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Game-Time Report/Recently, the most lively companies in the domestic game industry are NetEase, Tencent, Xishanju and other major MMO companies, which are experiencing the “Decisive Battle of MMO Madness”.
I believe everyone has seen a lot about the origin and development of the matter these days.
On March 11, after Xishanju’s “Jian Wang 3” posted a Weibo post about canceling equipment repair fees, NetEase Sheviao immediately retweeted it and said, “It’s 2024, and there are still games that charge for equipment repairs?”, and then This has triggered a series of wars of words between various companies and games on social media platforms.
Among the famous scenes include, but are not limited to, Yu Yuxian’s “I’ll tell you if you live for 15 years” in “Jian Wang 3”, the piglets “Black Ceng Ceng” and “Pink Cha Cha” in “Tianya Mingyue Dao mobile game”, “Jian Wang 3″ ” The combination of swords and swords can wipe out the pig evil” and so on.
NetEase’s “provoking trouble” at the beginning obviously became the target of public criticism, and there was a long queue of friends who “hated NetEase”.
Game-Time has previously reported on NetEase’s “crazy” marketing. This model was most widely known at the beginning by the Weibo account of the PC game “Ni Shui Han”, and was naturally inherited by the “Ni Shui Han” mobile game.
Now judging from the performance of NetEase Condor, this seems to have become a feature of NetEase’s new and old MMO products.
Although the mentality of those who are “crazy” by NetEase seems a bit unstable, as a player and a media, Game-Time is actually very happy to see a series of actions of NetEase in the MMO track in recent years.
On the one hand, as a media, the topics that come to your door should not be wasted.
On the other hand, in recent years, the Internet has not been talking about “post-00s rectifying the workplace.” NetEase’s various operations actually give Game-Time a similar feeling.
Although it includes products such as “Shooting the Condor” and “Nishuihan Mobile Game”, a series of “operations” inside and outside the game that seem to be somewhat inconsistent with the temperament of traditional big companies look a bit “crazy”. They are also rectifying MMOs and bringing new ones to the track. vitality.
If you don’t go crazy, the MMO track will really be a hero.
People always hate change, and so do games.
Whether it’s the “No Gold” slogan of the previous mobile game “Backwater Cold” and “Make MMO great again”, or the current “industry price war” of NetEase’s “The Condor”, “It’s 2024, and there are still game equipment repairs. Charges?” The basic idea is to try to make changes from the mature underlying business model of MMOs and promote changes in the overall experience of MMO games.
In fact, the business model of traditional MMO games is a very critical part of big R players. There are many stories on Zhihu about big players throwing tens of millions into games, and Game-Time will not give an example.
As for this model of relying on big R to make money, the more mainstream ordinary players are actually quite passive in it.
Although from the perspective of game operations, it is far simpler to prioritize the needs of a few people than to take into account the diverse needs of the majority. But on the one hand, since the work of continuing operations and profits of the game that should be reasonably made by all players has been taken care of by a few big players. R players contracted it, and ordinary players virtually became part of the game experience.
What’s more, in order to further take more money from big R players, game companies will also come up with various tricks. For example, many players are familiar with rolling servers, etc., which attract big R players to pay repeatedly by forcefully bringing everyone back to the starting point.
For big R players, similar operations may not be a big deal, but the same 100 yuan has different values for different people.
NetEase’s changes starting from last year’s mobile game “Ni Shuihan” are actually changing the normal state of MMO big R server maintenance. By introducing content such as 6-yuan skins, they are actually tapping into the consumption value of a large base of ordinary players and increasing the number of players. The payment rate increases the revenue of the game.
Similar operations are actually very common in games such as “Honor of Kings”.
Facts have proved that this model is successful. The mobile game “Ni Shui Han”, which generated over 2 billion in revenue in the first month last year, is the best example. It is also the most successful MMO mobile game in China for many years.
This year’s NetEase’s “The Condor” obviously wants to replicate its past successful model, and even goes one step further to launch a “one server for the world” strategy.
From the perspective of ordinary players, this is obviously good for us. Since every ordinary player has value to mine and is involved in the ongoing operation of the game, although big R players still exist, the game experience and content updates will inevitably take care of the needs of ordinary users.
And this is why NetEase’s approach is still happening today, because a small repost can ignite public opinion.
In addition to the secret cooperation of big companies to promote hype, in fact, behind it is the weakness of human nature.
Products such as NetEase’s Shooting Condor, as relative newcomers to the category, actually stand on the opposite side of traditional MMO games.
Not only did he pursue innovation and change without fear of a tiger as soon as he came on the field, but he even achieved unprecedented success in the end, which was somewhat too conspicuous.
Especially for existing players who could have made money in their comfort zones, when players realize that the gaming experience they are accustomed to can actually be more humane, players will naturally vote with their wallets, and they will naturally You need to adapt to changes in players and step out of your comfort zone.
In the workplace, there are still many people who have grudges over things like this. How can products developed by humans escape this trap?
Embrace change to survive
Why Game-Time believes that without the emergence of NetEase, MMO will continue to decline.
Because the plot of this If line has already been staged once in South Korea, where MMOs are more prosperous.
