From a valuation of 1 billion to a debt of 20 million, what happened to Longyuan Network?

"The company really doesn't have any money."

Longyuan Network was sued by a Chongqing company, because the effect of the cooperation between the two parties was not as expected, the Chongqing company demanded that Longyuan Network return the advance payment of 3 million yuan, and Longyuan Network lost the first and second trials. When the judge of the second instance asked whether there was any possibility of mediation in the case, Long Yuan's legal representative said that "the company really has no money". This case brought an enforcement order of nearly 3 million yuan to Longyuan Network.

According to public information, Longyuan Network has repeatedly stood in the dock in recent years, and there will be 6 legal dispute cases in 2024 alone. In October last year, due to a dispute with the management of Runaway Comics, the two founders Li Longfei and Yin Xueyuan became the executors, and the amount involved reached 19.52 million yuan.

Longyuan Network used to be a hot game publishing company, releasing three well-known games in a row in the first two years of its establishment, spanning the three game categories of SLG, action and MOBA, and in 2019, it released the popular "Duoduo Auto Chess".

However, Auto Chess is already a product that was launched almost six years ago······

Things don't go bad all of a sudden

If you take a serious look at the recent situation of Longyuan Network, you will find that freezing three feet is not a day's cold. Since 2020, Longyuan has launched 10 games, and there are also some bright products, but unfortunately none of them can carry the banner of revenue.

Among these products, only three games, "Nothing New", "The Battle of Eden", and "Music World: Re", which has just been launched, are still in operation, and the rest of the games have been discontinued or simply died in the beta phase.

These 10 products cover eight categories. From this point of view, Longyuan Network is still very willing to try different types of games. But it can also be difficult to operate eight game categories at the same time.

There were several tests of "Flower Story" during 2020-2021, but there has been no news since July 2021.

This is a Japanese-style hanaza game. Hanaza is a popular card game in Japan that replicates the two-player KoiKoi and three-player Hanazaki gameplay. It is worth mentioning that this seems to be a product that is in line with the popular Japanese game "Sparrow Soul", and judging from the promotional picture, it even has a hint of touching porcelain.

Above: "The Tale of Flowers"丨Bottom: "Sparrow Soul"

"Party of the Gods" has a unique design, but it has not achieved good results after its launch. This is a two-dimensional style TCG war chess game, the game incorporates some war chess gameplay, and adds elements such as movement and attack distance to the trading card battle, which is a bit new.

The game first landed in the Japanese market in October 2020, but only achieved the highest ranking of iOS games at No. 386, and has been declining since then. The national server will be launched in 2021, and the overall trend is similar to that of the Japanese server, with "Party of the Gods" only achieving the highest iOS game best-selling list at No. 229, and then falling all the way until it fell out of the list, and finally stopped operating and removed from the shelves on June 30, 2022.

In 2023, the game has been relaunched with revamped gameplay, and a "Project PT" that uses the same art materials has been tested, but the follow-up will not be followed.

上：《天神学院》 | 下：《Project: PT》

"Doomsday Empire: Legion of Girls" was announced to be out of service and off the shelves after less than two years of operation. This is an SLG game with two-dimensional beautiful girl elements, which was launched on April 9, 2020, but after four months of operation, the game can't even squeeze into the top 1000 of the iOS game best-selling list.

Battle Angel has been in operation for less than two years. This game was originally called "Dream Journeyer: Elegy for the Void", and it is a fantasy-style two-dimensional side-scrolling action game. Longyuan Network has taken over the distribution and operation of the game's national server since July 10, 2020, and changed its name to "Battle Angel", but after less than two years of operation, the distribution rights were handed back to the developer Fengyun Legend, and the name was changed to "Elegy for the Sky".

"Hearts of Freedom" was also taken off the shelves after less than two years of operation. This is a side-scrolling action game featuring retro European and American painting style, developed by the Prophet Cat team, and published by Long Yuan.

The game was originally called "Shilor Wars", and it took five years of development before it was launched, and the R&D team also rubbed an engine "Great Summoner's Tool" for this purpose, but the game performance was not very good, and the iOS game best-selling list ranked 400th, and then fell seriously.

Hearts of Liberty iOS market performance

"About My Reincarnation as a Slime: King of Monsters" started well, but it fell relatively quickly. It is a turn-based card game adapted from anime IP, developed by Longyuan Network and distributed by Wanda Cinema Line (Mutual Love Interactive).

The game was launched in the Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan markets in 2020, and then the national server was launched, of which the Hong Kong market had a good performance for a while, but the rest of the markets performed poorly, and each market was suspended from 2023 to 2024.

