Text: Eye Entertainment
You've definitely seen a similar short video on Douyin: a blogger is playing a puzzle game, and the difficulty is not particularly difficult. But every time you feel like you've passed the level, the blogger will make a stroke of genius and lead to a regrettable defeat in the game. The point is that the blogger in the video still doesn't understand what the problem is, and scratches his ears and cheeks to ask you for help.
This kind of short video recording yourself playing a mini-game is taking Douyin by storm.
Some users gave feedback in the comment area under this type of short video: After watching a (video) curiously, it is like being entangled, and you can brush it every day.
This is also supported by the data of related videos, and a large number of game tutorial videos can often receive hundreds of thousands of likes, which has also attracted many creators to run these Mini Game vertical accounts.
According to the data released by the 2024 Giant Engine Douyin IAA Mini Game Ecological Conference held by Mega Engine, in 2023, the DAU of Douyin Mini Games will increase by 150% year-on-year, breaking through the 10 million mark, and the number of monthly active users will exceed 100 million; At the same time, the number of hours spent playing per user increased significantly, up by 54.3%. In addition, the video views of the hashtag #Douyin Mini Game have also exceeded 193.8 billion times.
The Douyin mini game market is hot, and the Douyin New Deal in April has added fuel to this fire. But the problem is that the mini game business does tap the traffic of its own short videos on the Douyin platform.
Under the complex competition and harmony relationship between mini games and short videos, short games have become the only traffic porter between the two.
Millions of fans are added, mainly by pretending to be stupid
In the live broadcast room, the anchor is anxiously asking the audience what to do.
This is a game with the theme of "helping youkai disguise as an adult", and players need to use various props already in the scene to transform the monster, and finally help the monster complete the transformation without being detected.
In the live broadcast room with 2,000 online people, some users complained depressedly: Is the anchor invisible, a group of people said the correct answer, but chose a wrong one.
Xiaobai is a frequent visitor to the live broadcast room of the mini game, and he likes to open the tablet and mobile phone at the same time when he is resting, the tablet is used to catch up on dramas, and the mobile phone puts some content that does not need to occupy too much attention.
After swiping into the live broadcast room of the mini game by chance, his mobile phone began to hang in this kind of live broadcast room for a long time. At first, he was just curious about how to clear the customs, but after seeing a lot, he became a veteran of this kind of game, and he knew a lot about the cheats for clearing the customs. As a result, his motivation for hanging in the live broadcast room changed to show his experience and win the attention of others.
Xiaobai revealed to Eye Entertainment that more than half of the mini game anchors will use "pretending to be stupid" to win the attention of players.
Bloggers will deliberately make some obvious mistakes in the video to make the viewer feel "annoyed" and "speechless", thus stimulating their curiosity and desire to explore. This kind of "playing dumb" behavior is actually a clever strategy that can stimulate the audience's sense of engagement and substitution, and make the audience more engaged in watching and interacting with the video. This kind of interaction can not only increase the number of views and likes of the video, but also improve the stickiness and activity of the audience.
Taking the Douyin account @小凡游戏酱 as an example, relying on a small game video that can never be cleared, it has attracted 2.34 million fans. In the video comment area, enthusiastic users who provide answers have become a stable audience for her videos, so that each video has a good data performance.
But this kind of "playing dumb" style of play only worked in the past, and now this kind of rhetoric is now being eliminated. Xiaobai said that although bloggers who use "pretending to be stupid" to blog traffic still account for the majority, it is precisely because there are too many people who use it and the content is homogeneous that most of the head game bloggers have abandoned this kind of talk.
"The ones I use now are not pretending to be stupid, most of them are really stupid."
The homogenization of content is the biggest problem exposed in the content of short videos of mini games. The widespread emergence of this status quo is not only due to the low threshold for the creation of mini game videos, but also the relatively simple content expression methods of most creators, which also has a great relationship with the serious homogenization of the content of the mini game itself.
At present, among the various types of mini-games on the Douyin platform, puzzles (brain holes) and match-3 occupy an absolute leading position.
Like the previously mentioned mini-game mode of "helping monsters disguise as adults", there are many puzzle games including but not limited to "Playing Terrier Master", "The Whole Live", "No One Can Admit It", "Words Come to Find Differences" and so on.
This creates a kind of spectacle of TikTok mini-games: there are only popular game modes, and there are no specific popular games. Because of the review, most game modes can have a lot of follow-up content after three days after they become popular. Among them, puzzle games have become the hardest hit area of game mode homogenization because of their low production cost and fast production cycle.
This has forced Mini Game bloggers to start innovating on barren content sources, such as Douyin blogger Xiao Chen, whose video style is just like his account introduction, "unexpected methods, unexpected endings". Xiao Chen, in the puzzle game, use "death" to increase the difficulty, and then use "extreme operation" to clear the level, showing the technical flow in the puzzle game. At present, the three videos on the top of the account's videos have 2.77 million, 2.32 million, and 870,000 likes respectively.
