Text/Repair & QiuqiuThe free list topped the list, and within 6 hours of its launch, it rushed to the top 1 of the best-selling list, and swept the hot searches on various social platforms.So far, the last IP of Tencent's "Four Famous Novels" to launch a mobile game, a "Wang Bang" that was 10 years late, has finally been played. And the so-called "king bomb" is a card that no matter when it is played, the next family can only shout "can't afford it".Is the product too old? IP outgas? Too many competitors? All previous doubts about the MDNF have been dispelled in the face of today's results. said that no one was playing, but the WeChat server was full of queues.

MDNF not only told everyone that he can still play long overdue, but also proved that on the so-called DNFlike track, there is no one who can compete with it - even in the 10 years of waiting for MDNF, the market has long been entrenched by various like products.As the official team says: "There is no like in DNF".

01

Eight million warriors assembled

In fact, Grape Jun has long been mentally prepared for the popularity of MDNF.After all, the game before just "got the version number", it blew up my group chat, Weibo, and circle of friends. On the same day, the tweets of the official public account also exceeded 100,000+ views in a very short period of time. and then 3 million users grabbed the test number and the game official announced the file...... Related topics have rushed to the hot searches on various platforms one after another, and I feel that everyone is really suffocated.The hot search on Weibo since the game was finalizedThe game was officially launched today, and the popularity exploded. After Grape Jun logged in smoothly for the first time, he secretly rejoiced, but after cutting out and sending a screenshot to show off, he couldn't go back, and every server was full and had to queue up.

Such popularity is inseparable from the strong publicity of the game. It is not difficult to see that this time Tencent's distribution line is in full swing, and it can be seen from the type of content released by the recent game that MDNF's publicity and distribution covers endorsements, linkage, e-sports, concerts, revitalization, and interactive games...... I can use almost all the means I can think of.Not to mention, there are indeed many types of content that have poked into the hearts of players. For example, the memory CG "Return" released by the game on station B got more than 1 million views in just half a day; The content of the linkage with Bruce Lee and Di Lieba has been connected to several Weibo hot searches, and the retweets and likes have exceeded one million.On the eve of the open beta, the enthusiasm of players has reached new heights. Not only did MDNF land on the top of the iOS free list on the day of 520, but even the platform "DNF Assistant", which provides backorder IDs, also soared to the second place on the free list.The game also made a small activity to review the terminal game, and some old players have posted their DNF qualifications accumulated in the past 16 years.The "qualifications" of the two grape gentlemen

As for other official content, it has also been used by many players. MDNF played more of the "emotional card". For example, inviting singers and artists to "reproduce" the game's classic music, holding time concerts, filming the micro-movie "All Masters", and talking to a few hardcore players...... These things may seem too emotional to outsiders, but they are the memories of many DNF players.After reading it, some players sighed, "Say irrelevant things, drink happy wine, play happy games, and be friends for life." "Under the high-intensity content rhythm, the game has also formed a considerable ecology on various platforms. For example, the game has won more than 4 million private domain core users on Tencent's own WeChat game circle and QQ interest platform; On Douyin, the hashtag #Dungeons&Warriors/DNF mobile game has been viewed more than 6 billion times as of press time - on the day of the game's open beta, many topics also rushed to the top of the Douyin hot list.After the overwhelming publicity bombardment, the product still caught it with its excellent quality: the core content such as combat, cultivation, PK, and group play has been verified by terminal gamers for a long time, and at the same time, a series of optimizations and improvements have been made for mobile game scenarios and current user pain points.In the three months since the game was re-exposed, MDNF officials have not only mentioned "torture planning" many times, but also released more than a dozen "planning blue stickers" about game adjustments and optimizations, accumulating hundreds of replies and optimizations of game-related content, many of which are still pain points that DNF new and old players continue to pay attention to.Compared with following the changes in the market, the game may have decided to serve a fixed circle early on, so it pays more attention to the pain points and needs of this group of users.从社区的反馈情况来看，MDNF的策略和具体调优设计也得到了不少玩家们的认可，并且他们还主动提及目前游戏其他可以优化的内容。

