With a minion skin with a guarantee of around 2,000 yuan, “Wang Zhe Rongyao” reached the peak of single-day revenue.

Over the past week, “Give Your Little Soldier Skin” became the most popular topic in “Wang Zhe Rongyao.” What's even more outrageous is that this little soldier skin, co-branded with Hello Kitty, is worth about RMB 2,000 (probability is around 2,000 yuan), and after equipping this skin, only the player himself can see it; neither teammates nor enemies can see the effects of this skin.

As soon as this skin went live, it was frantically criticized by “Wang Zhe Rongyao” players and anchors. Previously, “Wang Zhe Rongyao” also launched some co-branded skins, such as the Flying Sky and the Nine Color Deer co-branded with the Dunhuang Research Institute, as well as skins such as Tang Monk Master, Daughter King, and Princess Yutu, which were co-branded with the 86th edition of “Journey to the West”. They were all widely praised, and they were all “clearly priced” 88 yuan or 168 yuan skins, and did not raise the price because of the joint name.

I thought this skin would definitely experience “Waterloo” on the first day it went live, but unexpectedly, it created the peak of “Wang Zhe Rongyao”'s single-day revenue. A “Wang Zhe Rongyao” anchor said on Douyin that the iOS revenue of “Wang Zhe Rongyao” exceeded 500 million on the day the co-branded skin was launched. According to the Android recharge algorithm, the total revenue of “Wang Zhe Rongyao” exceeded 1.5 billion dollars on the same day, breaking its record of 1.3 billion dollars in single-day revenue during the 2019 Spring Festival.

“Most Tales” observed that “Wang Zhe Rongyao” also launched a “canopy” (a personalized dynamic background setting) co-branded with Kouromi on the day it was launched, but the latter was far less popular than the former. It can also be seen from this that this Minion co-branded skin was the main contributor to the day's revenue.

A few months ago, Ma Huateng said at the 2023 Tencent Annual Meeting: “Gaming is our trump card business. Currently claiming to be the biggest game company in the world, it seems to be lying on the credit book for success. However, in the past year, we have faced great challenges. New ecological game companies have sprung up all the time. From the gameplay category to the content category, we are at a loss for a moment. Friends and merchants continue to produce new products, and we don't feel like we have made any progress.”

With cards such as “Wang Zhe Rongyao” and “Peace Elite,” can Tencent continue to maintain its position as a “game hegemon”?

01 The king is still the same

“Compared to other games, Wang Zhe is very cost-effective.” Zhao Ying started playing “Wang Zhe Rongyao” in 2017. At the time, she had just graduated from high school, and “Wang Zhe Rongyao” accompanied her from school to work. However, after playing for 67 years, Zhao Ying is also just a V8 user. She has recharged more than 5,000 yuan, an average of less than 1,000 yuan a year.

In the book “Shi Yuzhu's Autobiography: My Marketing Experience,” he gave an interesting example. For example, if you spend 1,000 yuan on a knife to set a jewel in a game, you can turn it into an exquisite knife, but if you directly ask everyone to spend 1,000 yuan to buy a jewel, many people don't want to, but if you let everyone buy a jewel for 10 yuan to set the knife, the probability of success is 1%. In fact, at the end of the day, it takes 1,000 yuan to succeed, so everyone can easily accept it.

In fact, many mobile games now follow this idea, which allows players to participate in the lottery at a low price and then control the probability of “equipment,” causing players to unknowingly spend a lot of money.

However, unlike the early “Wang Zhe Rongyao,” almost all skins were “clearly priced”. Their skins were divided into several levels of legend, epic, and brave. Each level had a clear price, namely 168 yuan, 88 yuan, and 28 yuan. Only “Honor Collection” quality skins required a lottery, but before, only one or two skins like this were sold every year.

Today, although Zhao Ying still plays “Wang Zhe Rongyao” every day, she hasn't played any money for a long time. Zhao Ying explained that there are three main reasons: first, consumption has been downgraded; compared to games, they are more willing to spend their money in “reality”; second, “Wang Zhe Rongyao”'s Elo mechanism greatly reduces players' gaming experience; third, skins are now released more frequently, and most of them are drawn by lottery, not “clearly priced” as before. “I just need useful skins for my favorite heroes; I don't want to buy new skins anymore.”

Many players clearly feel that starting last year, “Wang Zhe Rongyao” began to increase the proportion of lottery draws. According to statistics, in 2023, “Wang Zhe Rongyao” released three “Honor Collection” skins, and also added “Supreme”/“Peerless” quality skins, which require a lottery to be obtained, and they are also planning gift packs for items such as the Sky Curtain, which also require a lottery to obtain them. Due to the different probabilities, the price of the two ranges from 400 yuan to 800 yuan after drawing.