And even creators who don't have creative talent, most of them have gained good income under the current bonus period of mini games.
Douyin makes efforts to play mini games, and creators usher in dividends
On April 1, Douyin launched a new incentive policy for mini games: if the conditions are met, developers can get up to 90% of the share. This proportion is at a high level in the industry, reflecting the importance and support of the Douyin platform for the field of mini games.
The reason why the Douyin platform has taken such a "high-profile" posture is, on the one hand, because of the changing trend of the game industry in recent years. With the decline in the number of game editions and the contraction of the industry, game manufacturers have begun to focus on more flexible and lightweight projects.
Douyin mini games, with their lightweight and easy-to-use characteristics, are exactly in line with this trend. On the other hand, the Douyin platform also hopes to further enrich its content ecology and improve user activity and retention rate through the development of the field of mini games.
This wave has blessed short video creators of mini games. By publishing content related to Mini Games, Mini Game short video creators not only attract a large number of fans, but also enjoy the rich rewards provided by the platform.
Their income mainly comes from platform incentives and game manufacturers' shares. Every time a user enters the game through a link to a video they post, the creator gets paid accordingly. It's a straightforward way to monetize, and it's an effective way to inspire creators.
According to the Mini Game data released by Douyin, in the past year, DAU has increased by 150% year-on-year, the game time of a single user has also increased by 54.3%, and the average investment life cycle of Mini Games has reached about 43 days. At the same time, the monthly active users of Douyin Mini Games have also exceeded the 100 million mark recently.
This data proves that the mini game market is gradually expanding. But correspondingly, shovel sellers are also enthusiastic.
Zhou Guobin is a senior college graduate, during the internship he came into contact with the mini game promotion business in the company, and then he also opened a personal account to try, he revealed to Eye Entertainment that the current mini game short video creation track is very crowded, the lower the threshold, the more fierce the competition.
Due to the simplicity and ease of play of Mini Games, streamers or short video creators must find more innovative ways to attract and retain viewers' interest.
It's worth noting that Mini Game Live Streaming has its own unique challenges compared to traditional game live streaming. Due to the simple gameplay of the mini game, users often do not have the need to learn the game in depth, so the loyalty to the mini game streamer is not high. This affects the streamer's opportunities to show his charisma and attract loyal fans, which in turn reduces the tip income.
At the same time, the homogenization of mini games may also cause the audience to lose interest, increasing the difficulty and cost of the anchor to maintain the popularity of the live broadcast room.
Mini games and short videos in a coopetition relationship
According to the "2023 China Game Industry Report", the revenue of the domestic mini game market will reach 20 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 300%, and the market size is expected to continue to maintain growth momentum in 2024, which is expected to reach 60 billion yuan.
In this blue ocean of growth, the complex relationship between Douyin's mini game business and short video business that is both competitive and cooperative has attracted much attention.
On the one hand, there is competition between the two in the competition for user time. Short videos continue to attract users' attention with their short, flat and fast characteristics, while mini games attract users to relax and be entertained in a short period of time with their relaxed and interesting game experience. Therefore, there is a certain degree of competition between the two in terms of competing for the user's time.
However, on the other hand, Douyin mini games and short video business are mutually reinforcing. First of all, the Douyin short video platform provides a natural traffic entrance for mini games. By embedding Mini Game links or promotional content in short videos, Douyin can attract a large number of users to participate in Mini Games, thereby increasing the user scale and activity of Mini Games. Secondly, mini games can also bring new content and users to the Douyin short video platform. The interesting content and interactive elements in the mini game can bring richer content resources to the Douyin platform; At the same time, Mini Game users can also share their gaming experience and experience on the Douyin platform to attract more users' attention and participation.
This contradiction between oneself and oneself stems from a dilemma in the development of Douyin.
At present, Douyin's growth in the traffic pool has bottomed out, and in order to achieve further breakthroughs in revenue, it is necessary to improve the quality of the "traffic pool". Compared with indirect advertising business, local life services, e-commerce and games can directly monetize traffic, and there is more room for imagination. In addition, after ByteDance unloaded the "heavier" game business represented by Chaoxi Lightyear, it was more helpful to grasp this rapid growth opportunity by moving lightly to lay out the mini game market.
Secondly, from the perspective of user habits, Douyin's decentralized algorithm recommendation has gathered a large number of fragmented content users. This type of user group tends to have an easy and fast demand for content, and Mini Games just fit this habit. Mini Games do not require a complicated download and installation process, and users can easily experience them within the Douyin platform, which greatly improves user engagement and retention.
Under the development of this contradiction, mini game vloggers have become the only circulation outlet between the two formats. In the form of short videos, it continuously guides traffic to the Mini Game ecosystem.
"Try to have a huge amount of traffic, but this traffic never belongs to us, we are just the porters of the traffic." Zhou Guobin said.