02

Redefining differentiation

In my opinion, one of the interesting things about MDNF is that it's not a high-investment, large-scale 3D open world. If you put aside the IP feelings, this is not a sexy project from the gimmick alone.Even in the eyes of some, MDNF is very old-fashioned in terms of both core gameplay and art quality: the traditional pixel style that is not fashionable, and the side-scrolling action runmap full of déjà vu is incompatible with the trend of the industry in recent years to pursue more and more "high-precision".But now this result proves that this is not the case, on the contrary, it may represent a trend of the domestic market maturing: players have their own love, manufacturers take what they need, rather than what is popular, just swarm to do it, swarm to play.Previously, Grape Jun mentioned the situation of the Korean game market. Compared with the Chinese team, which pursues the limits of mobile games, the Korean team is much more conservative, and will not seek innovation and change on a large scale, but will target a clear target group and differentiate according to the specific needs of players.At the same time, Korean gamers are also highly sophisticated, and they are more accustomed to finding products that suit them than those who pursue the latest and trendiest topic games. Like MDNF, which is considered to be outdated by everyone, according to third-party platform estimates, after its Hanbok was launched, the cumulative turnover in less than eight months has reached nearly 1 billion yuan, and it also won the 2022 Korean Game of the Year Award.Hanbok is still ranked in the top 50 best-selling iOS lists in South KoreaIn terms of market maturity, the two markets of South Korea and Japan are very similar, and the games on the best-selling list are often not understood by the domestic market: with such old graphics and such old gameplay, how can anyone still charge money into them? Haven't they played well?But all domestic masterpieces have landed in the Japanese and Korean markets, and it is obvious that this group of players is not because they haven't played it, but because the market is sufficiently segmented. Gameplay is likely to be more important to this group of players than absolute audio and visual quality.And this playability just explains why MDNF is still playing in today's market - because the entire market has been chasing the quality and scale of content in the past few years, but the gameplay hasn't improved much.Therefore, the differentiation of MDNF lies in not overly pursuing the so-called market trends, but focusing more on its own and players' demands, and giving full play to DNF's own highlights and memory points - including stylized pixel art, fair PVP gameplay, abyss drops mechanics at the top, rich cultivation system, multiplayer online team gameplay, and so on.A more expressive Abyss Drop effect in a mobile gameFor example, in the past, many products in the era of terminal games focused on cultivation competition, and DNF was one of the first games to implement the concept of numerical balance and fair PVP, and now mobile games not only inherit this "good tradition", but also become more balanced in value.For example, in addition to the art mentioned above, the game's hardcore fighting and rubbing content are also features that attract many DNF players to enter the pit. In this regard, the mobile game reproduces the "arrow keys + skill keys" of the terminal game, and adds optimization strategies such as screen vibration feedback, one-click combos and attack adsorption, which reduces the player's experience threshold while restoring the fighting advantages of DNF as much as possible;Swipe the screen button plus the buff and swipe up the basic attack button to release the skillDNF's equipment-centered cultivation system has also given players a unique experience such as randomness, diversity and freshness in the era of terminal games, and now the mobile game has tried its best to retain this set of content, and has carried out multiple rounds of optimization in terms of materials, equipment inheritance, epic explosion rate, enhancement, trading, etc., hoping to solve the pain points of past games on the premise of retaining the characteristics of the game, and open up the gap with current games.Strengthen the guarantee mechanismIn addition, the game also optimizes a lot of content in terms of social, paid, etc. Some people may say that these are very detailed and trivial modifications, but the set of MDNF core is still derived from terminal games, can this compete with other head products at the moment and attract players?I think that's where the production team excels. DNF's core gameplay and selling points have been verified for 15 years, and the mobile game chooses to retain the above-mentioned IP memory points, which is not easy to make mistakes, but also makes it easier for old players and potential users to understand the game and understand the IP.The mobile game is about to be updated with team-based gameplayIn fact, with the maturity of the player base, the domestic market, which has been pursuing higher, stronger and hotter, has also begun to have a similar trend, such as "MapleIsland" and "Rush! Cookie Man: Kingdom", including today's MDNF, we will find that these products are not popular two-dimensional, open-world, content-based games, but they all have quite good results.The MDNF's achievement not only breaks the skepticism of the outside world, but may also remind us that we need to redefine "differentiation". Because in today's market where two-dimensional games and content-based games are piled up, games like MDNF that focus on operation and cultivation are scarce products.volume content scale, volume art quality, volume industrialization pipeline; Tonality, values, self-expression – in the past, many of our products have chosen these two routes. But as more and more projects fail, we will find that what is really lacking in the market today is a service-oriented product, a product that returns to the needs of players and has the main purpose of satisfying players.Familiar scenes, characters, and storiesAfter all, when everyone is going to make a differentiation, then it is not actually differentiation.

03

epilogue

For Tencent, the timing of MDNF's launch is just right, and it is a "bombshell" in the off-season of its new products.We can see that from the finalization of MDNF to the launch, Tencent's share price has increased by more than 40%, and the company's market value has increased by about 1.1 trillion yuan. Of course, there is not necessarily a direct causal relationship between the two, but if MDNF can continue to stabilize the current market performance, it should become an important turning point for Tencent's entire game business and performance this year.In the long run, as an important part of IP, MDNF's market performance not only continues the influence of DNF's 16-year IP, but also activates the attention of more domestic users and younger groups, bringing new imagination to IP - at least Tencent can have more opportunities to guarantee the bottom line if it wants to introduce more IP derivative works in the future.For the industry, the action category has not been a big plate in China. In the "2023 China Game Industry Report", we can't see a separate category of action games, but directly merged into the role-playing category, which is counted together with MMO and turn-based RPG.

But now the players and market in the action category are more mature than in the past, the scale is increasing, and the requirements are higher. Although there are many so-called DNF-like games on the market, none of them can meet the needs of the corresponding users well. Most of them gained popularity by rubbing DNF's selling points in the early days of their launch, and then quickly lost their popularity.Now that MDNF is launched, it can be regarded as a complement to the side-scrolling action track, and has the opportunity to raise the ceiling of the entire action genre a little higher, just like "Honor of Kings" is to MOBA, "Peace Elite" is to shooting, and "Genshin Impact" is to the second dimension.According to the development trend of the above-mentioned popular models, we should also be able to expect that after MDNF is launched, there will still be a series of like mobile games that will continue to follow up, and derive more subdivisions, giving players more choices and different experiences. After all, the expansion of the category is not only an increase in volume, but also an expansion of the track.Therefore, the launch of MDNF may not only be an opportunity for Tencent, but also an opportunity for the industry.

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