It can be seen from this that “Wang Zhe Rongyao” changed its strategy and increased its monetization efforts, but this also worsened the players' experience.

In August of last year, “Wang Zhe Rongyao” caused public outrage because of the lottery skin for the launch of the popular support hero “Yao”. For a while, many players fled to “Dawn Heroes” and “Battle for Ping An Jing”, which were also MOBA games. In that week, “Heroes of the Dawn” stabilized at the top of the App Store's free list, and the servers were all crowded out. In order to support this group of users, “Heroes of the Dawn” not only urgently added 400 servers, but also gave away a large number of heroes and skins for free.

Dramatically, however, it didn't take long for these players to quickly discover many of the shortcomings of the “Little Factory” game during the game, and were familiar with the high cost of playing with new heroes. Coupled with the difficulties in social relationships, and not wanting to give up the skins and items they bought in “Wang Zhe Rongyao,” these players chose to return to “Wang Zhe Rongyao.”

A netizen once asked, do you have any suggestions for a more fun game than Wang Zhe? A great response: Uninstalling and reinstalling “Wang Zhe Rongyao” after three days.

It has been nine years since “Wang Zhe Rongyao” went live. As a game “suitable for men, women, and children,” it supports half of Tencent's games. Recently, Wang Zhe Rongyao still ranked first in the global mobile game revenue list for March 2024 announced by the mobile app market research agency Appmagic, with revenue of about 133 million US dollars.

Generally, the life cycle of an excellent mobile game product is about 2 years, and “Wang Zhe Rongyao” still dominates the list today after more than 8 years. It can be seen that its product, operation, and social relationship chain is strong. A veteran practitioner in the game industry said, “There is no game that can completely replace “Wang Zhe Rongyao” now, and its influence is quite large.”

However, every game has its own life cycle, and even the toughest kings will eventually grow old. If Tencent wants to maintain its “glory,” it must create a new king.

02 The egg is ferocious

Judging from financial reports, Tencent's domestic games are already slightly fatigued. In 2023, Tencent's online game business revenue was 179.9 billion yuan, up 5.4% year on year, of which game revenue in the local market was 126.7 billion yuan, an increase of only 2%. Moreover, in the fourth quarter of last year, Tencent's game revenue in the local market even fell 3% to 27 billion yuan. As mentioned in the financial report, the reason for the decline was the decline in contributions from “Wang Zhe Rongyao” and “Peace Elite.”

According to incomplete statistics from a game anchor, “Wang Zhe Rongyao” launched a total of 63 skins in 2021, 74 skins in 2022, and 88 skins in 2023. “Pillars of the Table” are appearing more and more frequently, yet the revenue from Tencent's online game business has not achieved corresponding growth. This also shows from the side that it is already difficult for Tencent Games to make a big breakthrough by relying on “Wang Zhe Rongyao” alone.

As a supporting business, domestic game growth was weak, making Tencent very anxious, so it began to continuously explore new game products. Among them, “Yuanmeng Star” received the most attention. In December 2023, “Yuanmeng Star” was officially launched. Tencent spent 1.4 billion dollars to promote it, but the results were not as good as expected.

Also as a party game, the launch of “Yuanmeng Star” has not posed much of a threat to NetEase's “Egg Boy Party.” In 2023, “Egg Boy Party” was an impressive “dark horse”. The total number of registered users reached 500 million, and the revenue growth rate was as high as 1950.2%.

In terms of gameplay, “Egg Boy Party” has many innovations, and has enough cool and exciting points. This is due in part to the style NetEase dared to experiment with.

According to some game analysts, compared to Tencent “waiting for market verification and then following up”, NetEase is more willing to take the initiative to develop the market. For example, “Onmyoji,” “Eternity,” and “Egg Party” are all products of this strategy. Although this style of play is not that definitive, it is also relatively more likely to break out.

When “Wang Zhe Rongyao” was born, Tencent's horse racing mechanism once played an important role. There was quite a “100 battle for competition and dare to be the first in the world”, but on the party game circuit, Tencent's style of play became “cautious.” In fact, the games “Sugar Pea Man” and “Stumble Guys” gave positive feedback for a long time, but Tencent didn't choose to enter easily. According to the expert's analysis, “Sugar Pea Man” is a game on a PC platform, while “Stumble Guys” is a foreign game. Strictly speaking, the data from these two games cannot prove that this type of game can be successful in the domestic mobile game market.

