How to give full play to the IP advantages of "Tomb Robber Notes"?
Text/Yan Jinyan
Since last year, the outside world has been paying attention to the youmen.
Last Sunday, youzu's self-developed and spontaneous MMO "Notes on new tomb robbers" (hereinafter referred to as "New Tomb Robbers") was officially tested. On the first day of launch, the game climbed to the second place in the iOS free list. Considering the fierce competition for a number of new products in early September, the results of "New Tomb Robber" have been quite good.
You may feel that it is not difficult to achieve good results with an IP such as "Notes from the Tomb Robber", which has a certain national degree. But in fact, IP products are often more difficult to grasp, in order to give full play to the IP advantages of "New Tomb Robber", Youzu must solve at least three difficulties:
1. IP is a double-edged sword, and fans of the original will take a magnifying glass to examine the design of the game. The product must meet the expectations and emotional experience of the fans.
2. In addition to the core fans of the "Notes from the Tomb Robber" novel, there are also a large number of audiences for film and television derivative products, as well as pan-users of the tomb robbery theme. In the face of different user circles, it is necessary to come up with differentiated distribution methods.
3. IP advantages can reduce the cost of buying, but if you only use the traditional large-scale distribution, it is easy to embark on a wave of flow routes. How to control the rhythm of publicity is also a big problem.
In addition, for the wanderers in recent years, numerical cards and SLGs are the tracks they are familiar with, why did they choose to enter the MMO this time? With the above questions in mind, Grape Jun interviewed Wu Xi, vice president of Youzu Network.
01 Shape the tomb robbery experience on the product side
As an IP genuine licensing product of "Tomb Robber Notes", "New Tomb Robber" takes MMO as the main gameplay, and the logic behind it is not difficult to understand.
First of all, "Notes from the Tomb Robber" has been serialized since 2005, and has sold tens of millions of copies so far, in addition to a large number of film and television and fan works. The huge fan base is an important prerequisite for the success of MMOs.
Secondly, Wu Xi believes that once the homogenization of MMO products is serious, it is easy to fall into a wave of flow. Relying on the characteristic content of the tomb robbery theme, "New Tomb Robber" can make differentiated gameplay such as collection, puzzle solving, treasure hunting, three-person fighting, etc., and undertake the fans of "Tomb Robber Notes".
Therefore, in the product polishing and packaging, how to convey the settings and tomb robbery experience in the original work is a key step.
Taking the Crescent Hotel, which is more familiar to fans of the original work, for example, the production team extracted the two keywords of classical and palatial for the depiction in the novel. In the game scene modeling, the top of the interior of the Crescent Hotel is designed as a large dome, the first floor is scattered and adds partitions, and the Chinese style design such as screens and hanging pictures is used in the decoration, and we can easily feel the mystery and classical sense in the novel.
As the core building in the game, from entering the game to running the map to receive the task, we often have a panoramic view of the Crescent Hotel outside the building. The game is based on the architectural style of the Yuanming royal family, referring to the shape of the Hangzhou City God Pavilion, so that the external design of the Crescent Hotel is more in line with the appearance of wealth and solemnity.
According to Wu Xi, in addition to scene modeling, the production team also referred to a large number of historical documents and academic materials, and restored the treasures in the novel to the collection system in the game as realistically as possible.
For example, the first collection of Sengoku Books in the game. Its prototype refers to the Bullet Depot Book, and there is currently a small fragment in the Hunan Provincial Museum. In the collection system, we can see an introduction to the font, content and archaeological value of the book. Details that may not have been mentioned in the original book have a more elaborate performance in the game.
In terms of main gameplay, the game retains the traditional MMO process and system, in which the game's dungeons and props are wrapped in the tomb robbery theme.
For example, the collection system just mentioned, after the treasure is identified and solved, it can be used as a collection to meet the needs of the setting party, and it can also enhance the character attributes and become a part of the numerical system.
The main source of the collection is a three-person dragon vein treasure hunt quest, the player consumes the Luoyang shovel to dig up treasure, sometimes dig out the "big rice dumplings" (zombies), and sometimes need to crack the riddle incense burner. To a certain extent, this captures the needs of theme users.
A puzzle that appears when digging for treasure
02 Pull the long line,
Multi-platform differentiation publicity
In the face of the vast fan base, the distribution logic of "New Tomb Robber" is also different from the previous products of Youzu.
At the earliest, the game selected eight cities for outdoor large-screen placement, some of which echoed the original book. This launch does not directly display the game content, but leaves puzzle clues, driving users to find information with curiosity. On the other hand, the project team launched H5 and Weibo topic activities online to guide the dissemination of UGC content.
