A game has been on the market for 16 years, with countless imitators, and it can also bring up Tencent's stock price, which has been sluggish for a long time, overnight. Where is it sacred, and what is its magic?
On April 22, Tencent, whose stock price has been hovering below HK$300 since the beginning of the year, waited for two good news.
The first positive comes from policy stimulus. On the evening of Friday, April 19, the website of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) released the "Five Measures for Capital Market Cooperation with Hong Kong", which involves the Stock Connect mechanism and a number of favorable policies to jointly promote the capital markets of the two places. After the opening of trading on Monday, April 22, the Hang Seng Tech Index opened all the way higher, rising 1.78%.
The second positive is the "cash cow" game from Tencent. On April 22, Tencent officially announced that the national server of the mobile game "Dungeons & Warriors: Origins" (hereinafter referred to as "DNF") will be officially launched on May 21. After the news was announced, Tencent's share price opened higher, closing up 5.46% and recording its biggest one-day gain since July 2023, with a turnover of more than HK$13 billion.
In the next two days, Tencent's stock price continued to rise. On April 23, the stock price rose by 3.75%, and on April 24, the stock price continued to rise by 3.55% to close at HK$344.20 per share, an increase of 11.3% for three consecutive days
The game "DNF", which helped Tencent explode its stock price, finally gave Tencent, which was weak in old games, lagging behind in new games, and in a depressed stock price, a reason to rise.
"DNF" was developed by the South Korean company Neople in 2005, and in 2008, Tencent obtained the national server agent and officially launched it on the PC side. To this day, DNF remains one of the most popular and lucrative online games in the world.
Since being represented by Tencent, when "DNF" will be able to switch from a terminal game to a mobile game, create a more convenient game experience, and double the profit margin, countless players have been looking forward to it, and it has been expected by the secondary market.
However, due to the constraints of all parties, since 2018, the "end of DNF" has "changed hands" twice before and after. This official announcement, there are still a large number of players worried in the community: won't it be another "wolf"?
Since the first open beta of the "DNF" mobile game at the end of February, the relevant information has rushed to the hot search on multiple platforms, and a large number of players can't wait to get a sneak peek. According to the official display, 3 million "warriors" participated in the number grabbing within 3 days, and 230,000 players poured into the game on the first day of the beta, which directly filled the server, and many people queued for hours and couldn't squeeze in.
Recently, Morgan Stanley released a market report pointing out that the launch of "DNF" will become one of Tencent's largest game releases in recent years, and will be a key catalyst to promote the inflection point of domestic game business growth in the second quarter. DNF is expected to generate a total revenue of RMB10 billion in its first year.
01, is a brilliant overlord, but also the "bounce king"
From a common sense point of view, a PC game released in 2008 should have entered the end of its life long ago. However, in the 16 years of development, "DNF" has broken people's doubts again and again and transcended the cycle.
Due to the large number of players, DNF was once dubbed "8 million warriors" - but this number is far from covering the imagination of mobile games. In August 2020, the number of pre-registered players who were expecting the launch of the mobile game on the official website of "DNF" exceeded 50 million.
Although on the surface, DNF's rough pixel art, 2D graphics, and action brushes are full of outdated elements, the action design of its famous combos and rubbing moves, as well as the balanced MMO (multiplayer online) system and numerical system that "stand out in the world", make players feel "extremely comfortable" for the characters' skills, equipment, gameplay, and krypton gold design - in short, generations of players say that it is difficult to find such a fun game.
There have been countless games that have tried to "revive" and "ride" DNF – and the most recent one to "fold" on this path is the famous Byte Games Lightyear team.
In the summer of July 2023, Chaoxi Lightyear launched the "Crystal Nucleus", which was built with a lot of money, aiming at the traffic of old players of "DNF", and all kinds of publicity and distribution measures are "touching" DNF. In the Baidu DNF bar, "Crystal Nucleus" launched a page advertisement for the open beta, and the poster was printed with the slogan of declaring war: "Don't lose next door, be tough", and even directly found a number of game anchors in the DNF area to cooperate in the promotion.
