Text/Yiguang Flow

In 2024, can you imagine a light pay-to-play game 7 years ago, with niche gameplay, stand-alone + weak networking, able to withstand the aftermath of the blockbuster in August and achieve tens of millions of monthly turnover?

Not to mention, the grape king has seen it in the past two days. Among this year's imported games, "Shadow Fight 3" is such a special game.

The game was released overseas 7 years ago, and the national server was released in late August this year. In the past two days, foreign media Pocket Gamer mentioned in the news that at the same time, under the same DOU, the national server of "Shadow Fight 3" is 10 times that of the international server. Missed 7 years and now there are so many people playing?

With curiosity, I learned from the publisher Wanda Cinema Games that in fact, since the launch of "Shadow Fight 3", there have been more than 2 million new users in the national server, especially Android users, accounting for more than eighty percent of the overall volume, and the overall monthly turnover of the game is expected to reach tens of millions.

However, if you think about it carefully, this kind of "making anti-routine products into dark horses" is quite in line with the style of Wanda Cinema Games.

01

"Shadow Fight 3" why

Became a niche dark horse?

According to Zhang Yu, CEO of Wanda Cinema Games, the reason why "Shadow Fight 3" can achieve these results is due to several specific reasons:

The first is the basic handicap.

Although the Shadow Fighting series is niche, in fact, it has accumulated a lot of IP influence over the years and generations.

So far, the series has launched 4 products, the first web game "Shadow Fight" in 2011, the mobile game "Shadow Fight 2" in 2013, the 2017 "Shadow Fight 3" with more RPG elements, and the 2020 "Shadow Fight 4" with more emphasis on competitive PVP.

Shadow Fight 2

Among them, "Shadow Fight 2" won the top 1 of the free list of the App Store in 49 countries and entered the top 10 of the free list of 139 countries and regions with its rare and novel fighting gameplay, with a cumulative download of more than 250 million times, which can be said to be the king of fighting mobile games at that time.

Although since the 2nd generation, China has been derailed from the new work of this series for a long time, there are still many fans who have been following up on the international server, so in the niche track of domestic fighting mobile games, the basic plate of the Shadow Fighting series has been very stable.

The second is the increase in potential users.

In 2018~2024, when the shadow fighting series faded out of the domestic market, a large number of action boutique mobile games have emerged in China, broadly speaking, from "Honkai Impact 3" to the recent "Singing Tide" and "Jeopardy Zero", these action games have cultivated a large number of pan-action game users.

This makes it easier for today's fighting mobile games to get rid of niche labels and make achievements as long as they are properly minted.

In Zhang Yu's view, history is always circulating: "In the early days, mobile game players liked to operate, and they loved the exciting or delicate operations and gameplay of Water Cutter and Angry Birds; Slowly, players are becoming more and more reluctant to operate, so there are functions such as hang-up, automatic, one-key, and even the current placement gameplay; But in recent years, many players have become more tolerant of operation, and action games and open world have cultivated a large number of players who are accustomed to operation, and this is the opportunity for "Shadow Fight 3". ”

Then there's the difference in experience.

The core gameplay of "Shadow Fight 3" is fast-paced cold weapon fighting, which contains the heavy feeling of cold weapon slashing, and also contains the explosive energy of classic fighting games, so the actual combat feels exciting, realistic, and fast-paced.

In addition to combat, players can also form differentiated playing styles and Build routines according to different equipment, which further strengthens the game's operational, strategic and replayability. In addition, the game has been iterated overseas for many years, and old players will also make the best strategies and payment suggestions for new players based on experience, so the payment pressure is not high. In addition, due to the fragmentation of Android channels, the national server has removed the insertion of ads, which also makes the player's experience more concentrated.

All these factors make the national server "Shadow Fight 3" not only have the excitement and freshness of fast food games, but also have the light payment, differentiation and repetitive playability experience of niche games. In the many online mobile games that are either forced to force the liver and krypton, or the value is played from beginning to end, it sets off the relaxed feeling of "Shadow Fight 3", which can be opened anytime and anywhere.

