Where exactly are the native users?
Recently, Sony's "Concord" was launched and died violently, which sparked a lot of discussion in the industry.
The most direct reason is that no one plays the game, and the peak number of people online at the same time on Steam does not exceed 700. After 8 years of research and development and an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, it is such a gain, which can somewhat make people understand Sony's quick shutdown of the game. After all, sometimes a timely stop loss is also an option.
In addition to LGBTQIA, which is criticized on the surface, some players said that "Star Attack" is too old-fashioned in terms of gameplay mode, and there is almost no advantage in benchmarking OW and other similar products. This also made me wonder for a while, is it possible that the hero shooter competitive game category has reached its peak, and there is no new solution?
Judging by the market situation, this is clearly not the case. The author once mentioned in the article "On the Hero Shooting Track, Tengwang Starts to Bar Again" that in recent years, many "intermediate" products between OW and CS2 have been run on the Hero Shooting + Team Competition track. For example, Valorant, Calabichu, and FragPunk, which has high expectations among the player base, etc.
At the same time, at this stage, including Tencent, NetEase, iDreamSky, etc., are all bringing hero shooting + team competitive gameplay from the PC to the mobile game field, trying to find more increments through terminal transfers. However, at present, there are no related mobile game products to open up the situation.
A few days ago, Tencent's "Valorant" mobile game opened a short 3-day test. Judging from the video content flowing out of station B, the overall gameplay framework and quality of the game are quite mature, but the project team is still considering further polishing the mobile experience. In addition, NetEase's "Operation Apocalypse", which was first launched on August 30, does not seem to be as high as imagined.
This makes me wonder how much it will be a "false proposition" for hero shooting + team competitive mobile games? Or is it because it is still in the stage of "stepping on thunder" similar to the early MOBA mobile games and chicken mobile games?
Street fighting shooter mobile game must stretch TTK?
Since the beginning of the "Quake" series in 1996, the development of PVP shooting competitive games has not only accumulated a large number of fans, but also derived a wealth of subdivided gameplay tracks.
For example, the "CS" series, which pushes the minimap + short TTK strong competitive shooting to the top, "Overwatch", which integrates the MOBA concept and emphasizes the skill mechanism, and "PUBG", which integrates the non-bilateral tactical shooting competition (chicken) with a large map + collection + elimination mechanism, etc. In addition, based on the aforementioned product gameplay, many innovative games have been born in the future, including "Valorant", "APEX Legends" and so on.
So why is it difficult to produce new products in shooting competitive mobile games, and the hero shooting + team competitive mobile game track has not produced effective results for many years?
A very objective phenomenon is that in the field of mobile games, the only one that really breaks out of the track seems to be "Peace Elite", which won the final fruit of the "Chicken War". Looking further down from the App Store's best-selling list, the evergreen products that can rank in the Top 20 for a long time are also "CrossFire: The King of Gunfights", which has long been ahead of the traditional street fighting group shooting track.
Z, the producer of a popular competitive shooting game, told me: "It is already difficult to do shooting operations in mobile games, and hero shooting has also added skills, and it is difficult for players to take care of them all under short TTK." At the same time, to this day, many people still debate the question of "is it really fun to poke the glass and shoot guns, or because everyone around you is playing games on their phones".
In essence, the hero shooting + team competitive mobile game belongs to the traditional street battle team competitive shooting, and "short TTK" and "headshot" are the core features of this type of game. On the mobile side, due to the limitations of platform features such as small screen and poke glass operation, it is difficult for the Hero Shooting Team Competition product to perfectly restore the mature keyboard and mouse operation experience on the PC side.
In order to polish the experience of this type of gameplay on the mobile terminal, although the current practices of various manufacturers are different, they also have common directions, one of which is to "retain the core experience and lightweight operation".
In fact, it can also be seen from the dissemination points of products such as "Valorant" mobile game and "Operation Apocalypse" and player feedback that "restoring the PC experience as much as possible on mobile" is still the focus of everyone's attention. A UP master of station B mentioned in the video evaluating the "Valorant" mobile game that if the UI is hidden, this mobile game is actually similar to the original PC, and the game quality is very high, and he is very optimistic about the future performance of the game.
