The concept of the meta-universe suddenly exploded, and on the new battlefield, all parties grabbed food fiercely, but acted low-key.
Author 丨 Xie Xia
Editor 丨 and Yi Rong
Design 丨Li Bincai
Cover 丨 Figure Bug Network
At least four years ago, the domestic game industry had an illusion - sandbox games in the first year; three years ago, Tencent Games PC sandbox head Chen Shaowei shouted "2018 is Tencent's sandbox first year"; now, sandbox games have not yet erupted, not even "the first year" has not arrived, but it seems to be infinitely close to the moment of outbreak.
Before the tipping point, the Chinese mobile game environment is quietly changing. This is not only reflected in the challenge of the "channel is king" era, and developers who focus on creativity have more say, but also the classic IP masterpieces that were previously transplanted by the computer side were also consumed in previous years.
The change is understandable, and players are eager for a more creative new world.
User tastes are becoming more and more picky, which is especially obvious on TapTap, the game scoring power by the media, channels and industry insiders, flowing to the player side, the game reputation is directly affected by user evaluation, scoring.
The Matthew effect is still there, but there are still plenty of opportunities in the segment, reminding the market as a whole: bet on the future, be bold in innovation, rather than stick to the status quo.
This year, the rise of the Metaverse concept is pushing the sandbox to center stage.
The form closest to the metaverse
In March, sandbox game platform Roblox went public, and CEO David Baszucki said: "The metaverse is something that science fiction writers and futurists have conceived for more than 30 years. Now, with the further popularization of equipment with strong computing power, the network bandwidth has been further improved, and the time to realize the metaverse has become mature. ”
The metaverse concept originated from Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel. In Snow Crash, he depicts a virtual world parallel to the real world, the metacosm. In the metaverse, people in the real world have matching digital doppelgangers, and people live in the metaverse, and there is no time and space limit, and they never go offline.
In addition to Roblox, which is on fire this year, Companies such as Facebook, Tencent, Huawei, Mihayou, and Lilith have begun to lay out the meta-universe field.
Huawei is opening recruitment for the "River Map" project, from AR (augmented reality) to the meta-universe track, Tencent has made a number of investments in the meta-universe related fields, "Original God" research and development party Miha You bet on the brain-computer interface, and not long ago put forward the vision of "2030, to create a virtual world in which one billion people around the world are willing to live", Lilith is also recruiting meta-universe project talents.
David Baszucki believes that the metaverse has 8 characteristics, namely identity, friends, immersion, low latency, pluralism, anywhere, economic system and civilization.
Sandbox games are probably the closest form to the metaverse at present, which has become the first battlefield of the metaverse.
"The metacosm is a replica and upgrade of the physical world in the virtual world," Wang Shumin, managing partner of Yilian Capital, told Chuangbang, whether it is an immersive experience or an economic system, the sandbox is the closest to the metaverse form.
Sandbox games are evolutionary sandbox games, usually composed of one or more maps, containing role-playing, building, action, shooting, driving and many other game elements. Unlike other games, the world of sandbox games is more free, and players can explore different experiences in the real world, such as survival, construction, etc.
Not long ago, HooHeeHaa, the owner of B Station UP, showed himself in "Metropolis: Skyline", which took three years to restore the scene of Guangzhou City, and he built Guangzhou's modern landmarks, traffic arteries, historical sites, and even humanistic activities in the game, and the virtual Guangzhou he built was almost the same as the real world.
UGC (User Produced Content) is the core gameplay of sandbox games and its unique charm. In sandbox games, the construction of game scenes is no longer just from the game producer or designer, the player is the source of creativity - no longer limited to the world set by the game producer, through the game editor, the player can freely explore and create in the game, and then reconstruct a world.
Immersing the player enough is one of the characteristics of sandbox games.
According to the App Annie report, sandbox games accounted for the largest market share in the global gaming market in 2020, with a market share (Editor's Note: usually referring to sales or sales) approaching 7% of the 112 different subcategories and a 75% year-over-year increase in usage time.
