the industry pattern.
Jeopardy Zero won't be the next Genshin Impact
Before discussing whether Jeopardy Zero will become the next Genshin Impact, we should first be clear about what "Genshin Impact" refers to here.
The reason why "Genshin Impact" has become a phenomenon is already a cliché, transplanting the gameplay of console games to mobile terminals to bring a new entertainment experience to mobile game players is one of them, lowering the threshold for play so that most people can enjoy the fun of the game is the second, and the business model of free + selling characters is good for all types of players. That is to say, if you can't make a subversive game experience, face the big market, and have a sustainable profit model that conforms to the internal logic of the game, it is difficult to call it the second "Genshin Impact".
From this point of view, Jeopardy Zero and Genshin Impact are on a completely different path.
The main point is that Jeopardy Zero, which is positioned as an action game, does not have a framework for the mass market. Compared with "Genshin Impact" players can explore the world and see the scenery without watching the plot, and "Egg Boy Party" players can chat and interact without competitiveness, most of the gameplay of "Jeopardy Zero" revolves around battles, except for serving the plot story of selling characters and adding some interesting mini-games, there is no more free play space. This allows Jeopardy Zero to push away a large number of casual players and groups that are not interested in action games.
Secondly, "Jeopardy Zero" does not bring a subversive game experience, but chooses to optimize the action game track. On the one hand, the optimization here is to reduce the difficulty of operation, so that the game can accommodate as many gamers as possible while maintaining a certain degree of operation, and on the other hand, it optimizes the combat experience in the mobile game track, making the gameplay cool and pleasure that is difficult to achieve in action mobile games before. At present, the players who participate in the inner side basically agree that "Jeopardy Zero" has the quality and level of excellent console games at the combat level.
After sorting out the key points clearly, and then watching "Jeopardy Zero", it is an action game with enough outstanding highlights, and it is a "small but beautiful" boutique. While inheriting the high quality of Mijia games, it tries to integrate the two-dimensional and trendy culture, and the distinctive art style makes it attractive in terms of "appearance", and the internal combat optimization can also retain hardcore players and pan-action players. Therefore, the newly launched "Jeopardy Zero" will be a good game, but there is a high probability that it will not have a phenomenal impact.
Especially for the long-term operation game with combat as the core, it is doubtful whether "Jeopardy Zero" can maintain its popularity and reputation for a long time. If there is no action game with enough depth of operation, players who are too slow to release new characters will reduce their willingness to play due to lack of freshness, and if they release new characters too quickly, it will also affect word of mouth.
In other words, miHoYo originally did not plan to let "Jeopardy Zero" "inherit" "Genshin Impact". At the beginning of the development of the project, the team only had about 10 people, and after three years, it had grown to more than 300 people, while the "Genshin Impact" team had already exceeded 1,000 people, and the team size of "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" was about 500 people. "Jeopardy Zero" is a project that miHoYo attaches great importance to, but it does not meet the specifications of the next flagship work.
However, it is precisely this point that allows us to see more clearly the development strategy of miHoYo at this stage.
Youth is miHoYo's advantage
At the beginning of this year, after Liu Wei, the founder of miHoYo, was interviewed and said the company's development vision, "creating a virtual world that one billion people around the world are willing to live in by 2023" appeared on miHoYo's official website. Because the background of the interview is about the metaverse, most of the attention has been focused on a few numbers, but in fact, the "virtual world" that is easy to ignore is the core.
Whether it is last year's "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" or this year's "Jeopardy Zero", miHoYo is enriching its product line, filling in the entertainment world under the "miHoYo" brand, and expanding the type and scale of the player user group that can be accommodated. At the same time, it is also adjusting the market's perception of itself, so that the outside world can feel through each product that miHoYo is not a specialized manufacturer that only makes a certain type of game, but wants to become a mature game company or a giant in the field of culture and technology.
In the past, the development of domestic game companies basically had a strong path dependence, and when they had achievements on a certain track, they would attack on this track, and occasionally chase hot spots to make some track products that have been verified by the market. While this is in line with the business-first logic, no matter how much revenue a company generates, it is essentially more of a giant game studio than a game company.
A mature game company must undoubtedly have a rich product line, one IP can do multiple series of products, but the company cannot have only one IP, and at the same time, in the context of the integration of culture and entertainment, more entertainment products other than games will also be produced one by one. It is clear that miHoYo is heading in this direction.
From Genshin Impact to Honkai: Star Rail to Jeopardy Zero, the types of games involved are completely different, not only verifying the company's new and old IP development capabilities, but also training the company's team through existing product methodologies. In particular, now that miHoYo launches new characters in each game with high-quality PV, and even the new character servants of Genshin Impact have been upgraded from PV to single-player animated short films, it is miHoYo's ability to accumulate and build IP, allowing the company to move from game-centric to culture-centric.
At the same time, miHoYo's ambitions are gradually revealed. In 2018, the exclusive player community of "Miyou Club" was launched, and this year, the third test of "Jeopardy Zero" began to use the "miHoYo Launcher" to gather users of the brand's games and digest them internally, which is what other peers also want to do but have not been able to do.
Although miHoYo's various game products still have room for growth, and the singleness of gameplay is a unified drawback, which seems to be impossible to solve in the short term, as a young company, miHoYo has also given full play to its young advantages, not having to be constrained by commercial achievements like middle-aged giants, and has the courage and confidence to explore new tracks, which is also the main factor that is most likely to bring variables to the domestic game industry.
At a time when peers are paying attention to the big DAU and how to dig more money from the game category, miHoYo, which holds "Genshin Impact", has come to the next step in its development - to build a virtual world with the miHoYo brand as the core. So from the current point of view, miHoYo doesn't need the next "Genshin Impact", it only needs many "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" and "Jeopardy Zero" is enough.
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