A B station UP master gave Valorant mobile game a high evaluation
For example, in terms of the core experience, Valorant mobile game is the same as the desktop game, highlighting "headshots" and "emergency stop shooting". The game has been simplified to allow the player to release the move button to stop the character immediately, rather than pressing the "reverse arrow button" to make an "emergency stop". In addition, the game has a design of "aim assist", which is common in competitive shooters today.
However, some players believe that although "aim assist" can lower the threshold for operation, it will also affect the competitiveness of street fighting shooters. On the one hand, the "high probability" headshot makes the competitive experience poor; On the other hand, the problem of auxiliary aiming and adsorption will also cause some heroes with "stealth" skills to have operational shifts and lose their hero positioning characteristics.
In addition, in the opinion of producer Z, the street battle mobile game must be elongated TTK. As some players have said, if the Hero Shooting Team Competitive Mobile Game is a "short TTK headshot game", why not play CF Mobile Game. And how to balance simplified operation, competitiveness, and TTK is a problem that is currently being considered by the Hero Shooting Team Competitive Mobile Game.
Judging from the content of this Valorant mobile game test, the project team seems to be constantly trying and polishing, and the game has slightly enhanced the "running and shooting" ability of some heroes and guns, and there are relatively few heroes launched at present.
To put it bluntly, it's a matter of how to create a differentiated and more mobile-friendly experience. For example, the chicken gameplay itself has widened the firefight interval (large map + material collection + elimination mechanism), and at the same time, "Peace Elite" has improved the mobile operation in the process of "chicken war". Although CF mobile games are a traditional street fighting shooting competition type, the combat operation focuses more on "running shooting" rather than "emergency stop shooting", and has unique biochemical gameplay.
It is worth mentioning that in addition to the current design around hero skills, guns and levels, there are also some products on the market that find new solutions to problems in terms of gameplay. For example, the stringing mechanism of "Calabichu", the 3D transformation into 2D paper man, not only enhances the fun of the game, but also greatly reduces the range of cross-plane hits and headshot rate of the character, and improves the game's TTK and continuous shooting combat experience.
The lower limit of the end-to-end change is actually not stable
The author believes that if the hero shooting + team competitive mobile game can have a good experience, it can run out.
After all, on PC, Valorant has already proven its gameplay viability and market maturity. In other words, there are clearly opportunities when the relevant mobile game market is still in the exploration or even product blank period. However, it is still difficult to conclude how much imagination can be brought by the end of the hand.
In the golden period of mobile game development, many manufacturers not only enjoyed the dividends of the development of the platform of the times through "end-to-end transfer", but also created popular mobile game products in various categories such as MOBA, shooting, and MMO. This once made the industry regard "end to hand" as a "shortcut" that can avoid detours.
But now, the entire game market has entered a new stage of development, and the preferences of mobile gamers are constantly changing. Even if a terminal game with mature gameplay has achieved outstanding market results, it does not mean that it can reach the same heights on the mobile game platform.
Yao Yuan, the head of TiMi Y1 Studio, once mentioned in an interview with LatePost that whether it is "PUBG MOBILE" or "Call of Duty Mobile", an important prerequisite for their success is that they have a successful PC game first, so most players are willing to try. However, there are many restrictions on this type of IP migration: the IP must be suitable for online gaming, the IP should be driven by gameplay, and the gameplay should be able to adapt to mobile phone operation······ Today, it seems that there are not many eligible IPs.
This includes the problem that the gameplay we discussed above should be adapted to the operation of the mobile game, and there are great differences between users on different platforms.
According to some games that have been launched, it can also be confirmed. At least judging by the performance of products like APEX Mobile, they are nothing less than a failed exploration. In May last year, APEX Mobile, which had been online for less than a year, announced its discontinuation. In this regard, Chris Suh, chief financial officer of EA, once explained that there are three reasons for shelving games: the immersive experience of mobile games has not reached the quality of terminal games; Insufficient player retention; Third, users in the mobile game market are changing too fast, and companies need to re-adapt.