Image Source App Annie "2021 Mobile Game Market Report"
"Sandbox games can bring a sense of accomplishment, the biggest feeling is that time passes quickly," Dingzun Network founder Xu Yi is also a sandbox enthusiast, he has played dozens of sandbox games on Steam, at the same time, he is also developing a sandbox game, "like 'Civilization ( strategy game), you sit down to play, stand up when the sky may have been bright, but if you play sandbox games, you sit down, and when you stand up again, you will find that a week has passed. ”
Sandbox evolution
Domestic sandbox games are still in the stage of market education, and Chinese game manufacturers are good at fighting hard battles, completing pixel-level imitations in a short period of time and with high efficiency, and carrying out clever micro-innovation. However, the sandbox game is not just an arms race, the huge world needs more manpower and resources to invest, but it does not mean that it can win by blitzkrieg.
Creativity is the ultimate competitiveness, and at the player level, the domestic needs to re-explore the path.
What the player wants is not just to shove the apple into his hand, but the apple that hits him and inspires him to discover gravity.
On the sandbox game track, Tencent, ByteDance, NetEase, Gigabit, Hero Interactive Entertainment, IGG, Snail, Heartbeat Network and other manufacturers have layouts, intending to compete for an increasingly large market cake.
Behind the drama of this big factory, there have been small and medium-sized teams in China that have achieved good results.
NetEase agent "Minecraft" national service registered users more than 400 million, and the "Mini World" developed by Mini Play Technology was officially tested in 2016, the current monthly active users exceeded 100 million, platform developers exceeded 300,000, more than 100 studios signed, the number of developer works exceeded 400,000, the game also won the Google Annual Awards "Best Innovation" award in 2018.
Image source "Mini World" official website
Title: Luoyang Ziwei Palace, Author: Return
"Mini World" has spent more than 3 years using a self-developed 3D voxel engine, which is heavily optimized to efficiently display the dynamic world of the sandbox platform.
In terms of profitability, domestic sandbox games are not optimistic.
"Sandbox games have high requirements for game engines and research and development, resulting in very high costs, but its profitability is very limited, and when we developed Mini World, the market did not pay much attention to the sandbox game category, so it was still very difficult in the early stage of entrepreneurship." Zhou Tao, CEO of Mini Play, said to Chuang Chuang Bang.
Zhou Tao said that the difficulty of mobile sandbox games is mainly in the technical barriers to create, we must make the tools and platforms easy to use, reduce the creation threshold and the difficulty of getting started, simplify the creative process, so that more and more Chinese teenagers can create content on the platform.
At the other end of the weight is the investor. According to Chuangbang, a number of sandbox game companies have raised funds this year, and investors are also very optimistic about this track.
The investors of "Mini World" include Tencent, ELIX Capital, Nanshan Capital, etc., and YILIAN Capital entered the early A round and is an important institutional shareholder of Mini World.
Wang Shumin, managing partner of Yilian Capital, revealed to Chuangbang, "Sandbox games are a system engineering, and the engine that supports the whole world is very important, so the requirements for the front end, the middle stage and the back office are very high, especially the middle and back office, to have enough openness, to be able to reconstruct the engine to the extent of the world, but also to be able to make timely adjustment feedback according to the user experience." The project is very large, but it also means that the barrier to entry is very high. ”
From 2017 to the present, Yilian Capital has looked at a lot of sandbox game companies, and the entire market has broad prospects, but the evolution of the market depends largely on the evolution of the market head players, unless there is a very good entry point, otherwise there is still a high entry threshold for new players.
At present, the user group of sandbox games is mostly teenagers, primary and secondary school students are the main force of "Mini World" and "Minecraft", and the data disclosed by Roblox shows that 54% of users are "primary school students" under the age of 12, about 16.77 million, and 13% are teenagers aged 13-16.
Zhou Tao, CEO of Mini Play, said in an interview with Chuangbang that as far as the development trend of sandbox games is concerned, with the slowdown in the revenue growth rate of China's game industry, games such as sandbox games that are ornamental, interesting and creative can attract imaginative, creative Z generation young people to stop and love, and these people are the core user group of the future game industry, so the future of sandbox games is actually very potential.
At the same time, Zhou Tao firmly believes that the users of generation Z or even younger generations are the direct stakeholders in the future construction of the meta-universe.
The younger age of the sandbox has also given rise to another imaginative space – programming education.
"If you carry out education hard, the audience is always very narrow, and the fee will be higher, but doing education in the sandbox is a very huge market, because many things in the virtual world are interconnected with the real world, and its UGC model allows users to better understand programming, and user groups naturally have the tendency to do programming, which is a sustainable field."