At the same time as the recent MMO farce in China, South Korean gaming media Thisisgame also happened to publish an analyst article stating that “the Korean stock market is giving up its expectations for MMOs.”
According to a review by Korean media, according to Sensortower data, South Korea’s leading MMO market (top 20 by revenue) has indeed experienced a quite sweet growth period from 2016 to 2021, with an average annual rate of 51%. The market size has expanded from 373.2 billion won (approximately RMB 2 billion) to 2.9746 billion won (approximately RMB 16.2 billion).
But from 2021 to 2023, the Korean MMO game market shrank by one-third. The difficulties encountered by Korean game companies have alerted the Chinese game industry that it will not work to continue MMO products according to past practices!
On the one hand, the commercial performance of many new Korean MMO games is not even as good as that of old products that have been released for many years.
For example, in the famous Lineage series, NCsoft launched the mobile game Lineage M in December 2017, with sales reaching 778.9 billion won (approximately 4.25 billion yuan), which was the total of the entire leading MMO game market in South Korea in 2016. double.
Although the sales of “Paradise M” have declined in 2023, they are still 481.7 billion won (approximately 2.6 billion yuan). At the same time, “Paradise W” will be launched in 2021. Sales in 2023 will already be only 169.3 billion won (approximately 900 million yuan).
“Even if the sales of the 2023 Paradise 3 sisters (Paradise M, Paradise W, and Paradise 2M) are added up, they will still be lower than those of the 2018 Paradise M.”
On the other hand, while the Korean MMO market is shrinking, competition in the Korean game market has become increasingly fierce even though casual and light-medium games have become popular in the past two years.
“Once upon a time, MMORPGs required a lot of capital and were not realistic for small and medium-sized game companies, but this is no longer the case. Mobile MMORPGs are no longer the preserve of large companies, and some medium-sized companies are doing quite well.”
Affected by multiple factors such as market shrinkage and intensified competition, “Looking at the stock prices of domestic game companies serving MMORPG, they have all fallen by half compared with 2021. Only Krafton’s earnings have increased. In the last three months of stocks In the market, Krafton, Netmarble and Joycity are among the few game companies that have raised their operating profit expectations for 2024. This means that the profit outlook for MMOs is getting worse.”
Making MMOs truly free also liberates most people’s gaming experience
What South Korea’s MMO is going through actually has a strong reference effect on domestic MMOs. On the one hand, they continue to roll out production and quality, drive up costs, and at the same time compete for a smaller and smaller piece of the cake. This is the future that Korean companies have revealed to us without making changes.
As for the changes in the MMO category, if leading companies such as NetEase, Tencent, and Xishanju are not taking the lead, will we have to rely on mid-level small and medium-sized purchase volume companies?
In fact, from a long-term perspective, NetEase’s products such as Condor are fighting in the MMO field with slogans such as “price war”, “9.9 yuan appearance”, “not giving up paid lottery”, “one server in the world”, and “rectifying the chaos of rolling servers in the industry”. , it’s not just the MMO category that will be changed.
On the one hand, this can be regarded as a new exploration direction for NetEase games in terms of commercialization. After all, MMOs are not the only categories where phenomena such as sky-high-priced clothing, numerical payment, and big R maintenance services exist. Will NetEase explore similar products in more categories in the future? Profit model, such as SOC, 2D, etc.
On the other hand, as previously reported by Game-Time, the “giveaway” marketing of Chinese companies overseas has affected many new overseas games, including Pokémon TCG’s unreleased mobile game “Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket”.
As the leading gaming company in China, NetEase’s actions not only draw attention from peers, but also from players. When NetEase makes everyone realize that many previous designs in the industry were reasonable at the time due to the times and market limitations, but when there are actually better choices now, players will naturally make a choice.
After all, most people are small and medium-sized R players, and they prefer their own business model and experience, so they will naturally be more popular.
From this perspective, it can be said that the commercial transformation of MMO games such as NetEase’s Shooting Condor is actually one of the strategies for actively seeking changes in the current existing market and attracting new players from other competing products and even categories.
The gathering of a large number of small and medium-sized R players into NetEase’s games will actually lead to a further chain reaction, which is the transfer of large R users.
Because of “popularity”.
The game experience of big R players, especially in products with PVP and strong social elements such as MMOs, actually comes from “social status”. This is why elements such as rankings and titles are so common and important in many games.
This kind of game experience requires a lot of people to create an atmosphere. In short, the more people you face when successfully pretending to be 13, the better it will be.
Conclusion:
Of course, the core reason for NetEase’s series of seemingly game-crazy moves is to seek profit for itself. By exploring new business routes, it creates product differentiation and goes one step further to cultivate an ecosystem that is different from other games.
If other companies do not follow up, it will be difficult for players who have been favored by NetEase to be snatched away by other games. This can be said to be very important in the existing market. And if other companies follow up, NetEase will also have a leading advantage.
You can even further expand your presence at a time when other companies are facing change and may be hesitant in the early stages of “having to have both.”
However, for players, the direction of NetEase’s changes is actually beneficial to more people. If it can make MMO great again and improve the gaming experience of ordinary players, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if NetEase becomes a little more “crazy”.