In terms of experience, "APEX Mobile" really does not have much improvement in gameplay compared to "Peace Elite". Perhaps the biggest difference is that elements like "Slide Tackle" and "Hero Skills" had a certain freshness in the early days (and now Peace Elite also has them). At the same time, in terms of operation, "APEX Mobile Game" failed to perfectly replicate the PC experience.
The same problem also appeared in "High Energy Heroes" in the follow-up. The number of pre-orders before the game was launched exceeded 10 million, and the game failed to break into the top 30 of the App Store's best-selling game list after it was launched. In contrast, although the Naraka: Bladepoint mobile game has achieved good results in the early days of its launch, there is still a certain gap with the outside world's expectations for the game.
On the one hand, Naraka: Bladepoint has verified that there is a complementary relationship between the social needs of competitive games and the differentiated experience of Chinese martial arts action, and it has a unique style in the BR (Battle Royale) market. On the other hand, judging from the scale of the early publicity and release of the mobile game "Naraka: Bladepoint", as well as NetEase's ambition to further lay out the big DAU field, everyone actually has high hopes for the work to expand the BR/competitive mobile game market.
But the current performance of the "Naraka: Bladepoint" mobile game does not seem to be as strong as imagined (I thought it could fight with the king and peace). It still absorbs more users of the original terminal game or cold weapon chicken pendant type, and the follow-up long-term operation of the game is basically stable around the top 20 on the best-selling list.
Based on this, some industry insiders said that they don't know if the upper limit of market performance in the future will be the upper limit of hero shooting + team competition products such as "Valorant" mobile games. However, he added: "There is no shortage of such games that will continue to refresh the lower limit of market performance with the growth of users in the market, just like the search and withdrawal of subdivided gameplay products such as "Dark Zone Breakout". ”
Of course, in the author's opinion, if a product can stabilize in the Top20, it is already very successful. The reason why we have higher expectations is that we hope that the market will not solidify, and players can get a better and more diverse experience. It's just that it's much more difficult than you think to successfully build a brand new track.
Finding native users is more important than grabbing them
Back to the question at the beginning of the article, "Will Hero Shooting + Team Competitive Mobile Games Be a False Proposition?" “
I don't think so. At least from the perspective of the layout of Tencent and NetEase, as well as the attention of the player group, there is an objective demand for this type of mobile game. At the same time, just like the early MOBA mobile games that used virtual roulette and improved the operation of chicken mobile games, as manufacturers take turns to fight, the future hero shooting + team competitive gameplay can also find a way to adapt to the mobile game experience.
At present, the more critical question is whether the hero shooting + team competition mobile game category is expanding the shooting track plate, or competing with the existing track products for users.
If it's the latter, it may be more of a competition between individual items. Especially in the absence of substantial changes on the Internet platform, the hero shooting group competition mobile game, which also belongs to the major category of shooting competition, will inevitably compete with "Peace Elite" and "Crossfire: The King of Gunfights" back and forth to grab users.
At the same time, we need to take into account that the above two top products are also continuing to integrate popular game modes into their own gameplay systems. It may not be easy for the new work to snatch a part of the user market from them with deep IP user precipitation. The most feared thing is that a product like Sony's "Star Attack", which still uses the old gameplay mechanism 8 years after OW's launch, will end up with a player abandoning and losing all his money.
In other words, if you want to promote the development of the entire shooting market and truly break out of a track, the hero shooting + team competition mobile game needs native users and more pan-users. For example, "Genshin Impact" in the second dimension, "Against the Cold" mobile game in MMO, "Egg Boy Party" in casual competition, etc.
Judging from the current products that have been launched such as XD Network's "T3 Arena" and NetEase's "Apocalypse Action", they seem to be still exploring.
Where are the native users of the hero shooting + team competitive mobile game? Can the mature gameplay on PC have a second life on mobile? We hope that the products under development such as Valorant mobile game and Ace Warrior 2 can bring us some answers in the future.