Today's mobile game market is no longer the same as in the early years, high-quality secondary games, casual games are flooding the market, users want to play games and relax have more choices, the requirements for content quality have also been greatly improved, and more importantly, the mobile game track is also about to enter the stock market.

Reading Entertainment | yiqiduyu

Text | Garlic jelly corner

At the end of July, NetEase's "Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile Game" arrived in the official public beta as scheduled.

Compared with the launch of "Naraka: Bladepoint" on the PC three years ago, the IP mobile game obviously has attracted more attention from NetEase, not only with the purchase volume of the super Q1 MMO masterpiece "Condor Shooting", but also three days after the start of the service, it found the head KOLs of various games to hold friendly matches to promote and build momentum. The harvest is also quite full, since the open beta, "Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile Game" has dominated the App Store free list for seven consecutive days, and even Morgan Stanley gave an estimated turnover of 1 billion yuan in the first month.

Naraka: Bladepoint is a mobile game. In the early years, the rivalry between the two factories of pigs and geese in the field of chicken mobile games was talked about, and the good performance of "Peace Elite" over the years also made people have to face up to the long-term popularity of the "chicken" gameplay in the domestic market, so when "Naraka: Infinite" gained market recognition on the PC side, it can be said that it was natural to move it to mobile phones.

However, today's mobile game market is no longer the same as in the early years, high-quality secondary games, casual games are flooding the market, users want to play games and relax, there are more choices, the requirements for content quality have also been greatly improved, and more importantly, the mobile game track is also about to enter the stock market.

According to the data of the "China Game Industry Report from January to June 2024", the number of users in the game market in the first half of this year was 674 million, a year-on-year increase of 0.88%, and the mobile game market, which has the highest proportion of revenue, had a sales revenue of 107.517 billion yuan from January to June, a year-on-year increase of only 0.76%.

On the one hand, the stable distribution of edition numbers keeps new games continuous, and on the other hand, the continuous rise in development costs and the close saturation of new market increments make the competition in various tracks more and more fierce.

1

How many more can you fit in a competitive confrontation?

The long-term dominance of "Honor of Kings" and "Peace Elite" on the revenue side of mobile games has not been expected by a few people, although there are products like "Genshin Impact" that have been in the limelight for a while, but when it comes to the reality of daily revenue, Tencent's dominance is unrivaled, which is undoubtedly an important reason why "Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile Game" will land.

Pig and goose wars can be said to have always been the most interesting competition in the game market, from "Wilderness Action" and "Peace Elite" to "Egg Boy Party" and "Yuan Dream Star", just the head product can say a few rounds, and in addition to the head product, similar to NetEase's "Onmyoji" IP extension of the MOBA mobile game "Battle of Heianjing" can also be seen as NetEase's defense of "Glory of Kings" in the current environment.

"You have me" can be said to be the basic way of confrontation between the two manufacturers, for example, after determining the mobile game of "Naraka: Bladepoint", Tencent added the "Battle Royale" mode to this year's new game "Honor of Kings: Dawn of the Stars", which is not so much a rich gameplay as a response to "Naraka Mobile".

Judging from the current results, the "Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile Game", which has just been launched, has indeed performed well in terms of popularity, with the number of pre-registrations exceeding 40 million before the launch, and 27 million gold in 3 days after the launch, so that "Dawn of the Stars", which was originally scheduled to be launched on the same day as "Naraka Mobile Game", decided to postpone the public beta to October, that is, Tencent temporarily retreated in this round of launch.

However, Naraka Mobile's current performance is not indicative of the game's long-term future. On the one hand, the current performance of "Naraka Mobile" has the contribution of a large number of veteran players, and the dual-terminal interconnection benefits have allowed many PC players to recharge krypton gold in mobile games, which cannot reflect how attractive the game is to new users, and on the other hand, how much enthusiasm the market still has for competitive games.

Counting it down, whether it is "Glory of Kings" or "Peace Elite" are old games, they still dominate the market is due to social habits or loyalty to love is not certain, in the first half of this year, the effective revenue of mobile games almost did not increase year-on-year, which also explains the problem to a certain extent, after all, aesthetics will always be tired, and it is the norm to like the new and hate the old.

