This year, anyone who follows mobile games should have heard of Harry Potter: Magical Awakening. /Official website of the game
Harry Potter: The Magical Awakening has brought a "strong wind" to this year's mobile game circle.
After the game was launched on September 9, with just 20 days of data, it occupied the top of the september top game download list released by "Seven Wheat Data"; according to App Annie, a mobile application data analysis platform in the United States, as of October 8, it has become the best-selling IOS game in Chinese mainland.
"Harry Potter: Magical Awakening" can be the first cannon, indispensable to the blessing of popular IP. The game is set in the novel series Harry Potter, allowing players to play as wizards, enroll in Hogwarts College, and restore the characters and buildings in the book, so that a group of fans of the original directly called "moved".
The basic gameplay of "Harry Potter: Magical Awakening" is "Draw Card", which is also a traffic hero that cannot be ignored. In the game, players need to draw cards representing different spells by luck and use them in the arena.
China's mobile game market from 2013 "budding year" so far, has been rapid development for nearly a decade, many gameplay has been updated N generation, or directly eliminated, only the "card drawing mechanism" is the developer's heart of the eternal white moonlight -
Whether it is the pure card game "Hearthstone", or the business game "Gangnam Hundred Views" that has nothing to do with card competition, or the love game "Love and Producer", all include card drawing settings.
Mobile game industry analytics platform GameRefinery pointed out that in the top 100 of China's mobile game revenue rankings, the proportion of games that use special card draw mechanisms has risen from 15% in March 2020 to 30% in May 2021. In just 14 months, the data has doubled, which shows how "fragrant" the card drawing mechanism is.
The popular trend of card draws in China is on the rise. /GameRefinery
So, where exactly is its incense?
The cake of the card draw, really big
Draw mechanic, dating back to the 1993 card game Magic. Players participating in the game need to buy their own physical cards and combine them into different decks according to the strategy to defeat the "enemy" cards.
Similar to the blind box, each set of Magic cards is random, and players may not be able to draw the cards they want, so their willingness to buy is stronger.
This is the reason why the card drawing mechanism has market potential - what you can't eat is fragrant.
The "Magic" physical card of that year is worth much today. In 2013, on the foreign trading platform eBay, the "Black Lotus" card was sold for $27,000 (about 170,000 yuan). /Network
Time slipped to 2013, with the popularity of mobile Internet, Chinese mobile games have a blowout, "Escape from the Temple", "Subway Parkour" and other blockbusters have entered our field of vision. According to a report released by Ai Media Consulting, the scale of China's mobile game market reached 12.25 billion yuan in 2013, an increase of 108.7% year-on-year.
Mobile games equipped with a card drawing mechanism, during this time, really realize the market potential into real money and silver.
The card game Hearthstone is similar to the upgraded Magic in that players have their own fixed deck of cards and can get additional draws during battles. The game launched in China in 2014 and remained at the top of the China App Store game revenue chart until 2018, with a total turnover of US$161 million (about 1.11 billion yuan) on the IOS platform in four years.
After Hearthstone, "Draw Cards" were targeted by more developers, and the card forms were also more -
The cards in Harry Potter: Magical Awakening are called "spells", which are drawn and upgraded by the player in the copy, and then cooperated in the battle, throwing out the spell, if you clear the opponent's wizard's health, then you win;
In the world of Harry Potter: Magical Awakening, defeat the wizards on the other side with spells (decks) together!
The cards in "Yin and Yang Division" are called "Style Gods", and the player plays the role of Yin and Yang Master Qingming, manipulating the Style Gods to fight;
The card drawing behavior in "Yin and Yang Division" is called "Drawing Symbol Summoning".
The cards in "100 Views of Gangnam" are residents, buildings and landscapes, and players place and build their dream cities one by one according to their own aesthetics.
In "100 Views of Gangnam", the residents or buildings randomly drawn from the card pool (left) will be automatically included in the player's resident list (right) and will continue to be cultivated by the player. /Screenshot of the game
Although most of the card draw mobile games that emerged later did not change the soup, they all performed well. In 2016, only 27 days after the launch of "Yin and Yang Division" in China, the total number of downloads exceeded 10 million times, while the cumulative download volume of "Glory of Kings" from July to September of the same year was 20 million. In 2018, two years after the launch of "Yin and Yang Division", the average monthly flow was still maintained at a height of 350 million yuan.