Wang Shumin revealed that "Mini World" once did a free graphical programming education experiment, and it received large-scale user participation on the day of launch.
Tencent is both a Roblox investor and a strategic partner in China. In 2019, the two companies established a joint venture to teach coding basics, game design, digital citizenship and entrepreneurial skills as the main business, and launched the "Education Pioneer Program", focusing on youth programming education.
Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent, once said: "Our partnership with Roblox provides an interactive platform for young people of all ages in China to develop their programming, design and entrepreneurial skills. ”
After the release of "Island Island" represented by Tencent, it cooperated with the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Shanghai Normal University to introduce products into the teaching of game design. LEGO Unlimited has established a dedicated server for minors and launched exclusive educational content.
Programming education will eventually return to the metaverse, and reconstructing the world with a sandbox will be the beginning of the dark war of the metaverse of major manufacturers.
Big factories poured into the sandbox track
To be clear, sandbox games are still not mainstream among domestic player groups, but this does not prevent big players from betting.
According to Chuangbang statistics, NetEase has launched 8 sandbox games, and Tencent has 10.
In 2016, NetEase announced that it was the agent for the PC and mobile versions of Minecraft, which had been online overseas for five years, with users in dozens of countries and more than 100 million registered users.
Image source "Minecraft" official website
Title: GN Forest City Author: GN WORK
Since then, NetEase has successively launched games that integrate sandbox elements such as "After Tomorrow", "Reloaded", "Ninth House", "Quantum Special Attack", "Fortress Frontline", etc., including mecha battles, competition, survival, construction and other gameplay, in order to occupy a more segmented market.
Tencent has also spent a lot of time on sandbox games.
Three years ago, Tencent released 3 sandbox games in one go at the New Cultural and Creative Conference, including "Island island", "ROBOCRAFT" and "Handmade Planet". Chen Shaowei, head of tencent game PC sandbox and publisher of "Island Island", also said that 2018 is the first year of Tencent's sandbox.
The picture is taken from the official website of "Island of Island"
In recent years, Tencent has also represented and released sandbox games such as Lego Unlimited, Delusional Mountains and Seas, and My Origins. In addition, Tencent has also cooperated with Klei Entertainmen to represent the Chinese version of the "Famine" mobile game "Famine Compilation Edition", and Tencent's Aurora Project has also released a number of sandbox games, such as "Brick Maze Builder" and "My Hero".
Among them, "My Hero" was developed by The Electric Soul Network, and the "Barbarian Wars" under the Electric Soul Network is also a game that integrates the sandbox gameplay.
"My Origins" was developed by Perfect World, with more than 14 million omni-channel reservations before launching, and Perfect World also represented a vehicle battle sandbox game "Genesis Chariot" developed by Russian manufacturers.
ByteDance certainly won't miss this feast of the future. Not long ago, some media exposed that ByteDance invested nearly 100 million yuan in the "ReWorld" developer code Qiankun, and the enterprise investigation showed that Yan Zhi, the head of ByteDance's game business, was already a member of the board of directors of Code Qiankun.
Image source "Restart the World" official website
Xing Shanhu, the founder of Code Qiankun, once founded Ledong Excellence, and "My Name is MT" is his masterpiece. Reboot World is more like Roblox, a game that takes a strategy of building a platform to inspire UGC creation, with a physics engine editor and a game creation sharing community.
Other manufacturers that have established a large scale naturally do not miss the opportunity of the sandbox market, such as TOEIC Network has launched 4 sandbox games, Gigabit has 3 models, IGG has 2 models, and the Heartbeat Network holding TapTap also has two products in the reservation stage, including the agent's foreign sandbox game masterpiece "Terraria" mobile version and self-developed "Heartbeat Town", and Snail Digital is more determined, and has shifted the focus of research and development to sandbox games.
Snail Digital has launched heavy MMO mobile games such as "Taiji Panda" and "Nine Yin True Scriptures", but in recent years, Snail has launched sandbox games such as "Darkness and Light", "Block Ark", "Ark: Survival Plan Online" and so on. Shi Tao, vice president of Snail Digital, once revealed that sandbox game research and development has become a key category of snails, and the investment has exceeded that of MMOs.
As the first battlefield of the meta-universe, the sandbox game market has ushered in an unprecedented hilarity, who will throw the apple that hits the player? The answer may lie in the bets of the licensees.