"When I'm particularly tired, I don't want to play large-scale online games, but there is no pressure to play "Shadow Fighting 3", if you want to play harder, you can fight more every day, especially the kind of cold weapon fighting and the rhythm of seeing and dismantling moves, it is very much the taste of martial arts master duel in the movie." Zhang Yu was also fascinated by the game.

Next is the market gap.

For a long time, there has been a huge gap in domestic fighting mobile games, even if some games play the slogan of fighting, but in fact, the framework of the game is more numerical online games, so it not only lacks the technical play space of fighting, but also retains many functions and experiences of online games that make people feel pressured.

From a zoom in perspective, part of the development trend of the domestic mobile game industry in the past two years is to increase investment, make heavily industrialized masterpieces, replace other competitors as much as possible, and compete for players' main game time; The other part is to use fun gameplay combined with a strong payment mechanism to compete for the player's attention time, and quickly cash out to compete for the player's money bag.

In fact, there are very few games like "Shadow Fight 3" in this kind of environment, which serve more interesting and playable gameplay, and use a light payment mechanism to retain players for a long time. So whether it is from a niche track or from the perspective of the general environmental trend, "Shadow Fight 3" has seized a large enough gap and opportunity.

Finally, there is the help of localization and publishing.

On the one hand, the game itself has an international content iteration strategy, which also includes Chinese-style content that is close to domestic users, and has certain advantages. On the other hand, for this game, Wanda Cinema Games has formulated the core characteristics of focusing on the Android ecology, focusing on the exciting scenes of fighting and action tension, which quickly activates old players and drives new players.

So on the whole, "Shadow Fight 3" can still succeed in China across 7 years and become a dark horse product in the niche track, thanks to the changes in users and the market, the gap caused by the competition between manufacturers, and the characteristics and advantages of the product itself. And it was able to quickly conquer the city, thanks to the publisher's precise positioning of this product and appropriate promotion strategy.

02

Don't play cards according to the routine,

Why does it happen every time?

From Saint Seiya, to Qin Shi Mingyue, to Shadow Fighting, Wanda Cinema Games has released more and more products in the past two years. What's more noteworthy is that they don't seem to play by the routine every time.

When taking IPs, they always like to choose some IPs that are very old, rather than the current hot IPs. For example, after winning the Saint Seiya IP, it not only broke into the top ten iOS best-selling in China, but also counterattacked the top three iOS best-selling in the Japan market, becoming the first dark horse to go overseas this year. Now they have used a niche fighting game from seven years ago to make tens of millions of turnover.

In Zhang Yu's view, the core strategy of their ability to make these achievements is to be sure that mainstream companies cannot eat all the markets.

"For a long time, we have always believed that games are the content industry, unlike food delivery and e-commerce, which compete only with one or two big players in the end, and there is no absolute king in the game industry. In many subdivisions, large manufacturers are unwilling to do or even not very good at it, we can do it. ”

"For example, in the film field, which is also in the content industry, film companies can not only use ultra-high investment to shoot the wandering earth with a target box office of billions, but also use relatively reasonable small-scale investment to produce small-scale movies with a box office of one or two hundred million or even tens of millions of box office, and it can also make money."

Therefore, the ideal state of Wanda Cinema Games is to find a blue ocean field with fewer competitors and use a deeper understanding to promote profitable products. Zhang Yu believes that the success rate of doing subdivided tracks is much higher than doing mainstream tracks or following popular products.

"A lot of people don't understand, or haven't thought carefully about this logic. To do a mainstream track or follow the trend, such as making SLGs or placing cards, your first goal is to take out another mainstream game in the player's hands. It's actually very difficult, especially when the player has invested a lot of money, but it has to be done - you can't succeed if you can't take out the opponent. ”

"But the goal of the subdivision track is different, I don't need to kill people, I just need to be fun enough, obviously, it's much easier than taking out my opponent and having fun at the same time. When you don't have an opponent, the success rate will be greatly improved, for example, I play "Full Moon Night", stand-alone card building mobile game, this game has no competitors at all, then I won't delete this game in my mobile phone, and even play it from time to time, and see the update on the krypton. ”

