Today, NetEase is flooding the screen again.
In the afternoon, NetEase’s flagship product “Seven Days World” released a short video calling for “Fair Game”. In the video, he directly opened the microphone passionately: “We are tired of the chaos on the market that ruins the gaming experience of ordinary players because of numerical payment. Therefore, we call out to the entire industry to return games to the embrace of a fair experience.”
The production team of “Seven Days World” also appeared in today’s live broadcast, explaining one by one how to embrace “game fairness” and the plans for future games after they are launched.
For example, in terms of numerical values, the production team has made it clear that it will ban the sale of numerical values, so that every player can have an equal development and combat experience, and avoid paid designs that accelerate growth and reduce the pressure of killing monsters.
The production team also generously demonstrated the commercial content used to replace the sales value-excellent appearance design. In order to express sincerity and determination, it said that it would give away the “Red Dragon Set” skin for free as a benefit for today’s first test.
At the same time, topics surrounding “fair games” and “numeric payment” are also fermenting on social media. On Weibo, the topic “Games are the last place where fairness should be lost” became a hot search topic; on Station B, players joked: “Don’t mention xxx in every sentence, never leave xxx in every sentence”; in Maimai, a man who claimed to be a former businessman of a certain factory Users of centralized operations lamented that “there is no time to talk about conscience and ideals.”
The industry’s long-standing “elephant in the room” has really been brought to the forefront this time by “Seven Days in the World”.
Why has numerical anxiety become a pain point for the entire industry?
In Gyro’s view, the reason why “Seven Days World”‘s call for fairness this time has aroused so much discussion is indeed because “players all over the world have been worried about the value of suffering for a long time.”
There are many reasons why today’s players resist “selling values”. For example, they have become more knowledgeable after being baptized by many products and are tired of this traditional game business model. Another example is the overall economic downturn in recent years, which has caused many people to With tight wallets, P2W, which has a hint of “forced consumption”, is more likely to attract resentment.
But in fact, it is not easy for manufacturers to quickly keep up with the changes of the times and adapt to the needs of players. On the one hand, as mentioned in the short film “The World in Seven Days”, revenue targets are a big mountain in front of most studios. On the other hand, most manufacturers will be more inclined to play safe and will not rashly abandon the “market proven” path.
Although many head products have tried to restrain the practice of “paying money to become stronger” – for example, mainstream MOBA games have widely distributed skin experience cards to balance the value bonus of skins – but the “selling value” concept Things have been uprooted, and most manufacturers seem to be still waiting and hesitating.
In addition, on the consumer side, many players still have an “investor” mentality and are unwilling to invest too much time and energy in products that have no long-term operating potential. This also makes manufacturers more inclined to adopt conservative strategies to a certain extent, let alone take risks to make paid innovations.
So the question is, why does NetEase’s “Seven Days World” dare to take the lead in the industry to speak out in such a high-profile manner?
Opening the mic with passion, does it depend on courage or confidence?
In fact, NetEase has launched a high-profile “price war” and taken the lead in resisting “selling values” since the mobile game “Ni Shui Han”. However, “Seven Days World” proposed to completely embrace game fairness and call on peers to join the queue, not only in the SOC track No one has done it, and it is a very new thing in the entire industry.
Judging from the fact that “Egg Party” took the lead in targeting the party game market and the huge potential of UGC in the past few years, and thus led the category, we can see that there are often long-term considerations behind every “very new” decision made by NetEase.
However, the solution for “Seven Days World” to be a fair game is also very simple and straightforward – including the core weapons in the game, there will be no payment related to numerical strength, and the payment points are limited to cosmetic content such as skins and social content. And this confidence and confidence largely come from the edge that the product has shown.
First of all, the outside world has shown a high degree of recognition for “Seven Days of the World”.Especially overseas, the game has achieved good results in testing and gained initial market recognition.
For example, in Discord, the community number of “Seven Days World” has reached 350,000, ranking fourth among domestic games, and ranking first among domestic games that have not yet been officially launched.
After the game was launched into beta, the number of players joining Discord grew rapidly.
Another example is Twitch, where the live viewing time of “Seven Days in the World” has reached approximately 4 million hours.
Foreign media Wccftech also listed “Seven Days in the World” as one of their most anticipated games in 2024.
The outstanding performance in the data has initially verified this solution that does not sell values at all. The recognition overseas has undoubtedly given the team the confidence to boldly expand to the entire industry this time.
Secondly, this product itself hides too many things.
Just take the design of the monster images in the game as an example. As a supernatural-themed SOC game, “Seven Days in the World” avoids conventional designs that have become somewhat “desensitized” to players today – such as “werewolves” and “ghosts”. etc. – instead chose to deeply combine the elements of ghost stories with daily life scenes, creating many monster images that are eye-catching.
“Baby Bus” is a design popular among players
This kind of design itself is closer to the actual life of players. Various strange combinations not only surprise players, but also give them a sense of immersion.
Not only that, “Seven Days World” itself has also chosen the creative route of “co-research” with players, which means that many contents will come from the most popular ideas and ideas among players. Therefore, Mr. Gyro is very optimistic that this game will produce a lot of game content that will be popular among players and even be released in advance before it is officially launched.
This type of design can also stimulate players’ imaginations
In addition to its unique theme and deep immersion, “Seven Days of the World” shows a high degree of freedom in camp construction gameplay and unrestricted open world experience content, which is already quite rich in the test version alone.
“Eternal Island” with no territorial restrictions and buildable in all areas
In addition, the hard power of the team behind “Seven Days in the World” cannot be underestimated.
Whether the team has a mature industrial pipeline, sufficient production capacity to meet players’ demands for rapid content consumption, and the realization of the above-mentioned “co-research” strategy determines whether it can abandon value sales and adopt the commercialization route of large DAU and low ARPPU as soon as possible. Positive cycle, thus promoting the game to long-term operation.
But at this point, “Seven Days in the World” seems to have demonstrated its strength.
In the latest real-machine demonstration released last month, “Seven Days World” has already taken the lead in showing the “Palu” gameplay with quite good quality before major manufacturers. The elements of ghost stories are equally cleverly integrated with the image of Palu. In addition to I am impressed by the amazing mobility of the team, and one can’t help but wonder how many “parlu” are behind the scenes to ensure efficient iteration of the game.
Freshly released “Abnormal Object” gameplay
It is understood that the team size of “Seven Days World” is as high as 300 people, and the investment has reached the level of 1 billion. This level of investment explains where the team’s production capacity comes from, and also makes people look forward to seeing the finished product.
Overall, “World in Seven Days” has taken the first step on the road to revolutionizing the industry’s “numerical sales”. However, in the game industry with serious path dependence thinking, changes in any phenomenon will not happen overnight. “World in Seven Days” 》It is still difficult to draw a conclusion on how much impact it will have on the ecology and pattern of the entire industry, and we will wait and see.