Throughout the warm-up stage, the project team mainly released signals to users through online and offline integrated marketing: the tomb robber notes out of the genuine mobile game.
Wu Xi said that the tomb robbery IP carries a large user base and emotions, so "New Tomb Robber" does not need to rely on centralized outbreak of private marketing to open user cognition, but needs to lengthen the overall marketing timeline and gradually arouse the emotional resonance of fans.
This also allows "New Tomb Robber" to determine the main position of Weibo as the main position of publicity very early, which is rare in the publicity of Youzu's previous products. "In the process of using the research, we found that the audience of the "Notes on the Tomb Robber" IP, including many female users and pan-users of the theme, these two types of users are more active on Weibo and more sensitive to the topic."
Around this point, Youzu did the tomb robbery content related punch card activities in advance on Weibo, and it should be noted that this activity is not simply "booking game benefits", but more to cultivate users' attention to the topic. In the follow-up publicity, Youzu continues to precipitate PGC and UGC content into the topic through KOL marketing and official activities.
For example, during this year's 817 Rice Festival, youmin planned dozens of Zhang Qiling Cosers to surprise the marketing activities in various places at the same time. On The weibo of Fans and Coser, which is highly followed, this kind of content is easily spread by fans.
The forwarding and commenting data of a single Microblog are higher
For other social platforms, Youzu has also found suitable marketing and communication methods according to the attributes of the platform and the user's favorite.
For example, users on Douyin will pay more attention to content with quality and trendy sense, so they focus on KOLs with face value and film review; while on Kuaishou KOL cooperation, they pay more attention to grounded funny and plot masters, and launched the "Magic Watch Challenge" that Zhang Qiling surprised everywhere, using magic expressions to open the user's desire to spread.
#Zhang Qiling surprised everywhere #Kuaishou Challenge
03 Focus on brand marketing,
Shape user perceptions
It can be seen that compared with the traditional traffic-based publicity, Youzu has done more brand marketing in the release process of "New Tomb Robber".
Wu Xi believes that "the core goal of product-effect integration is to reduce the comprehensive cost of customer acquisition and build brand recognition." Products need to have characteristics worth expressing, and be able to form their own brand image and cognition. ”
Put on the "New Tomb Robber", in fact, it is doing brand content around the IP of "Tomb Robber Notes".
In the past, many games will use the celebrity spokesperson's publicity strategy, and youzu has also tried this way of playing before, but after research, they found that the audience of the "Tomb Robber Notes" IP is huge and the circle span is large, each user has different likes and dislikes for each version of the tomb robbery, and the use of any star as a spokesperson is biased. Therefore, according to the user's liking and IP relevance, they selected Zhang Qiling and Nanpai Sanshu, the two most sympathetic figures of fans.
Before the public beta, the third uncle of the southern sect participated in the game publicity process as the "number one player", and through the interview with the planner, he personally played the experience, endorsed the game, and increased the fan appeal of the game.
After the public beta, the game announced the Zhang Qiling brand advertising film, and created the emotional topic of "Zhang Qiling is lucky to have you", which received 130 million views on Weibo, and the brand film received 720,000 plays and 6,000 retweets in just one day.
Finally, the game announced back to the plot of the "Tomb Robber Notes" novel, and carried out the topic activity of "rewriting the meaning of difficult peace" on Weibo: users write down their own intentions, and the 5 microblogs with the highest popularity can be realized into the game's "strange story" gameplay.
Perhaps touching the softest part of the hearts of the fans of "Notes from the Tomb", the activity Weibo quickly broke through 3,000 retweets, and the topic can see the true feelings of many fans.
04 Conclusion
To sum up, in the overall strategy of distribution, "New Tomb Robber" has grasped the point of genuine IP authorization and highlighted the brand recognition of the original work to users. At the same time, on different platforms, for different circles such as original fans and theme pan-users, corresponding publicity and play methods have also been proposed.
For youzu, from the self-developed IP "Junior Series", to "Game of Thrones", to "Notes from the Tomb", they are constantly iterating on the distribution methodology of their own IP products, such as this time using a more mature product-effect combination method.
In the future, when you launch the "Three-Body Problem" IP work and the new work of "The Three Kingdoms of the Youth", you may be able to make new attempts and changes based on the previous experience. This is a good start for the wanderers who are starting again.
Game Grape Recruitment Industry Reporter/Content Editor,
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