But it turns out that after "Crystal Nucleus" was briefly popular for more than 2 months, the flow of water began to turn from prosperity to decline. At the end of 2023, Chaoxi Lightyear also started the road of layoffs.
Some players said that "DNF" has gradually evolved into a culture of continuous iteration after more than ten years in the history of the game because it is difficult to surpass. Hot words such as brushing pictures and moving bricks are derived from "DNF", which has stimulated the development of online game novels and derived popular IPs such as "Full-time Master";
But for many years, for a variety of reasons, DNF has stayed on the PC side. And such a popular game, if it can successfully turn to mobile games, its imagination will naturally be infinitely amplified. But to this day, the PC version of "DNF" has been upgraded countless times, but the mobile game has been repeatedly postponed, and this glorious overlord of the terminal game has also been nicknamed the "Ticket Skipping King" by the industry.
At the end of 2018, at the winter conference of the "DNF" national server, game producer Yin Mingzhen revealed that "the mobile game version will be launched in the first half of 2019", but it was finally gone.
In May 2020, the DNF mobile game operation team announced that the number of pre-orders for the game exceeded 30 million, and the game will be officially launched in the summer of 2020. However, 3 months after the news was announced, "DNF" officially announced that the mobile game would be postponed due to the need to upgrade the internal anti-addiction system. At the same time, the number of players waiting for the mobile game to launch has soared further to 50 million.
02. How much money did DNF make for Tencent?
Since 2008, when the national server was represented, although "DNF" has not been able to enter the mobile game world that Tencent is good at, Tencent has made a lot of money in this game for more than ten years.
Since 2009, there have been "DNF" imitation products such as "Ghost Blows the Lantern Gaiden" (2009), "Dragon Nest" (2010), "Famous Generals of the Three Kingdoms" (2010), NetEase's "Soul Slashing", and Changyou's "Sword of Shadow" (2013) to "kick the gym", but they have not shaken the status of "DNF" in the hearts of players.
With an unparalleled traffic advantage, Tencent has also deeply bound the entire social ecology to "DNF", and used the whole product line of QQ, QQ Music, QQ Zone, and Tencent's official website to attract traffic to it.
Tencent's blockbuster bet has paid off. When the "DNF" national server was first launched, Tencent ranked third in the online game industry, and the most popular games of the year were "Legend of Blood" and "World of Warcraft". Soon, DNF became one of the troika driving the growth of Tencent's PC game business (the other two being CrossFire and League of Legends).
After "DNF" gradually passed its peak, in order to retain users, the national server cooperated with the major version update, and successively launched gameplay methods such as group book, small trumpet feeding large trumpet, etc., which increased the online time of resident players and alleviated the fatigue caused by players repeatedly experiencing MMO content.
In August 2012, Tencent announced that the number of PCUs (the highest number of simultaneous online users) in the national server of "DNF" exceeded 3 million, and in June 2016, the number of PCUs exceeded 5 million - at that time, the global PCU of "PUBG", which won the sales championship for 55 consecutive weeks on the Steam platform, was only 3.24 million, less than 2/3 of DNF's domestic PCUs.
In 2017, the average monthly turnover of DNF in China was close to 1 billion yuan. In 2018, in conjunction with DNF's 10th anniversary, a series of events were held to help reach new heights. At that time, Neople disclosed that in the ten years since entering the Chinese market, "DNF" has accumulated global revenue of more than $10 billion, which is far more than the most profitable game on Steam and consoles, GTA5, which has a total revenue of $6 billion.
In 2023, Korean media reported that DNF's cumulative revenue has exceeded 20 billion US dollars (140 billion yuan). According to the statistics of the third-party platform, DNF mobile game Hanbok has been online for 8 months, and the cumulative turnover has reached 1 billion yuan.
At present, according to the comprehensive estimation of a number of market investment researchers, the "DNF" mobile game is expected to bring 50-10 billion revenue to Tencent in 2024.