This year's sudden "Life Reopening Simulator" is, to some extent, also a mobile game based on "drawing cards".
At the beginning of the game, the player chooses 3 from 10 randomly generated "talents" and adjusts the proportion of the four attributes of appearance, intelligence, physique, and family. With the development of the game, you will find that the talents and attributes of the mother's fetus are floating clouds, and whether you can go to the peak of life depends on luck.
Many netizens played halfway and found that it was contrary to their envisioned life, so they angrily started all over again. This setting invisibly attracts players to open the game repeatedly, and also makes "Life Reopen Simulator" quickly become popular. Three days after the game was launched, it received nearly 200 million visits and occupied the first place in the Tap appointment list.
Appearance, original family, health, which one do you think has the greatest impact on life? In fact, no matter how many times you restart, you can't guess. /Screenshot of the game
It can be seen that the card drawing mechanism in the mobile game industry is a formula for commercial value and topic degree.
But on the other hand, why can't we, as players, resist the temptation to draw cards?
After opening the "Draw Card" gameplay,
More audiences
In 2006, there was a phenomenon-level online game "Journey" in China.
The game is based on Chinese martial arts culture and integrates elements such as competition, love, and cultivation that young people like. Unexpectedly, the "Lucky Wheel" function, which was originally planned to be used for fun, actually triggered a heat of discussion, and the fire was so hot that Southern Weekend also reported this gameplay in particular:
The moment you open the chest with the key, the four square lights converge in the chest in the center... When the box is parked at what location, you get what items.
At the time, Hearthstone was still in the conception stage. Ben Thompson, the only member of the game's art team and a painter and creative director, has also observed the "lucky wheel phenomenon" of Journey. He later concluded in an interview:
"At the moment of opening the bag to draw cards, the player will have a kind of excitement that everything is possible. They will keep suggesting to themselves: they have opened a dozen or twenty bags, and this bag must have the card I want. ”
"Keep players hopeful forever". /Screenshot of the official Hearthstone video
Doesn't that sound familiar? This passage translates into the language of psychology, the famous "Skinner Box Theory."
In the 1930s, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner put a hungry mouse into a cardboard box. There was a button in the cardboard box, and the mouse pressed the button once, and Skinner threw a piece of food in it.
After the mouse formed a "hungry - press the button" associated thinking in his mind, Snakim adjusted the feeding frequency - the mouse pressed the button several times before he threw in a piece of food. However, instead of being discouraged by the reduction in food, the mice pressed the button more aggressively.
Skinner came to two conclusions:
Rewards (food) can motivate mice to take the initiative to do things that they "didn't think to do"; if you want to make mice adhere to a certain behavior, the best way is not to reward it every time, but to let it do it a few times and then reward it.
Humans react more violently to the Skinner Box Experiment than mice. Luke Clark, a scholar at the University of British Columbia, has proposed that random properties under card drawing will increase dopamine activity in the human brain, which is simply "addictive".
"Go to bed after winning one more round, draw another set of cards and go offline... Oops, it's 12 o'clock! "/Visual China
Of course, there are exceptions to everything, if there are really "no perseverance" players who uninstall the game in anger, will the developer not lose blood? As a result, the "guarantee rule" came into being, that is, after promising how many times the card is drawn, a high-level "card" will be issued, such as the "Jiangnan Hundred Views" in the drawing position of the card marked "ten consecutive must be ranked or above roles".
In addition, it is the card draw mechanism that is full of "surprises" that makes the game tend to be fair.
In the esports circle, there has always been a controversy about whether Hearthstone is e-sports or not. Some opponents have compared it to the traditional esports game StarCraft:
"As long as StarCraft players are willing to spend time practicing and spend money to buy equipment, they can completely achieve an 80% chance of winning." Hearthstone is different, even if it is a top master, it is good to have a 60% win rate, because the luck component is too high, you don't know what cards you will draw. ”
In the eyes of hearthstone event organizers, this is another charm of Hearthstone - the random attribute solves the game balance problem, changing the gamer structure from the traditional "pyramid" to "flat". That is to say, "Xiaobai" may also defeat the master, which makes the game experience of more players take care of.
