Why are some casual games becoming more and more "serious"?

The nature of casual games is two-way, players get relaxation and happiness from them, and game manufacturers get their own corresponding benefits.

Nowadays, the Internet information is developed, and all kinds of new games are emerging. Only by updating more high-quality content and innovating gameplay can game manufacturers retain players, achieve better publicity, and gain good reputation. profit. And this has led to the current games becoming more and more serious in order to gain player stickiness, which is what is now popular as "liver".

The purpose of games is to increase user stickiness, and the ultimate goal is still revenue.

User online time is also a viscosity, conversion rate is revenue, mobile phone performance and screen ratio are the magic assists, and finally it is market category competition, casual games are still casual games. If the market competition is too big, the frequency of game updates will be high. , increase the freshness of the user, and the difficulty of the game will become conceivable.

Because casual games are all based on a single monetization model with a simple mechanism, the core competitiveness is low, and the rapidly expanding market can no longer see revenue growth. This made the gold rush of casual games gradually calm down, so hybrid leisure appeared, just like the previous Dream Garden, eliminating, building, breaking through, and collecting into one.

I just entered the mobile game industry at the end of 2013. At that time, the mainstream was casual games, with many parkour and match-3 products, and the rest were card games. At that time, there was a vague notion of "hardcore games" in the industry, but it was basically a fantasy, because neither hardware performance, network bandwidth, nor user habits could support the hardcore game market. The mainstream argument in the market was that "mobile games are only suitable for "Use fragmented time to relax." What you see on the subway are mainly casual games. It was not until the second half of 2014 that some experimental heavy-duty mobile games were successful.

By this year, if you say "mobile phones are not suitable for playing hard-core games", few people will believe it. Most of the top of the rankings are heavy-duty MMOs, and there are some who make mobile games like PC games. trends, especially products from major manufacturers. After reading too many rankings, I get the feeling that casual games are no longer played. In addition, casual games are a product of the recent rise of mobile games. After several years of industry development, it gives people the impression of being out of date, which is normal.

But in fact, casual games still have a very considerable number of users, especially head products, which still have a stable position. There are several evergreen match-3 games in China, including Le Element’s “Happy Match”, Tencent’s “Tiantian Love Match”, and Lemon Weiqu’s “Bingo Match”, all of which have been in operation for more than 3 years. , you don’t know the number of active users, but you will be shocked when you look at it. Take the report just released by Jiguang Big Data today. If you eliminate the game category alone, the number of players will be 170 million. In other words, one out of every eight people plays matching games. This is the result of the gradual decline in the penetration rate of matching games in the industry in recent months.

At the beginning of this year, App Annie released the 2017 global Application active list. Among them, "Happy Match" and "Candy Crush Saga", two old match-3 games, ranked second and fourth respectively in the global monthly active user rankings, second only to "Honor of Kings" and "Clash of Clans" 》.

Since there are still so many active users in casual games, why are casual games so rare among mainstream players? There are two main reasons here.

On the one hand, the casual player group is outside the sight of "mainstream players". Take the elimination game as an example. The latest Aurora big data shows that the proportion of female users exceeds 68.5. However, the current mainstream game trend in the market is still dominated by men, so the activity of female players may not be noticed. In addition, in terms of age distribution, casual mobile game users are also more dispersed, with younger and older users accounting for a larger proportion. The age level of users is also different from those of serious mobile game users.

On the other hand, the reason why we rarely see the exposure of casual games is also related to the resource allocation of channels.

When we open the traditional domestic Android application channels, we rarely see recommendations for casual games on the homepage, and we rarely see such games at the top of the list. One reason for this is that traditional application distribution channels are mainly based on sharing and intermodal transportation. They care more about traffic returns and revenue, so they are more willing to recommend games with high ARPU values. The ARPU value is not the strong point of casual games. The vast majority of casual game users do not pay, and even if they do, they are mainly concentrated between 0 and 30 yuan. In comparison, the ARPU of heavy games is much higher. The same traffic obviously gives greater returns to heavy games.

But this phenomenon is not absolute, and there are many types of channels. For application distribution channels like the App Store, absolute revenue is not the only pursuit. Its role is more like maintaining an application ecosystem. Therefore, Apple’s recommendations are not driven by the revenue capacity of the game, but rather consider word-of-mouth. , activity, product quality and other factors. Similarly, domestic mobile phone manufacturers’ own application platforms will also consider more aspects.

Let’s take Huawei, which has the highest domestic market share, as an example. Huawei’s application distribution channel is called “Huawei App Market”, and there is also a “Game Center”, which is not only an important entrance to the application market, but also Has its own independent APP. On the Game Center homepage, we can see that among the editor's recommendations, there is "Happy Match", and a game with a strong casual atmosphere like "Meow Star Wars" has also been placed in the Feature slide on the homepage. Of course, MMOs, MOBAs, and action mobile games still account for the largest proportion of the homepage on the homepage, but compared to the homepages of other channels that are all about heavy games, the proportion of casual games on the homepage of Huawei Game Center is already large.

