Text/Repair

"Three Kingdoms: Plotting the World" (hereinafter referred to as the Three Schemes) is really fierce.

When the game was launched for a week, BOCOM International estimated that the turnover of "Sanmou" in the first month reached 5~800 million yuan, and it is expected to contribute 8~1.3 billion yuan to Station B within the year. According to the information obtained by Grape King, perhaps everyone still underestimated the achievements of "Three Schemes" - its first month turnover is likely to have exceeded 800 million.

In fact, many people think that the first-week results of "Three Schemes" are smashed by the amount of purchases, and they will soon fall back to the prototype. However, in the past month, the game has withstood the pressure of new and old competitors from all walks of life, known as the "most volatile summer file", and has continued to maintain the first place in the domestic SLG track, and the best-selling list of iOS games has stabilized in the Top 10.

The stock of station B rose all the way from HK$68 at the beginning of this year to HK$145, hitting a new high this year. As a result, investment bank JPMorgan Chase raised the stock rating of Station B from "neutral" to "overweight", and raised the target price from HK$110 to HK$165.

This time, Grape Jun doesn't want to go into the details of what to reduce liver and krypton, and why the game won, we have reported on this many times before. Today, I would like to share some observations from the beginning of the game, as well as the impact that the product may have on the SLG track and station B after getting this first month's results.

01

A good story

One of the core charms of SLG is storytelling and engaging storytelling. anchors, alliance leaders, management, big-headed soldiers, and even small internal (internal moles...... Everyone has a role to play in the story and has a part of their own. As the "actors" and "scripts" change, the content of the story will also change, resulting in a diverse server ecosystem.

Unlike MMOs, SLGs have fewer servers and higher information density. Later in the game, you will find that the grievances and hatreds between several alliances can be perceived by most players who participate in them. In addition, because the anchors in station B have a close connection with fans, the impact of their words and deeds in the game will be further amplified.

I'm in the district server where the UP main @ Meow Lixiu is located at station B. The story begins before the game even starts: he throws smoke bombs in the SLG circle, pretending to take people into the 10th server to touch the alliance, only to turn around and run to the 22nd server with the fewest competitors.

This means that the anchor can influence, or even change, the "power pattern" of the entire server to a certain extent. The trend and intensity of the power pattern of a region often affect the game experience of most users, such as whether it is a fierce confrontation or a long fish, which is directly related to the retention of the server.

Like the protagonist of the 22 regional uniform, it naturally becomes Meow Rikyu and his sailors. In the first week of the service, the offensive of several of our anchors Water Friends Alliance can be described as devastating, and there are almost no PVP links, all of which are developing violently. It sounds boring, but in fact, the seeds of the story have been quietly planted at this time:

Because the alliance (the alliance with the largest number of people who win the hegemony industry) has only 200 positions, there will inevitably be an uneven distribution of benefits. Previously, at the bottom of Meow Rixiu's comment area, it was already possible to see that some people in the Second Alliance were dissatisfied, although the alliance management explained this, but obviously it could not solve the fundamental contradiction - the prince and the prince would have a kind of Xiangning?

So later, the First and Second Leagues decided to organize a friendly match to determine the final hegemony. As a result, after the Second League took Luoyang, the situation changed suddenly, and the friendly match became a friendly match, and as a result, the civil war began, and rumors spread for a while, and it was difficult to distinguish between truth and falsehood. On the post bar and station B, there are various story versions, what is the inside and outside the enemy, don't talk about martial arts, come to steal, come to cheat.

Things have developed to this point, and District 22 is considered a pot of porridge. But the battle situation of the entire server has been revitalized because of this, and the situation has changed from a monopoly to a group of heroes, and Meow Rikyu stepped down from management and withdrew from the main stage, which also made this story quite a sense of drama of "the emperor died, and the world was in chaos".

Outside of the game, this matter has also become a hot topic in the community. There are quarrels on the line, there are internal revelations, and some people say that the people who come forward now are all history books (tampering with history), not the real situation.

The birth of these "melons" is mainly due to the design of the game in terms of alliance and historian ecology, not only the regional server where the anchor is located has various "alliances and backstabs", but also in the regional server composed of ordinary players, the grievances and hatreds between players and players have also generated a steady stream of materials for the game historians.

In addition, the special hegemony setting in "Three Schemes" (the top four alliances all have hegemony quotas) also makes several alliances of equal strength close to each other in a regional server fight until one minute before the settlement in order to fight for more hegemony places. And these seemingly evenly matched alliances need to be exhausted by some tricks to capture more cities and points. This also makes the story in the middle and late stages possible to reverse and reverse at any time.

