WeGame's development after nearly seven years is not fast, although this is related to the game market environment, but if it continues to slow down, the opponent may be coming......

Reading Entertainment | yiqiduyu

Text | Garlic jelly corner

With the pre-sale of "Black Myth: Wukong" on June 8, this game that first met the market in 2020 has returned to the throne of popularity, and Weibo, Douyin, Station B, and Tieba all have related hot search topics on social platforms. In Steam's weekly sales list, "Black Myth: Wukong" occupies the first place in the weekly list of the world, the country, and the Hong Kong region, and even the limited physical collector's edition priced at 1998 yuan was sold out in 1 minute.

As the first domestic triple-A masterpiece, "Black Myth: Wukong" carries the expectations of too many Chinese players, and on the other hand, it may also have Tencent's game store WeGame platform.

Since 2017, when Tencent officially changed the name of TGP to WeGame, it has tried to provide Chinese players with a one-stop game service similar to Steam, but it has not been recognized enough in the full player market for many years. In the player community, if someone asks whether a game can be purchased on WeGame, most of the negative remarks such as "what do you can't think of" will appear in the comment area.

There are many factors that have not been recognized by WeGame in the player user group, such as the richness of the number of games, pre-sales and after-sales support, and the reputation of the company behind Tencent in the player community, etc., but just like "Fortnite" is to EpicGameStore, "ApexLegends" is to Origin, the emergence of "Black Myth: Wukong" may really provide a turnaround for WeGame's development in the market.

1

What did WeGame do wrong?

As a "Black Myth": Wukong" that will be "reported" to players once a year, in fact, the earliest "meeting" this year is through WeGame, and a new trailer was presented to the game on the WeGame Game Night on May 19th, and the standard version of the WeGame Store was released at the end of the film, priced at 268 yuan. While much of the discussion has focused on the game's pricing, the announcement through Game Night itself shows the game's "close" relationship with WeGame.

WeGame is slightly unique in all platform distributions except NS, not only is the game pricing the first to be announced, but the redemption codes that come with the two versions of the physical game are also the WeGame platform. Although many users said that after buying the physical version, they would sell the redemption code and then buy the digital version on other platforms, it is clear that the official still tends to guide players to experience it on WeGame.

On the one hand, as the first domestic 3A masterpiece, it is most reasonable to cooperate with the domestic game mall platform, and on the other hand, the development team Game Science is inextricably linked with Tencent. First of all, the founding team of Game Science used to work at Tencent, and the failure of the work "God of War" during his tenure was also a motivation for the team to develop "Black Myth: Wukong". On the other hand, in 2021, Game Science received an investment from Tencent, and Tencent's association with Ubisoft paved the way for the game to be developed with the UE5 engine. It can be said that today's "Wukong" has really received the help of Tencent.

But as mentioned above, even if the official physical version intends to guide players to experience WeGame, some users still don't seem to buy it, expressing their avoidance of WeGame, so what did this platform that tries to serve player users do wrong?

Back in 2018, a year after WeGame's official launch, the well-known action game series "Monster Hunter: World" was released. The launch of super popular games on the new platform would have been a perfect start, with big games attracting players, and players precipitating because of the game, but this virtuous circle was broken by the sudden removal from the shelves.

Only 4 days after the game was launched, the platform suddenly stopped selling and removed the game, and the reason for the removal was that "some game content did not fully meet the requirements of policies and regulations". That sudden removal from the shelves brought a huge blow to the development of WeGame in the local market, although the platform gave an unconditional refund service at that time, it still left an extremely bad impression on WeGame by the player community - untrustworthy.

After that, even if the number of WeGame's game reserves is gradually enriched, Tencent's popular games are bound to the platform, and they have not been able to impress those who have left the stand-alone player group, in the current player cognition, WeGame can be said to be just a Tencent game launcher such as "League of Legends" and "Valorant", as for its original plan to become the Chinese version of Steam, it has not been recognized by users.