Hearthstone event organizers also believe that random performance moments surprise players and improve user adhesion.
card drawing mechanism,
Is it really the perfect solution?
However, the card drawing mechanism is not perfect.
The opaque winning rate has plunged many mobile games into turmoil.
In 2017, a Japanese player took the card mobile game "King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Battle OL" to court on the grounds that "the probability of drawing cards is suspected of fraud". The player said that the game draw page clearly showed that the extraction rate of the game character "Kula" was 3%, but his actual extraction rate did not match the promised probability.
The game's customer service explained this phenomenon as "3% refers to the rate of Kura's appearance in the character echelon". The game's card pool has always been co-existing with characters and props, and the character appearance rate is 10%. In this conversion, the true appearance rate of Kula is only 0.333%. After investigation, the Japanese Consumer Agency ruled that the R&D team was illegal.
Kula's card pool clearly states "3% probability of occurrence". /Screenshot of the game
In 2018, "Love and Producer" launched the "SSR Probability 5 Times UP" campaign, which means that during this time, the probability of drawing premium cards is 5 times that of usual. Many players spend a lot of money to draw cards, but find that the SSR has a rate of only 3%. The game development team then adjusted the probability, but did not admit that the probability was wrong in the response, but explained it as "the player's hand is not good".
In the response, the official promised that "if you spend up to 120,000 diamonds (the medium of card drawing), you will be able to collect 8 rare cards", but you are once again punched in the face by players: "The cumulative draw of 1449 times, that is, 210,000 diamonds, has not been collected." "/Web screenshot
In public opinion, the debate on whether the card draw is gambling or not has never stopped, and another question has been derived: the frequent card drawing mechanism has made the fun of the game deteriorate.
In 2017, the Japanese mobile game "Alice in Death" had to be removed from the shelves for maintenance due to too many logins on the first day of its launch, resulting in a server crash. The game can then only be serviced for a few hours a day and then continues to be maintained.
Even so, in order to win the rare character "Little Red Riding Hood", players still did not hesitate to spend money to recharge, and in only 4 days, the game was pushed to the 7th place on the App Store's Best-seller list in Japan, surpassing the old Japanese game "Monster Marbles".
Do the players of "Alice of Death" draw cards like crazy to enhance the game experience, or simply enjoy the coolness of the moment of opening? The answer is self-evident - the game's page was stuck in PPT at the time, talking about the experience.
Recall that in the "Skinner Box Experiment", in order to get food (rewards), mice that slowly developed the habit of pressing buttons are actually very similar to us - spending money, time and energy to draw cards, not to play the game better, but only for the "card draw" itself.
To sum it up in the words of the book "The Birth of Alienation", it is that "people are voluntarily doing things that they do not really want to do" in order to obtain so-called happiness.
The frequent appearance of the card drawing mechanism creates an illusion for our players: the purpose of playing the game is to draw cards, and the drawing of cards is the source of happiness - it is really screwed. /Visual China
I have to admit that the current card drawing mechanism is still creating good market results, but how it will go in the future depends on whether the developer can come up with a new balance method. Many gameplay, in fact, there is no need to draw cards, if you impose a setting in order to share a piece of the pie, it is quite uninteresting.
Moreover, when players re-realize the original intention of playing the game, this business formula is not stable.
[1] Hearthstone, which swings on a random scale| Shixiang
[2] From "Krypton" to "Liver": Watching cards from "Yin and Yang Division" to collect cards and cultivate the ideological strategy of the game| Zhou Siyu
[3] Players are addicted to "kryptonite gold", and manufacturers lie down to count money: is the card draw game innovative or gambling? | China Youth Daily
[4] Addicted to kryptonite card can not extricate themselves, can not control the original because of this | PCGAMER
[5] | about skinner-style single-player games WouldYouKindly