Although it has been less than a year since it was launched, no one can deny that NetEase's "Against the Cold" mobile game has changed the pattern of the Chinese game market and is enough to be recorded in the history of Chinese games.
In a sense, you could even describe the game as "great".
On June 30, 2023, the mobile game "Against the Cold" will be officially open beta. At this time, although it has attracted the attention of many players because of a series of "exaggerated" promotional slogans, no one will have too many expectations for its future. After all, this is an MMO mobile game that has been proven to be a "marginal, niche" genre by countless games.
The impression of the public players on this kind of game that has been too mature can be simply planned as "liver and krypton", "crazy cutting leeks", a new game is not in the smoke for two or three months after the launch of the cloud is not a trace, and the vast majority of young people will not take a look at the MMO at all.
However, what is unexpected is that the mobile game "Against the Cold" actually broke the curse of MMO's "short shelf life", and it took less than 3 months to easily win 50 million players, and no matter the player retention rate, payment rate and praise rate, it has set a new record, and the MMO mobile game has changed from a "niche" to a "tuyere".
But the subsequent market reaction told everyone with bloody facts - it's not that MMOs have become popular, it's just that the mobile game "Against the Cold" is outstanding. Its success cannot be replicated.
Why is this happening? The reason is actually very simple, the mobile game "Against the Cold" is fundamentally not a traditional MMO, but a new "game form".
From the very beginning, the mobile game abandoned the "numerical drive" that traditional MMOs had insisted on for decades, and turned it into a pure service-driven. The game has completely not sold values, does not have liver or krypton, and stitches everything, and does its best to attract more players with a better game experience and a more affordable price system, and achieves the commercial appeal of small payment on the basis of a huge number of users.
In a sense, there is no "skill" in the mobile game "Against the Cold", since its launch, it has been insisting on continuously strengthening the content that is popular with players, and then using more radical updates and iterations to meet the increasing new needs of players, serve as many people as possible and maintain its huge user base.
Players feel that the drop of game equipment is too face-looking, and the official has upgraded the equipment many times to drop the guarantee; Players feel that the casual gameplay is not rich enough, so the official has added dozens of gameplay modes such as martial arts eating chicken, casual racing, backgammon, mahjong, and fighting landlords, turning themselves into a "game hall"; Players feel that the lone wolf experience can be strengthened, and the official continues to evolve intelligent NPCs, realizing all the imagination of players.
With monthly major version updates and expansions released every four to five months, the mobile game is evolving like crazy, allowing players to experience a visibly upgraded......
It is precisely because of this that the success of the mobile game "Against the Cold" cannot be replicated at all.
After all, in the face of such a large user base and always running at full strength, you have to do better in a shorter time on the basis of its continuous evolution, good enough to shake its increasingly solid foundation, and some license can "replace it".
It's a fantasy, isn't it?