TapTap outage notice

"Auto Chess MOBA" has been removed from the shelves overseas, and there is no news about the national server. This is a derivative work of the "Duoduo Auto Chess" IP. The game was originally exposed in early 2021, emphasizing free heroes, fair competition, and auto-chess IP, and its gameplay added elements of day and night changes, and it can also destroy certain terrain, some of the shadow of DOTA.

The game started a soft start overseas in November 2022, taking the US market as an example, the game won the highest 171st place on the best-selling list of GooglePlay games in the action category after it was launched for a month, but it was announced that it would be removed from the shelves after less than a few months of operation, and now nearly two years have passed, and the official research and development trends have not been updated, and the game has not obtained a domestic version number.

Soul of Eden hasn't been updated in a long time. It is a real-time strategy TCG game developed by Rhea Games. The game debuted as early as 2016 and was revealed early due to its similarity in gameplay to Supercell's Clash Royale, but it didn't get back until 2020.

After the game was launched, it once rushed to the 128th place on the best-selling list of iOS games, but the momentum was not maintained, and the ranking of the turnover fell rapidly, and after a year, it basically fell out of the list and could not query the data.

TapTap was last updated in August 2023

"Music World: Re" can provide relatively stable revenue, but it is more difficult to make a lot of money. It's a remake of Rhea's classic music game Cytus, and in a sense it's a fried cold rice.

"Wuhua Mixin" is the product that has attracted the most attention from Longyuan Network in the past five years. The original name of the game is "Coming to the Ancient Mixin", which is a war chess game with the theme of cultural relics anthropomorphism, which is published by Station B.

The game was established in 2018, and its art quality has been recognized by many players, and there are some new ideas in the gameplay, and it has also linked "National Treasure", which is the most high-profile product of Longyuan Network in recent years in addition to "Duoduo Auto Chess".

However, the game has entered the stage of waiting for the approval of the version number since 2022, but it will not get the version number until 2024, and the game won the 2nd place on the iOS game free list and the 22nd place on the iOS game best-selling list on the first day of launch, and the position on the best-selling list in the first month of the launch is basically stable between the TOP200, but the subsequent decline is more serious, and now it has fallen out of the list.

Whether it is an agent or a self-developed game, none of the games launched by Longyuan Network since 2020 have achieved stable commercial results, and the product operation time has basically not exceeded two years, which can hardly be said to be a healthy business operation state.

I think about the time when I had my hands in my pockets

If you look back, you will find that Longyuan Network has not changed much from now. To a certain extent, from glory to loneliness, what has changed is not Longyuan, but the market.

Once it comes to the history of Longyuan's fortune, there are three products that cannot be bypassed, namely SLG "Battlefield Red Alert", MOBA "Freedom War" and action game "Jubang", and these three products can't be avoided by one person - Li Longfei, founder and CEO of Longyuan.

Li Longfei used to work as a product manager of mobile QQ and QQ browser at Tencent, and then left to join the dim sum desktop team of Sinovation Works, and finally went to Zhixingtong for a period of time and participated in the research and development of some projects.

In July 2013, Li Longfei, Yin Xueyuan and other friends founded Longyuan Network with a starting capital of only 5.5 million, and these funds were not enough to support a start-up publisher to win a good product.

Li Longfei

Fortunately, Li Longfei reached a cooperation with the two old clubs, Zhixingtong came up with a product he had participated in the research and development of "Battlefield Red Police", and Sinovation Works provided a pea pod channel.

Although the company and the game were very competitive at this time, the monthly turnover of "Battlefield Red Alert" has exceeded 10 million levels within the year.

The original name was "Red Alert 4: The Rise of Great Powers"

If the success of "Battlefield Red Alert" is due to the help of the old club and the efforts of the distribution work, the success of "Gathering Explosion" and "Freedom War" is mixed with more adventure elements.

The agency of "Gathering Explosion" is the opportunity for Long Yuan and Leia Games to start their relationship.

With the development of several excellent audio games such as Cytus, Rhea had already made a name for himself at the time, but he was still limited to the field of music games. And "Gathering Explosion" is a mobile sci-fi action game, which somewhat breaks the player's impression of Rhea. In fact, the project was established at the beginning of the team, and the development process was relatively bumpy, with a research and development time of nearly four years, and finally this product was finally delivered.

The four keywords of "60 yuan, buyout system, sci-fi action products, and domestic mobile games" will make people feel that it is difficult to succeed even this year, let alone 2015, and "Ju Bang" even has a high agency fee of up to 8 figures.

From a business point of view, it is a bit too light to use the word adventure to describe "Ju Bang", perhaps it would be more appropriate to use words such as "wronged boss" and "want to go out of business", but Long Yuan just gambled this time.