"In my experience of contacting so many products, the success rate is calculated purely from the comparison of the number of successful products and the number of similar products, and the success rate of subdivided categories is much higher than that of those large categories, for example, 100 SLG models can become one, but when doing subdivision tracks, three or five models can become one. It's just that the voices on the market selectively ignore the difficulty of success of SLGs and selectively highlight the height of such products. ”

"I am very touched by this, 10 years ago, when I released "Little Army: The Three Kingdoms" and "Stickman Alliance", these two stand-alone mobile games had no opponents, and we could play to our heart's content in terms of distribution, and do what we wanted to try, and the single one achieved hundreds of millions, far exceeding our expectations. But later, when online games were released, the competitive pressure was more than 10 times greater than that of making a stand-alone game. ”

Based on this judgment, Wanda Cinemas has planned two main lines: reshaping classic IP and entering the global market.

The first main line is to make IP products, but it must also be in line with the strategy of finding the direction of the blue ocean, so specifically, the approach of Wanda Cinema Games is to reshape the classic IP. The core logic is to find classic IPs with good enough basic disk and fan base, and secondly, to reshape the value of IP and awaken the IP heritage in view of the shortcomings of domestic IP development.

For example, in the previous article, we talked about "Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice", which grasped the old fans' uneasy understanding of the final holy war, reawakened a large number of old fans in the Japan market, and finally pushed the product to the top 3 best-selling positions.

The second main line is to develop overseas markets. Among them, it is not only the promotion of domestic products, but also the introduction of overseas differentiated products such as "Shadow Fight 3". Similarly, in the selection of products, we will also focus on whether there is a blue ocean space that does not follow the crowd.

Specifically, when introducing "Shadow Fighting 3", Wanda Cinema Games looked at several advantages: one is the differentiated features of the product itself; The second is the change in the gaming habits of domestic players, as well as the expansion of action mobile games to potential users of fighting mobile games; The third is the increase in the number of stand-alone games caused by changes in domestic players' payment habits and habits.

If European and American players like to play first and then decide to pay, and Japan players like to study the cost performance first and then plan to pay, then domestic players are used to charging a little first to see if it is cool before deciding to abandon the pit or continue to play. This difference in habits is very advantageous for "Shadow Fight 3", which focuses on small payments and single payments.

On the one hand, "Shadow Fight 3", which is a single-player experience, has enough playable space itself, and it can be played well with or without payment; On the other hand, the same small payment can be exchanged for a much greater increase in experience in "Shadow Fight 3" than in online mobile games, so the paid retention will also be high. After all, the 648 that can be spent by drawing three shots and ten consecutive shots in other mobile games is already an unnecessary over-spec payment amount in "Shadow Fight 3".

After determining that the product is feasible in terms of gameplay characteristics, experience differences, user scale, payment and revenue, etc., the specific results will be determined by the distribution and operation.

When Wanda Cinema Games released "Shadow Fight 3", the goal was clear: to grasp a core point and penetrate the user layer as much as possible.

Compared with many flashy mobile game masterpieces, "Shadow Fight 3" is difficult to compete with mainstream products even if it has made artistic improvements on the basis of previous generations, so the publisher focuses on the gameplay itself, that is, fighting. The charm of fighting, especially the charm of cold weapon fighting, is the excitement of the symphony of gold and iron, the thrill of seeing the moves, the power of one move and one style, and the tension of an instantaneous explosion.

However, when actually playing the game, it is always the two-dimensional screen of the mobile phone that interacts with the player, just like standing from the perspective of a bystander, watching the battle between two people.

Therefore, Wanda Cinema Game chose to use film and television to amplify the charm of fighting. With the help of engine recording, they added more perspectives on the basis of the original in-game battles, so as to generate more and more tense shots and images, such as shots facing the blade, close-ups of unleashing ultimate, slow motion of swords intersecting, etc.

