Produced by Tiger Sniff Commercial Consumer Group
Author|Huang Qingchun
Visual China
The beginning of the gunpowder smoke of Internet giants often occurs between the micro and the end - it may be a shouting from executives, it may be a round of mutual choking, or it may be a-for-tat press conference.
On April 23, Douyin posted the data of the steep growth in the past year at the first platform-level IAA Mini Game Industry Conference in Changsha, and the next day (April 24), WeChat held a WeChat open class - IAA Mini Game Special Session in Wuhan, and pulled out steeper and steeper data.
Tiger Sniffing Note: Mini games can be divided into three categories: IAP (in-app purchase payment, including game prop sales, level payment, etc.), IAA (advertising monetization), and IAP + IAA (hybrid monetization) according to the form of monetization.
If Douyin's concession for Mini Game developers in early April (Douyin IAA developers can get 90% of total Android consumption and advertising incentives equivalent to 5% of total Android consumption) is a new policy announced by WeChat for Mini Games in March (WeChat's advertising incentive ratio for IAA developers is raised to a maximum of 40%, plus 50% cash sharing, developers can get up to 90% of the revenue), then this Mini Game Conference is quite a bit of a "muscle" flavor.
I don't know who set the date first, anyway, Douyin and WeChat are staring at the "fat" of mini games - judging from the report cards posted by the two successively, 2023 will be a year of comprehensive blowout and fast lane of mini games: hundreds of millions of game users\potential users have been pulled into the pool, and hundreds of thousands of developers have rushed in, but in specific comparison:
- In terms of user scale: In the past year, the number of daily active users (DAU) of Douyin Mini Games increased by 150% year-on-year, especially the number of activated users exceeded 40 times in the second half of 2023, and the DAU of WeChat Mini Games increased by 20% year-on-year in 2024Q1, and the MAU (monthly active users) of IAA Mini Games reached 500 million, with more than 400,000 developers.
- At the commercial level: In 2023, the number of Douyin Mini Games will increase by 80% year-on-year, and related revenue will surge by 28 times month-on-month, and in 2024Q1, WeChat Mini Game advertisers will increase by 35% year-on-year and the purchase consumption will double, and the total commercial volume of IAA Mini Games on the platform is expected to exceed 10 billion yuan in 2024.
"With the penetration and traffic filling of top apps such as WeChat and Douyin, more game manufacturers and developers will pour into the mini game track, and hot money, talents and resources will also flow in, and the growth curve will become steeper and steeper. An industry researcher said to Tiger Sniff.
Two styles: restraint VS vigorous miracles
When Internet giants are eyeing the same "new cake", their business strategies and playing styles often imply the company's past style.
Looking back, WeChat Mini Games has a slow climbing period, which is in line with its consistent "restrained" external cognition:
- In 2018, Zhang Xiaolong's "Jump" on the platform kicked off the prelude to WeChat mini games, and IAA mini games entered their infancy, and the hyper-casual category gradually built users' awareness of the mini game platform;
- 2019-2021 is the precipitation period of WeChat Mini Games, at this stage, shooting, simulation, puzzle, role-playing, and tower defense categories have products that have emerged, and gradually cultivated users' gaming habits;
- Since 2022, there have been popular models in various categories in the WeChat ecosystem, and users have developed the mentality of playing mini games.
Source: QuestMobile / TRUTH China Mobile Internet Database
Tiger Sniff has learned that at present, the average game time per capita of WeChat IAA Mini Games and Hybrid Mini Games has reached 60min, and the retention of active seven-day games has reached 60%, and there are obvious differences in category preferences among users of different ages and genders - specifically:
- Young female users are more enthusiastic about solving puzzles and finding faults, young and middle-aged female users prefer simulated management, and match-3 is a popular category covering all ages.
- Male users have richer category preferences, young men like IO games (online multiplayer), action shooting and other "show operation" categories, older men are more willing to try strategy, simulation and other categories, and middle-aged and elderly men have a soft spot for answering questions, which is an important way of daily entertainment.
Douyin's entry into the mini game track still follows the style of "vigorously producing miracles":
- Before 2020, there were limited advertisements for mini games on Douyin, and the platform did not make it a key business direction.
- From 2021 to 2022, Douyin has become an unavoidable placement position for game manufacturers, and intensive mini-game advertisements are blowing out;
- From 2023 to the present, Douyin mini games have grown savagely, and Douyin has become a small game platform that "wrestles" with WeChat.
Even, Ding Chengliang, director of mass business analysis of the giant engine, optimistically said that the entire mini game track is expected to reach 600-65 billion yuan in 2024, and may soar to 800-85 billion yuan in 2025, "Douyin will account for 1/3 of the market share in the market, and with the advantages of a strong ecological traffic base, multiple distribution scenarios, and customized algorithms, it will contribute to the main increment of the growth of the track scale." ”
Douyin's confidence lies in the fact that in recent years, the demand for focused, fragmented, and personalized entertainment has surged, which provides the soil for the savage growth of mini games, and Douyin mini programs have large traffic and low content thresholds, which are more suitable for fragmented entertainment methods.