However, less than four months after its launch, "Ju Bang" sold 200,000 copies on the iOS channel alone, and the Android channel also performed well, although it did not quickly recover the cost, it has earned a good reputation for Long Yuan.

With the successful cooperation of "Gathering Explosion", Long Yuan also got on the line with Rhea, and the two established a long-term cooperative relationship. Rhea's previous works (such as "Ancient Tree Melody" and "Music World") gradually entered the mainland through Long Yuan, and the products developed by Rhea were also basically distributed by Long Yuan, and this partnership has continued to the present.

As for "Freedom War", it is more gambling.

At a time when the MOBA game League of Legends was taking the world by storm, everyone could see the potential of the MOBA category, but mobile MOBA has always been a less talked about area, after all, there are too many technical difficulties in replicating MOBA games on mobile.

In 2014, Li Longfei was introduced by a friend to the development team of "Freedom War", Shanghai Funny House, in a remote building where even mobile phone signal was relatively scarce, and the team only showed a mobile game demo with Flash to make a two-roulette operation.

Faced with this seemingly unreliable situation, Li Longfei made a decision within two weeks - Long Yuan took out 70% of the company's cash on the account at that time to win the agency of "Freedom War" and gave the team an investment.

The original name of the game was Fighting Spirits

There are many friends in the industry who are not optimistic about Long Yuan's agent this time, but in September 2014, the first test data gave Li Longfei a lot of confidence, and the game was officially renamed from "Fighting Spirit" to "Freedom War", the second test data was better, and there was an episode before the third test.

Under the introduction of the same friend, Gaia Interactive Entertainment, which was not long in business at that time, also met the teasing team, and also hoped to enter the game after watching the demo. The three companies pulled and pulled, and the final result was that each gave in, Gaia Mutual Entertainment spent a lot of money to buy the distribution rights of the iOS channel of "Freedom War" from Long Yuan, and Long Yuan continued to be responsible for the distribution of the Android channel.

At the beginning of 2015, "Freedom War" Android and iOS have been launched, according to media interviews, about half a year of operation, "Freedom War" has reached the highest DAU has reached 1.5 million, of which 85% come from Android channels, Longyuan even organized a league activity, the popularity is real, but because of the overall quality problems, the game's monetization ability is not too good.

Three months after the release of the third hit work, Long Yuan has just ushered in his second anniversary.

However, as a publisher, Longyuan Network actually released a lot of products that were intentionally or unintentionally ignored.

According to public information, Longyuan Network has at least 14 products online or at least in the testing stage from 2013 to 2015, with a variety of themes, such as the Journey to the West theme card "Ten Thousand Demon Valley", the magic RPG "Dragon OL: Deathwing" and the Hong Kong-style RPG "Glorious Years".

It was an era of savage growth, and Long Yuan also used a lot of free advertising, and each product was more or less suspected of gaining popularity, such as renaming "Red Alert on the Battlefield" to "Red Alert 4: Rise of Great Powers", because the original IP "Red Alert" series was only released to the third part, the name itself has its own absorption effect.

Above: "Glorious Years"丨Middle: "Knights of Wonderland"丨Bottom: "Dragon Online: Deathwing"

Some media once asked Li Longfei about the copyright dispute of "Battlefield Red Alert" (from the source code leaked by overseas manufacturers), but he did not make much defense, only said, "I think the company survives first, this is a very real word".

Looking at it now, "Battlefield Red Police", "Gathering Explosion" and "Freedom War" cannot be regarded as making "big money" in the game industry, but one has a good start, one has a good reputation, and the other has stood on the tuyere for a while. The simultaneous appearance of three categories with a huge span in the hands of a game publisher is enough to make Longyuan Network famous.

As a result, the valuation of Longyuan Network rose and reached 1 billion in one go.

At the height of the limelight, Long Yuan chose to accept the 100 million-level investment of Zhejiang Digital Culture, and then successively received the investment of Wuniu Investment, Xinglu Capital, Sichuan Newspaper, Runaway Comics, Chengdu Industrial Investment, Yutai Blue Stone and Tencent, counting the previous Tap4fun, Challenger Venture Capital and Innovation Factory, Longyuan has received a total of 11 investors' investment.

In that era, whether to make money or not did not affect Longyuan Network's stride.

That time has passed

At the end of 2015, Tencent's "Honor of Kings" was launched and quickly demonstrated its strong ability to attract money. In contrast, the monetization ability of "Freedom War" itself was weak, and there were also cooperation problems between Long Yuan and the developer, and finally Long Yuan judged that "Freedom War" "did not have many opportunities" at the end of 2015.

Li Longfei once positioned Longyuan Network as "not engaged in research and development, only publishing, but will invest". He soon began to reflect on whether this model was feasible, so since 2016, Long Yuan began to carry out transformation and self-development.