To say that WeGame has done something wrong may be that it has failed to do a good job of controlling the game's content moderation, but this is far from the real problem. There is a high probability that WeGame will not let such a situation happen again, and its rights and interests feedback also make it clear that if the game stops operating due to uncontrollable factors, players can still play locally or apply for a refund, but the loss of player trust and the disappointment that they had to face when they were full of expectations are the fundamental reasons why it is difficult for WeGame to expand the market.

2

Can Black Myth: Wukong help WeGame rebuild trust?

Phenomenal products have always been the key to opening up the market for game platforms. EpicGame has early users because of "Fortnite", and then the weekly gift gives players the nickname of "E Treasure", and Origin can also enter the track because of "ApexLegends", even if players call it "rotten orange" because of its unstable server, but the platform is also gradually gaining a foothold because of this phenomenon, and Steam is also after the launch of "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds", the number of players in the country has increased significantly, expanding the platform's Chinese user market.

Obviously, WeGame is hoping that Black Myth: Wukong will be the key to turning its fortune around, and we think this can really help the platform to weaken the negative impression of users to a certain extent.

At present, the number of followers of "Black Myth: Wukong" on the WeGame platform has reached 280,000+, which is already very considerable as a domestic stand-alone game, and there is no doubt about the ability of this phenomenal game to attract users for the WeGame platform. For example, for users who are not stand-alone players but want to try, WeGame has a certain degree of convenience to operate, and the original user base of WeGame also has a certain probability of purchasing directly on the platform; In addition, Steam's high commission ratio is also influencing the decision of some players who understand this information to buy on which platform, and we have seen many questions about whether WeGame has a lower commission for the game, so that the development team can get more support from players.

This kind of drive can attract some new users to WeGame, and their "hostility" and "prejudice" towards the platform will be attenuated. But this is only the first step in reversing user attitudes.

If you put aside the crisis of trust and the collapse of reputation caused at the beginning, WeGame can be said to be developing seriously, in the face of domestic game developers, it has given enough sincerity of 10 million yuan to free shares, and in the face of users, it is also constantly expanding its own game pool (the platform shows that there are currently 1033 games), including last month's high-topic second game "Ming Tide" landed on WeGame, and it is also gradually changing the perception that "WeGame is just a Tencent game launcher".

However, the small number of games and incomplete service capabilities are still the reality of WeGame. A large number of single-player players prefer Steam, which is not only related to the rich amount of game content gathered by the platform around the world, but also related to the service capabilities that are strongly related to the game experience, such as creative workshops and user sharing/online. That is to say, Steam's service for player groups has achieved multi-dimensional refinement, and in comparison, WeGame is still a relatively basic game business, which is also an important point that it cannot accumulate users for a long time in the short term.

Although "Black Myth: Wukong" can bring a sufficient number of attention and users to the platform, but to retain these new users WeGame still needs to do a lot, if there are no supporting services to keep up in the short term, then WeGame will most likely return to the "game launcher" positioning, and this is still a big gap with the goal of the service platform.

End

WeGame's development after nearly seven years is not fast, although this is related to the game market environment, but if it continues to slow down, the opponent may be coming. According to 36Kr news, NetEase recently reached an agreement with Microsoft to try to introduce both sides and third-party games into China through the Xbox platform, which is likely to collide with WeGame.

At the same time, miHoYo has also begun to make launchers for its games, and two popular games, "Genshin Impact" and "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", have begun to prepare for access. Although there is a high probability that miHoYo is just paving the way for the development of its own "Honkai Universe", it cannot be ignored whether such an influential manufacturer drawing a circle to cultivate user behavior will have an impact on the game platform that serves all users in the future.

Multi-genre high-quality games are the core competitiveness of the game platform, only one "Black Myth: Wukong" is far from enough, if the current industry output does not make WeGame have enough market attractiveness, then the pressure will eventually return to Tencent itself, it depends on what kind of works this game company in the world is already considered the top in the world will come up with to the market.

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