In this way, it is equivalent to turning a fight from a simple bystander's perspective into a scene with film and television editing techniques. By using these materials to advertise, we can continuously reinforce the labels of "Shadow Fight 3" such as "real fighting", "cold weapon fighting", and "technical operation". It is understood that the click-through rate and conversion rate of this kind of material are very high, which makes the cost of buying the game to a very low level.

At the same time, Wanda Cinemas Games also contacted almost all existing Shadow Fight 3 UP and veteran players, and reached in-depth promotion cooperation with them as much as possible, or purchased video licenses from these players for promotion, or used their unique ways to create derivative videos to guide players to discover the game's in-depth gameplay and more charm.

These collaborations are disguised as a layer of insurance for the promotion of buying volume. Many players who are accustomed to action games may just be accustomed to the operation of fighting after entering Shadow Fight 3, but it is difficult to discover the game's routines and playing styles at the first time, so it is easy to lose the freshness.

However, the strategy guidance, whimsy, and even extreme challenges of old players and UP can immediately provide new players with ideas and directions, whether it is krypton, technology, saving resources, matching equipment, or studying routines, there is a weather vane that can choose to experience, so that new players are not easy to lose, and it is easier to explore the charm of the game.

Therefore, on the whole, Wanda Cinema Games was able to successfully release "Shadow Fighting 3", and at the practical level, it grasped the core point of "the charm of fighting", and retained players with the attraction of buying volume and the guidance of old players; At the strategic level, it is to seize the incremental space brought by action games and find the gap in the niche track of fighting; In terms of strategic direction, it is to grasp the blue ocean that large manufacturers cannot set foot in, and make products without opponents.

It can be said that as long as the whole link of "strategy-strategy-practice" runs well on a specific track, then Wanda Cinema Games will have room for operation and enough chance to win without playing cards according to the routine.

03

In today's mobile game market,

Choice is more important than anything else

In the past when the industry was prosperous, everyone could be capricious enough. Follow the trend, there are a large number of users who can wash; to engage in large input products, and have capital willing to fill the pit; Gambling on high-risk tracks, there are also family funds for people to squander. However, the game industry is not what it used to be, and in today's market, failure is equivalent to nothing, and survival and stability are the core issues.

What's even more embarrassing is that caution and pressure have also made more manufacturers cringe, afraid to try to innovate, dare not make mistakes, and dare not deviate from the success template, which in turn has created more cases of failure due to homogenization. It is enough to see that not all manufacturers can see the most correct choice at the moment, and it is difficult to bear the risk of choosing the wrong one.

It is even rare to find a sober company like Wanda Cinema Games, which understands why they do it, how to do it better, and ultimately how to protect their revenues, whether it is in terms of the big strategic direction, the mid-level publishing strategy, or the small product choices. More importantly, through trial and error and accumulation in the past four or five years, they have gradually run through the implementation of the whole set of strategies.

In this process, Zhang Yu is also constantly screening and reserving classic IPs, and now he has reserved Caijing, JOJO's Bizarre Adventure, Transformers and several other classic IPs; At the same time, he is also trying to get in touch with more subdivided track teams and products with ideas, which in his opinion is worth investing in Wanda Cinema Games regardless of returns, and at the same time, it can also contribute to the industry.

"The game industry is supposed to be colorful, but a lot of big companies don't do it, and small companies don't have the ability to do it, and we happen to be trying the middle track between big and small companies, so we can try something new. Now "Shadow Fight 3" has also been verified, and the stand-alone experience + weak network can also be successful in the current market. ”

"I often tell my team that I'm okay with losing money for innovation, but I'm never going to be insensitive to spending money. Many routines are rotten, and they are definitely not worth following us, but some potential niche and unpopular products, we can understand and understand the packaging, and can help R&D avoid bad distribution, so it is worth trying. ”

Looking back, although the game industry is becoming more and more homogeneous, and the resources in the industry are also highly concentrated and solidified, the big manufacturers have never been able to take all the cakes. For example, the exploration and success of Wanda Cinema Games' "non-routine" direction, for R&D, with more successful releases in different fields, the way out of its own products will also increase more choices.

And when more manufacturers make more flowering products, our game industry can also be more prosperous.

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