Now it seems that the transition is clearly not going well. Taking the first four years of transformation as an example, during this period, Longyuan had a total of 13 products online or tested, but most of them were still agency products.

On the whole, even if you count the games that died halfway, Long Yuan has not exposed many self-developed products, which may be related to the time of the company's self-developed projects. According to Li Longfei's past interviews with the media, the internal project approval process generally lasts for more than 12 months, and there are two main directions: one is competitive games, and the other is innovative games.

There are light and heavy products in the competitive direction, such as "Don't Run After School", this game was tested on Android in February 2018, and as of the date of publication, it has received 1.19 million downloads on the TapTap platform, which is quite popular, but the game has not performed well after landing on the iOS channel in 2020, and it is only ranked 1209th on the best-selling list of iOS games, and it soon fell out of the list.

In 2019, the auto-chess gameplay that originated from "Dota 2" exploded, and even directly created a new competitive game category - auto-chess, Longyuan reached a cooperation with the developer Giant Bird Duoduo Studio, and used the art materials of the previous self-developed product "Project: DayDream" to transform "Duoduo Auto Chess" into a mobile game, once again eating the crab of the new track.

The domestic market was handed over to Tencent in the early stage, and the game turnover was about to fluctuate around the TOP200-400 in the iOS game best-selling list, but it was announced that it broke up after less than a year of operation, and Long Yuan took back the game publishing rights, and the follow-up results were not too good, but it also provided a stable cash flow for a period of time.

Tencent's performance during the period (October 2019 to August 2020).

The market performance of Long Yuan after taking back the issuance rights

Long Yuan's heavier competitive game during this period was Codename: Dragon.

"Codename: Dragon" is a chicken game. A few hours after Tencent announced that it had won the copyright of "PUBG", Longyuan Network exposed its self-developed airborne competitive terminal game "Codename: Dragon" in a high-profile manner, and the highlights of its launch are all aimed at "PUBG", such as "free games, no accelerators, low-end models and UE4 production", and several subsequent tests have been conducted, but there has been no follow-up news since July 2018.

Above: "Codename: Dragon" scene design diagram丨Bottom: Character backpack interface, picture source Ziyan game commentary

As for Long Yuan's innovative games, there have been many attempts.

For example, AVG "Dream Silk Road", which is a text adventure game jointly created with China News Service. The game uses simulated chat software to exchange messages with the virtual protagonist Liu Qingqing, a reporter from China News Service, which was relatively advanced in 2017, but the game was not put on the shelves after a short test.

"Dreaming Silk Road"

It also appeared on the official tweet of China News Network

As a result, neither of these directions has actually produced any successful commercial products.

The main revenue during this period still comes from the release of products, such as "Vientiane Story" jointly developed by Rhea and Ryubuchi, which is a fantasy adventure RPG game, the game was launched in April 2018, with a turnover of more than 100 million in the first month, and the highest position of the iOS game best-selling list was 26th, and after four years, it continued to fluctuate between the TOP300-600 of the iOS game best-selling list, and finally fell out of the list in September 2022.

The performance of "Vientiane Story" in the domestic market

According to the official website of Longyuan Network, there are currently a total of ten games operated by Longyuan, seven of which are products of Leia Games, and the other three games ("Wuhua Mixin" is operated by Station B) in "Warriors: Rise of Great Powers" is a new version launched after the suspension of "Battlefield Red Police", leaving only "Duoduo Auto Chess" and "Don't Run After School", two self-developed seedlings.

The poor operating conditions also affected the confidence of the management in Longyuan.

Since 2020, a total of four investors have withdrawn their shareholdings, including Yutai Bluestone, Innovation Works, Wuniu Investment and Sichuan Newspaper, and four investors have chosen to reduce their shareholdings.

Gone are the days when you could swoop in investment if you saw the potential.

epilogue

The "Duoduo Auto Chess" IP seems to have become the company's only lifesaver now.

In January of this year, Long Yuan also secretly tested an auto-chess game called "AutoChessMini", which follows the setting of card stacking stars and bonds, players have to choose five hero cards on the field before the battle, spend gold coins in the game to summon heroes and fight against other players, the overall design is relatively light, it looks like a product of a mini-game track.

《AutoChessMini》宣传图

《AutoChessMini》

It's been a long time since there has been news of a new work on Longyuan Network, and the last time a new product was exposed was "Project: PT" in 2023, but there was no follow-up after the test of the work. At present, there are only two games that have not yet been launched, namely "AutoChessMini" and "Auto Chess MOBA" (not to mention whether this one has been cut or not), as for whether it can get out of the predicament, it depends on how it develops in the future.