If the user clicks on the "Category" label, they will see the "Casual Puzzle" category of games, which is at the top of all categories. You can see the platform's recommendation for this category.

Why are casual games ranked first? To put it bluntly, casual games do have a lot of users. As Huawei's own pre-installed channel, Game Center is part of the mobile phone ecosystem. It should focus on a wider range of user needs and certainly not just look at revenue data. Not only that, Huawei will also open the DigiX Lab within this year, specifically for domestic game developers, to provide services such as game application experience improvement and game compatibility testing. Therefore, whether for ordinary users or practitioners, Huawei The application market is not a simple channel.

Judging from statistics in July this year, the number of monthly active users of Huawei App Market reached 180 million, of which the monthly active users of games have exceeded 40 million, and the average monthly downloads have reached 200 million times. Data from the third-party data platform MobData in the first quarter of this year show that the proportion of mobile game players using Huawei mobile phones is the largest in the country, reaching 17.1. So to a certain extent, the reason why Huawei App Market recommends casual games is not because casual games bring more money, but because it can better reflect the real needs of Chinese mobile game users, and the built-in application platform of mobile phones is obviously Meeting user needs is the top priority. Therefore, whether it is rankings or recommended positions, it is easy to see casual games such as match-3 and parkour.

In addition, we have noticed that Huawei has also done a lot of work in gathering the popularity of players. Some time ago, Huawei and Le Elements organized a two-day "Happy Xiaoxiaole" Huawei fan meeting in Hangzhou. The whole event was held in a lively manner, with 30 players present in one day. Not only were "heavy match-3" players who came from Harbin and cleared the game with all stars, retired couples who had played match-3 games for 4 years, but also all the players. The youngest player in the game was 8 years old, and the game creator also came to the scene to communicate with the players.

I have to say that I am used to seeing mainstream game events in the industry, but it is quite emotional to see this kind of gathering of "non-mainstream" players.

The organizers did not reduce their professionalism because all the casual players came. The venue layout was quite unique and reflected the game elements familiar to the players as much as possible. The players stayed in the "Happy Fun" themed suite specially designed by the venue provider, Atour Hotel, which can be said to be quite warm.

How about it? Is the current level of activity of casual games different from what you thought? Games range from simple to complex, but the fun is genuine for everyone. Your family and elders may get no less fun from those seemingly simple casual games than you get from 3A masterpieces, as long as you pay attention to protecting your eyesight.

Due to the simple mechanism and low threshold of ultra-casual, this category market has gradually become saturated after experiencing the “carnival” in 2018 and 2019. The one-time ultra-casual trend seems to be It seems to be the end of the line.

Judging from the statistics of downloads, the most important indicator of the ultra-casual category, the downloads of the category continued to rise until Q3 of 2019. Although there was a slight decrease in Q4, the number was still high. No less, and using only one quarter's data to present a view will inevitably be biased. However, the year-on-year growth rate curve provides a basis for the maturity of the ultra-casual category market and the cooling of the gold rush.

On the year-on-year growth rate curve, the year-on-year growth rate in 2018 was almost above 100, reaching the peak in Q3, with the growth rate as high as 169. This is a category explosion, the result of the gaps in the product market being quickly filled, various products springing up after rain, and developers rushing to enter the market. In 2019, although there is still a strong improvement in Q2 compared with Q1 as in 2018, the year-on-year growth rate has been on a downward trend.

A certain boss once said, "How can you become stronger without spending money?"

1. The essence of a company is to make money, and game companies ultimately make money through games, even if There are some associations that generate electricity for love, but it will be difficult for them to last if there is no source of profit.

2. The problem of the profit model of games. At present, most domestic game companies mainly focus on mobile games. The profit model is to play for free, and then make money through krypton gold selling numerical props or advertising fees. The former is usually what players call "heavy", while the latter mainly uses high traffic in exchange for advertising fees, which is what players usually call "light".

However, with the development of game companies, it is increasingly difficult to satisfy their appetites with light profits. Therefore, it is an inevitable trend to find ways to increase in-app purchases in casual games. In order to retain Players, there will definitely be many free welfare activities added to the game. Free-to-play and small krypton players will probably stay for the welfare, but they will gradually become wage earners in the game. They go online and move bricks on time every day for the welfare of the game, and contribute to the development of the game. Traffic data contributes.

This is the current normal state of domestic game companies, and it is also the mainstream trend that continues to develop. It is very realistic and cold, but it is also difficult to change.

After all - this is an era where everything is about "money", an era where entertainment is the end of the world.

Because the 20% rich people who control 80% of the wealth are afraid that the 80% poor people with low wages and no entertainment activities will rebel, so more and more brainwashing dramas and games have appeared. Entertainment is given to us poor people to kill time, so we go to work-game-sleep, falling into an infinite loop. Without thoughts and dreams, you will never become that 20-year-old person.

Because casual games take up a short time, people can use time fragments to play the game, and they can do other things during the game.

Because some of the gameplay ties you up. Yeah