In addition to “insufficient data to prove it will be successful,” Tencent's game's cautious response may also be related to Tencent's huge size. Even though Ma Huateng made a harsh speech about the game business, and the company optimized personnel, a Tencent game insider told us that the pressure has not yet reached the end. “Maybe the company is too big, and every studio has its own interests.”

Tencent's “prudence” allowed “Egg Party” to seize the opportunity and build a moat to a certain extent.

The senior practitioner mentioned above analyzed that as a party game, “Egg Boy Party” has social attributes. Once user stickiness in social games is formed, it will form user barriers, making it difficult for other competitors to take away users. On the other hand, “Egg Boy Party” introduces a UGC mechanism. Users are not only players, but also creators. “Yuanmeng Star” is also a difficult thing to get rid of these creators, because it is an ecosystem, and there is no point in digging up individuals if there is no way to move them all over.

On February 2, 2024, “Egg Boy Party” sent players a letter called “Eggboy's Gift” in the game. It mentioned that the number of times Eggboy Park was played more than 100 million times a day, 400,000+ new content creations were added every day, an average of 3.8 park maps were created every second, and that the game had 20 million+ passionate and like-minded creative partners.

Obviously, “Yuanmeng Star”, which lacks content creators, has also weakened its appeal to players.

Last month, the case where the creator who signed up for “Egg Boy Party” sued Tencent for plagiarism went viral on Weibo. The creator made a map called “Because of the Blue” because the map was extremely challenging and was very popular in “Egg Boy Party.” The creator claims that this map was extremely pixel-copied from “Yuanmeng Star”. Whether it was the overall logic, gameplay settings, or item placement, some even had the same color, almost a one-to-one copy. Later, “Yuanmeng Star” responded that all related creative maps had been removed from the shelves.

Although strictly speaking, “Egg Party” and “Wang Zhe Rongyao” are in different game categories, “Egg Party” draws on “Wang Zhe Rongyao” in terms of profit model. The appearance (skin) of the blind box is the main revenue point of “Egg Boy Party”.

“Wang Zhe Rongyao” has released many co-branded skins and gained a lot. Since the launch of the public beta on May 27, 2022, “Egg Party” has also linked the appearance of more than 20 blind boxes with well-known brands and IPs to quickly design the IP image license into a skin, which not only fills in game content, stimulates players' purchases, but also uses promotional resources from collaborators to increase the popularity of the game, and expand the number of users and revenue.

Looking at the age distribution of players, some data shows that “Egg Boy Party” accounts for 29.39% of users aged 31 to 40, and 27.56% of users aged 18 to 23; “Yuanmeng Star” accounts for 43.94% of users aged 31 to 40, followed by users aged 24 to 30 accounting for 25.77%. Behind this data, it is not ruled out that real-name registered users are parents, and real players are younger, but in comparison, “Egg Boy Party” still captures the hearts of young people better.

Just like back then, “Wang Zhe Rongyao” captured a generation of young people. Although the egg is small, Wang Zhe is getting old. If “Yuanmeng Star” doesn't take over, then the young group may change hands.

This is the situation Tencent doesn't want to see the most. Ma Huateng once said that his biggest concern is not being able to understand the preferences of young people.

Therefore, at the annual meeting, Ma Huateng directly put forward requests and plans for “Yuanmeng Star”: “Although it is late, it is not only a game for us, but it also has a social component. This itself is our base camp. We must definitely do our best, and it also requires all businesses to combine and explore common development.”

03 The Awakened King

A few years ago, Tencent and NetEase also had such a clash. In October 2017, NetEase released “Operation Wilderness”, a “chicken eating” game. In less than four months, Tencent also released a similar game “PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds” (now “Peace Elite”), which overtook it in one fell swoop.

In response, the senior practitioner said, “The two games were less than half a year apart. NetEase user barriers had not yet been formed at the time, and Tencent still had a traffic advantage, so the latecomers took the lead, but now times have changed.”

Times are indeed different. Take “Wang Zhe Rongyao” as an example. Its explosion point was at the end of 2015, and the reason why it became a phenomenal hit, apart from the excellent quality of the game itself, is also inseparable from Tencent's huge number of users, resource support, and social genes.

When users sign up for “Wang Zhe Rongyao”, they are directly linked to a QQ or WeChat account, and can invite friends to “blackout” through QQ or WeChat. iOS and Android can compete together, and they can also share new achievements, new heroes, and skins with friends. In addition to socializing with acquaintances, Wang Zhe Rongyao also provides players with opportunities to team up with strangers. Through WeChat, players' weekly “Wang Zhe Rongyao Battle Report” is promoted, and the ranking mechanism of “Wang Zhe Rongyao” has also stimulated competitive mentality among players and increased activity.