According to the survey of Giant Arithmetic, Douyin Mini Game users have strong game stickiness and willingness to pay, and most Mini Game users have formed a long-term habit based on categories, with more than 70% of Mini Game users playing more than two Mini Games at the same time, and nearly 40% of users playing for more than 1 hour a day.
In addition, there are more than 300 million users who watch game live broadcasts and short game videos on Douyin, and the age composition of Douyin Mini Games has also shifted upwards as a whole, with the main growth distributed in the two age ranges of 24-40 years old and over 50 years old.
It's no wonder that Douyin's management's will (in the mini game track) has landed so quickly - in addition to using the regular feed stream (the information flow that continuously updates and presents content to users) for acquisition, Douyin IAA Mini Game has opened up the full-scene distribution capacity in just one year, and advertising, Douyin live broadcast, short video, search, game recommendation card, Douyin sidebar, mini game center and other channels together constitute the diversified traffic entrance of Douyin IAA Mini Game.
Source: Game Working Committee, 2023 China Game Industry Report
Tiger Sniff understands that in 2024, the product capabilities of Douyin IAA Mini Games will be further upgraded:
- Strengthen the design of game packages in the game sidebar to guide users to quickly access and cultivate repeat visit habits to improve retention rate.
- Enrich search results and improve search traffic optimization;
- Play directly through subscription cards and feed game progress to improve user reach and recall.
In addition, the giant engine has also launched a platform-level automated delivery product, UBMax, which can bring more stable delivery results to manufacturers based on more flexible automation, higher-dimensional effect optimization, and longer-term ROI (return on investment) optimization, and achieve "cost reduction and efficiency increase".
A corporate executive told Tiger Sniff that ByteDance, a young giant, has stood in the center of the stage for too long, and has single-handedly created a traffic system in the BAT jungle. "In the past, the 'vigorously produce miracles' style of play shook BAT in the information and short video tracks, and since then, ByteDance has skillfully used traffic backflow to make new businesses quickly start, and conquered the city under the strategy of "rapid business expansion, rapid investment of resources trial and error, and rapid adjustment" - its purpose is to infinitely granularize people and teams in the business body, and it has become a 'god'. ”
One piece of "fat", two "hungry men"
The reason why mini-games are called "fat meat" comes from two aspects:
First, mobile games are still in the stage of unleashing their potential, and mini games are a huge incremental content scene that is exploding.
Source: Game Working Committee, 2023 China Game Industry Report
Taking the growth rate of mobile apps and mini games as a reference section: According to the "2023 China Game Industry Report" released by the Game Working Committee, the actual sales revenue of the domestic game market will exceed 300 billion yuan in 2023.
Among them, the actual sales revenue of the mobile game market reached 226.86 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 17.51%, and the actual revenue of the mini program game market soared by 300% to 20 billion yuan.
Source: Game Working Committee, 2023 China Game Industry Report
Such a steep growth rate is due to the fact that Mini Games can convert platform game users and potential game users (who are not exposed to games) to support a large enough user base.
Take the data of WeChat Open Class - Mini Games as an example: in 2024Q1, the DAU of WeChat Mini Games increased by 20% year-on-year, the MAU of IAA Mini Games reached 500 million, and the number of developers exceeded 400,000 - even though the data climbing curve of the Mini Game track is amazing, the number of WeChat users exceeded 1.3 billion and the MAU of Mini Programs exceeded 1.1 billion in the same period, and there is still huge room for growth in follow-up Mini Games.
A big reason behind this is that IAA mini games are not restricted by the system/platform, and are more suitable for the landing of lightweight products with cross-platform layout (lower threshold and more controllable risk) - the current APP games often have several G installation packages, and there are generally first-time login loading packages;
Secondly, from the perspective of the entire industry, the previous mini games mainly focused on the leisure category, and in the past two years, they have begun to iterate to diversification, which is better than the short project cycle and light investment - taking "Just My Eyes" as an example, its full platform users have exceeded 150 million, and Lu Zhentang, CEO of Yig Technology, the production team, shared that the project was approved in June, launched in July, made a profit in August, and exceeded 10 million in December, which fully confirms the characteristics of IAA mini games with a short production cycle and fast return on investment.
FINALLY, THERE ARE ALSO DIFFERENCES IN USER PREFERENCES BETWEEN MINI GAMES AND APP GAMES - MINI GAME USERS PREFER CASUAL GAMES, PAY MORE ATTENTION TO THE CONVENIENCE OF GAMES, AND TEND TO PLAY IN FRAGMENTED TIME (A FEW MINUTES APART), WHILE APP GAME USERS PREFER TO PLAY MOBAS, SHOOTERS, ROLE-PLAYING AND OTHER CATEGORIES, PAY MORE ATTENTION TO GAME QUALITY AND EXPERIENCE, AND TEND TO PLAY GAMES IN A LONGER FULL PERIOD (MORE THAN 20 MINUTES).
Second, Mini Games are not grabbing APP market share, but mining/converting new industry increments.
According to the third-party survey data obtained by Tiger Sniff, Mini Program games are more attractive to middle-aged groups aged 18-40, with a higher proportion in new first-tier and second- and third-tier cities.