And Tencent itself knows better than anyone that "DNF" has a significant impact on the company. In Tencent's 2023 annual report, DNF was highlighted and defined by Tencent as a "mobile game with high development potential". At the earnings conference, Tencent's management highlighted the launch time of the "DNF" mobile game, which is tentatively scheduled for the second quarter of 2024.
03, the goose factory has been a bitter explosion for a long time
To a certain extent, Tencent, which has been suffering from the explosion for a long time, is in urgent need of a masterpiece like "DNF" to boost the weak game business and market expectations.
At Tencent's annual meeting in early 2024, Ma Huateng rarely used such harsh words as "lying in the credit book" and "no achievements" to evaluate the game business. According to the financial report, in the fourth quarter of 2023, Tencent's game revenue was 40.9 billion yuan, down 11% from 46 billion yuan in the previous quarter and 2% from 41.9 billion yuan in the same period last year. Tencent's explanation for this is that due to the decline in revenue of "Honor of Kings" and "Peace Elite", the revenue of games in the domestic market fell by 3% year-on-year to 27 billion yuan.
However, according to the previous statistics of "City Boundary", starting from Q4 of 2021, in Tencent's 9 consecutive quarterly financial reports, the game business has been fluctuating slightly between 420-44 billion in the rest of the quarters, except for 46 billion in Q3 of 2023 and 48.3 billion in Q1 of 2023.
Combined with the latest quarterly financial report, game revenue plummeted to 40.9 billion yuan, the lowest value in recent years. It can be explained that Tencent has not produced a big hit game for a long time - the core of growth is still contributed by "evergreen games" such as "Honor of Kings" and "DNF" terminal games.
Due to the obvious lack of innovation in Tencent games in recent years, Ma Huateng's mood seems to be more and more urgent.
"Palu (a character in the popular game "Phantom Beast Palu") is so popular that almost all studios are doing Palu. A Tencent game source told "City Boundary". Because Ma Huateng proposed that Tencent Games failed to get a head start in the competition with "Egg Boy Party", "it came too late", so when a game with a very hot market appeared, it did not hesitate to use horse racing to test the waters of new types of games.
At the beginning of this year, Tencent also hoped to recover the decline by benchmarking NetEase's "Egg Boy Party" to create "Yuan Dream Star".
At the annual meeting, Ma Huateng emphasized the importance of "Yuanmeng Star" with "going all out" and "combining all businesses to explore common development". Ma Huateng said that such a party game with strong social attributes originally belonged to Tencent's "base camp".
Under the thunderous anger of the boss, this "Yuan Dream Star", which was nicknamed "Yuan Shen" internally, grabbed the greatest internal resource support. But judging from the data performance, although a huge amount of marketing was spent, "Yuan Dream Star" failed to "snipe" "Egg Boy Party" in the short term.
In the fourth quarter report of 2023 released by NetEase, CEO Ding Lei commented: "The increase in marketing expenses in the fourth quarter is mainly due to competitive factors, which I think is normal." ”
Under NetEase's heavy investment, "Yuan Dream Star" only beat "Egg Boy Party" in the best-selling list for 20 days, and then entered a period of about a week of stalemate;
Under the anxiety, Tencent's expectations and investment in the "DNF" mobile game are even more conceivable. However, in addition to "DNF", Tencent's game reserve this year is also relatively rich: "Need for Speed: Mobile Game" announced that it will be set for this summer, the civilization IP SLG mobile game "World Qiyuan" was exposed for the first time and started paid testing on March 22, and "Counter War: Future" also released a demo of the actual machine in February this year. And potential products such as "Pokémon Gathering" and "Let's Create! Our Planet" have also obtained version numbers, and there is a high probability that they will be launched this year.
However, some players believe that the fun and popularity of "DNF" in terminal games may not all be realized in mobile games. "The fun of DNF is reflected in the combos and skill combinations. On a computer, players can press multiple keyboards, and the mobile screen is cramped, so it will be difficult to arrange the keys and design a rich skill presentation. ”
These speculations and questions can only be answered after the official launch of the "DNF" mobile game.
Author | Zhao Zikun
Edit | Li Yuan
Operations | Liu Shan