If the server doesn't have a good story, or if the story doesn't keep you engaged, you're likely to lose money. And when the story of the server is written by the players themselves, the decisions of each alliance can change the situation in the region, and everyone is a part of the server process, the survival of the game will naturally be better. After all, there is no verification environment for players to simply grow vegetables and receive cards. Of course, there are places in the game for simple strategy competitions such as martial arts, but if the story is lost, the results of the competition will not be so exciting - you are indeed the champion, but no one cares.

02

A new story

The ecology created by "Three Schemes" certainly depends on the so-called liver reduction and burden reduction.

Reducing the liver and reducing krypton is just a means to improve the strategic space and lower the threshold for player participation. In fact, when "Three Schemes" really fights, it is actually very intense, and it is common for the two alliances to lose hundreds of millions of battles in a battle. Because the player's early development time and difficulty have dropped significantly, the focus of the game is on alliances or personal feuds.

The restriction on the paid value also provides the possibility of "lower grams" in the game - in the above-mentioned Meolixiu Civil War, the krypton level of the two alliances is lower than that of the first alliance, but by means of combining vertical and horizontal and mutiny, they successfully grabbed Luoyang.

If we think of SLG as a MOBA or a game of chicken on a monthly basis, we need to improve the quality of the player's play in each game (season).

Now that the game is coming to the end of the S1 season, from the design point of view of the SLG game, this is just for players to just finish warming up and playing the first hands-on tutorial. The S2 season is where the charm of gameplay really begins.

And after getting the report card of the first month, we can basically say that "Three Schemes" has passed the line called life and death, and the next thing is to see how long the game can remain in the top 10, Top20, and top 50 on the best-selling list.

The game is now at the end of the season, and user stickiness has decreased, and revenue and duration have also declined. But the problem of boredom at the end of this season is a stubborn disease in the SLG category, which is difficult to cure. The approach of "Three Schemes" is to drastically reduce the length of the season, reduce the boring time, and start the new season in more than 1 month. As a comparison, similar products are usually 2~3 months. The seasonal rhythm of the game also gives players time to fish, so that the game can also be positioned as a side game.

From product design to operational ideas, "Three Schemes" is taking a path that similar SLGs have not taken before. A student from the project team told me: "The team is also crossing the river by feeling the stones, and many decisions have no precedent that the industry can refer to, and you can't prove in advance that this is definitely right, but fortunately, everyone has persevered." ”

Of course, from another point of view, this is a big test of the team's productivity, after all, there must be enough gameplay content for each season: new generals, new scripts, new classes, etc.

In the month after the game was launched, the team also repeatedly told me "don't open champagne halfway", saying that the SLG category can only be defined as "done" if it goes through a life cycle measured in "years".

So we can see that the game has been updated and optimized for more than 1,000 pieces of content in the first month. The game has been called "the most persuasive project team" by players since the closed beta, and it can be regarded as standing.

Another problem for the game is how to further distinguish between players after greatly narrowing the threshold for development, and how to bring new experiences to players in subsequent seasons on this basis. After all, after players develop patience and consumption habits and establish a new psychological price anchor, reducing liver and krypton itself is no longer a bright spot.

How to do a good job in the subsequent season is a more difficult test for Sanmou, after all, there are many products that have a good start and fail in the subsequent season.

But in any case, after the results of the first month came out, the impact of "Three Schemes" on the domestic SLG pattern has been officially established - from two-level opposition to three-point world. Of course, old products have their own moats, but it can be said that it is even more difficult for similar new products to join the battle and get a piece of the pie, unless there is a very large, structural design breakthrough.

For Station B, the success of "Three Schemes" is bound to boost the morale of the team in the game business line, and more importantly, after the inherent thinking is successfully broken, the future of Station B games has begun to have room for imagination: this platform, which is good at the content of secondary games, has become a SLG that is "liver and krypton" in the traditional sense.

From the earliest 15-person start-up team and a PPT to the top 10 best-selling hits, the "Three Schemes" publishing team has also run a complete round of the process of "how to use and give full play to the advantages of station B in non-second-game games" in the past two years, and has established a new category of game publishing pipelines.

In addition, after station B now has a new cash cow, it also gets a new margin for error. That's the beauty of SLG projects – success is hard, but success pays off. After the success of the three wars, everyone should see the change in the market position of Lingxi.

In addition, it is worth noting that "Three Schemes" is also the first product that Chen Rui, CEO of Bilibili, personally returned to the game business of Bilibili and took charge of game publishing, which can be regarded as the implementation of the business concept of "focusing on making the top boutique of the category" proposed by him at the financial report meeting in 2023.

The future of station B games may have to tell a new story.

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