Among them, the overlap between Douyin Mini Games and APP game interest groups is only 14%, and the overlap between Mini Game paying users and APP game paying users is less than 11%, and the user overlap between the two is extremely low, and Tencent executives also said on the 2023Q4 earnings call, "At present, we have not seen any encroachment between Mini Games and APP, and some Mini Game paying users (with a single-digit overlap rate) are also APP paying users." ”
Source: Game Working Committee, 2023 China Game Industry Report
In this regard, Li Qing, the head of the WeChat Mini Game team, explained, "Assuming that the Mini Game and the APP are purely competitive, they will not go far, because the APP is already a large-scale market. We realized a long time ago that Mini Games are an increment of the game industry, or a relatively parallel state to the app market. ”
It is worth mentioning that there is no shortage of industry researchers who told Tiger Sniff that the opportunity for the outbreak of this round of mini games mainly stems from technological breakthroughs, especially Unity's adaptation to enable mobile game development to seamlessly connect with mini games. In this regard, Zichen Leyou Gao Fei (representative product "Snake Endless Battle") said frankly, "Three or four years ago, when hyper-casual was popular, Unity did not support the presentation of WeChat mini games, and after the breakthrough of WeChat platform capabilities (supporting Unity) in the past two years, the product supply began to rise rapidly. ”
This judgment coincides with the sharing of the WeChat team, and Li Qing believes that the important breakthrough of WeChat Mini Games in 2023 is the adaptation of Unity and the liberalization of 1G package infrastructure.
"First of all, the release of WeChat capabilities, to the transformation of developers into productivity, there is a process in the middle, such as the code package from 20-30M to the release, iOS under the high adaptation, high-definition, high-performance mode, to solve the basic Caton problem; Li Qing said.
What is Douyin and WeChat fighting for?
Of course, the game between WeChat and Douyin in the mini game territory cannot be limited to interpretation from the game level, and to understand the logic of the two continuous increases, we must jump out of the game thinking.
To a certain extent, WeChat and Douyin's bet on mini games is not a simple layout of the game track, but the use of mini games as a strong interactive advertising pool - the characteristics of mini games are click-to-play, which can make more full use of advertising exposure and shorter links, and high-frequency, rigid demand, scenario-based, and large DAU can complete the commercial internal cycle through advertising components.
In the past year, ByteDance has surpassed Tencent to become the most profitable Internet company - according to foreign media reports in April, ByteDance's profits soared by about 60% in 2023, sales increased from $80 billion to nearly $120 billion (about 870 billion yuan), and EBITDA jumped from about $25 billion to more than $40 billion (about 290 billion yuan), which marks that ByteDance has surpassed Tencent in revenue and profit.
Among them, the rapidly expanding advertising business is the "engine" for ByteDance to boost revenue - on November 14, 2023, foreign media quoted people familiar with the matter as reporting: ByteDance benefited from the strong growth of advertising and e-commerce businesses, and its revenue in 2023Q2 increased by about 40% year-on-year to $29 billion, far exceeding Meta (FaceBook's parent company).
Since then, the mobile Internet has completed the reshaping of the territory from the three-legged stand of the old BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) to the confrontation between the two superpowers and multiple powers (Alibaba, Tencent, Toutiao, Meituan, Didi, etc.) and then to the new BAT (byte, Alibaba, Tencent).
Note: ByteDance's revenue is converted according to the exchange rate of the current year, and the conversion of revenue in 2023 is based on the exchange rate of April 28, and Alibaba usually has a full fiscal year from April 1 to March 31 of the following year
Even, the channel advantages of Mini Games are also reflected in cross-platform traffic and advertising promotion.
For example, Douyin gradually opened the external links of WeChat Mini Games last year, and the Douyin live broadcast room also began to have related promotions of WeChat Mini Games, connecting WeChat and Douyin, the two largest traffic "islands" on the market, and bringing more traffic to the Mini Game industry.
Of course, there is another key factor that cannot be ignored - mini games driven by social gameplay have strong user stickiness, which is a "sharp weapon" to grab users' attention and pull the product duration.
In 2023, "The King of Salted Fish" and "Knights of Madness" will reach more than 80 million active users, and QuestMobile reports that in February 2024, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment's "Seeking the Way" MAU will reach 160 million, and the MAU of "King of Salted Fish" of Haoteng Imagination will reach 117 million.
In addition, industry insiders estimate that the active users of "Catching the Big Goose" and "Shooting at Zombies", which were popular some time ago, are also increasing by tens of millions, and "Hundred Refining Heroes", "Stray Supermarket" and "Spirit Sword Immortal" are becoming new hits to take over the baton.
"There are 6 positions in the TOP 10 of the WeChat Mini Game Best-selling List (April 24), either airborne or rapidly rising, which is something that no one expected-which not only shows that the traffic pool of the Mini Game market is large enough to accommodate multiple popular purchases at the same time, but also shows that the traffic distribution efficiency of Mini Games is extremely high, which has never been seen in the APP game market. GameLook analysis said.
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