WeChat users continued to grow rapidly in 2015, surpassing 600 million. The average age is 26, while the post-90s account for nearly 60% of QQ users. With a huge number of users and rapid activation due to resource bias, “Wang Zhe Rongyao” has pioneered a new frontier of Chinese gaming and has become a “everyone is playing, I want to play too” social product.

In 2015, the most active traffic pool was on WeChat, and now, the most active traffic pool is on Douyin. According to the data, Douyin had 600 million daily active users in 2022, with an average usage time of 125 minutes, as ferocious as WeChat in 2015.

The Tencent game insider mentioned above concluded, “Egg Boy Party” didn't develop very well at the beginning, but later it started quickly through Douyin.”

“Egg Boy Party” was only fully released half a year after it went live. It was late November 2022. Bloggers and anchors who played “Egg Boy Party” on Douyin posted short videos and livestreamed “Bring Your Own Dry Food” on Douyin, which brought in a wave of “tap water” traffic. NetEase soon discovered this and began working on Douyin. According to statistics from advertising and marketing data agency DataEye, at the time, “Egg Party” invested more resources in Douyin effect marketing, and related short videos and live broadcasts grew rapidly. The popularity of user discussions led to a rapid jump in game downloads, breaking the circle among non-core players. Coupled with winter vacation and the Spring Festival holiday, teenagers had plenty of time to spend short videos and play games. “Egg Party” exploded after 2023.

“Egg Boy Party” captured Douyin's traffic pool to complete a counterattack, and also prompted NetEase to use Douyin as the most important advertising channel. According to reports, “Egg Boy Party” accounts for nearly 60% of advertising in Byte's Pangolin League, and Douyin has become an important partner of NetEase. “Last year, NetEase was very aggressive. Several products were heavily linked to Douyin and promoted.” The Tencent game insider said.

Tencent also discovered the power of Douyin traffic and adopted the same strategy. At one point, about 38% of advertisements for “Yuanmeng Star” went to the Pangolin League.

Although the two companies had a competitive relationship, and the relationship once competed, when Douyin became an important publicity channel, the two sides had the possibility of cooperation. “Making games requires a long period of accumulation and accumulation. Byte currently lacks good games, and Tencent games also need new channels.” The Tencent game insider mentioned above believes, “Tencent's current settlement with Douyin probably has a lot to do with this.”

In fact, now the domestic mobile game market has actually changed dramatically. Tencent is no longer the only company. Although the revenue scale of “Egg Boy Party” is far greater than that of “Wang Zhe Rongyao,” it should not be underestimated. Furthermore, Miha Tour has taken the place of two-dimensional gaming by relying on several games such as “Genshin” and “Collapse: Stardom Railroad”. “Collapse: Starry Dome Railroad” has absorbed the original amount to a certain extent, but in terms of revenue, it grew rapidly in March.

At this point, Tencent chose more flexible “diplomacy,” and it also planned ahead and viewed competitive relationships from a strategic perspective.

In fact, Tencent is not unsuccessful in the young audience market. In 2021, the interactive romance mobile game “Love of Light and Night” launched by Tencent was even known as the “pinnacle of the National Second League”, with sales exceeding 100 million in the first month of its launch. Co-branding is also a major way for “Love of Light and Night” to generate revenue. Previously, after launching a co-branded product with Hi Cha, players directly crowded out Hi Cha stores just to cross the dimension with “Paper Man's Husband” and “Happy Proof.” At the time, some people joked, “Hi Cha robbed the Civil Affairs Bureau of work.”

According to the “2023 China Game Industry Report”, 80.7% of “Light and Night Love” users are women, and 74.8% of users are users aged 25 and under. According to other data, currently the IPs of the four major B users are mainly distributed in the North Shangguang region. However, “Love of Light and Night” is not regarded as “the hope of the whole village.” The senior practitioner mentioned above believes, “The two-dimensional aspect of art is difficult to measure with quantitative data, which is probably one reason.”

Another possible reason is that due to various market and policy considerations, Tencent has to exercise caution and restraint to a certain extent, which gives room to other rivals. However, it is not that Tencent's combat power is poor. This is the most efficient machine in the Chinese game industry and even the internet. At Ma Huateng's request, once it has recovered, no one dares to underestimate its combat power.

Tencent has realized that it is necessary to maintain the “trump card business” of games. Faced with many competitors and channel changes, of course, Tencent will not hand over the “king” of the domestic game market; then it will inevitably fight back in a big way.

Competition brings more innovation, which is a good thing for gamers.

Text | FunTalk, Author | Wei Xia, Editor | Liu Yuxiang