Therefore, although "Naraka Mobile" with action elements may indeed stimulate the market in the short term, considering the changes in the market environment, perhaps these new action competitive games, including Tencent's "Dawn of the Stars", can only carve up the existing market, and it is difficult to raise the ceiling of the competitive market.

In other words, in the competitive confrontation track, the best situation is just the replacement of the old and the new, and various manufacturers begin to use content and operation to "eliminate the loser".

One more thing, "Naraka Mobile Game" actually has some unique advantages, the action game wrapped in the martial arts world view, naturally has the charm of provoking the market DNA, in our opinion, it is likely to be able to beat other "chicken" mobile games, but zooming in on the entire competitive competition track, "Honor of Kings" may still be able to go a long time.

2

Tough open world

At the same time as the high-profile public beta of "Naraka Mobile Game", "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun", which was also part of NetEase's original public beta on July 26, was postponed, which may have been affected by the feedback from the player market.

To put it simply, "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" has more important significance than "Shooting the Condor" brought by NetEase at the beginning of the year. First of all, it is no longer an MMORPG that NetEase is good at, but more single-player content, which means that "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" shoulders the responsibility of opening up new markets for NetEase, and secondly, the open world is a type that the current user market still has great expectations, and the performance of "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" will directly affect the user market's perception of NetEase's game development capabilities.

After "Genshin Impact" lit up the open world "fog" for the game market, this element has become a "masterpiece" that can no longer be ignored by various manufacturers, NetEase's "Yanyun Sixteen Voices" and "Codename: Infinity", and Tencent's IP redevelopment of "Honor of Kings: World" are all games that reopen the world elements, but the interesting thing is that the pie was drawn early, and until now these two giants have not been able to really serve the content.

On the one hand, the development cost and technical requirements of games with open world elements are higher, and it does require a longer cycle, and on the other hand, having a big world in the air does not allow players to really pay, in other words, fun is the core competitiveness of the game.

For example, Kulo's "Singing Tide", which has been launched this year, although the player base has a lot of rhythm, and it has certain similarities with "Genshin Impact", but it still retains its audience with differentiated action gameplay, and so far "Singing Tide" can still maintain the top 50 in each list.

Judging from the market feedback, "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun", in addition to no one complaining in terms of scenes, old-fashioned character modeling, stiff action performance, and conventional combat gameplay have not made players shine.

On the other hand, the perfect world "Alien Ring", which suddenly became popular in the game circle in July, added functions such as driving and buying a house in addition to fighting in the open world, and the seamless map in the 10-minute actual machine demonstration directly captured users, even if players were worried about optimization but kept looking forward to it, and the market feedback of "Yanyun Sixteen Voices" was full.

The open world is really too difficult to bite, especially the giants have more requirements for such a big game reserve, such as it is better to capture more user groups. For example, considering the quality of the gameplay, the core target audience of "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" should be single-player players, but the official announcement will be launched on the mobile terminal, which means that the development of the game in many aspects will be affected by the mobile terminal, or the scene will shrink or the gameplay will be simplified.

Whether it is NetEase or Tencent, if these giant manufacturers can't figure out how much potential energy a game has and what they want, then the open world track is likely to be overtaken by other manufacturers and miss a good opportunity to win the market with content again.

3

There are more and more multi-terminal games

Will the spring of PC come?

Judging from the data, the stagnation of the growth of the mobile game market contrasts with the slow rise of the terminal game market, which is likely to be affected by the trend of game premiumization.

In the past, the rapid expansion of the mobile game market was to expand the scale of game time through the mobile terminal, so that many people who did not play games became players because of convenience, and when more and more high-quality games took the form of multi-terminal, those users from mobile phones began to gradually shift to the PC side, for no other reason, the same game experience on PC is better than that of mobile phones.

Games are a strong experience product, when there is a better experience, it is difficult for people to go back to the small screen to rub glass, and for game development, compared with mobile phones, the performance of the PC can also make game development more feasible in terms of improving the player experience, in other words, a good game is most suitable for the presentation of the channel must be the computer.

Nowadays, more and more games are being launched in parallel on multiple terminals, which is nothing more than to accommodate as many users as possible, and we would like to say that in the context of the stable or even saturated growth of the mobile market, it is almost inevitable to re-emphasize the player experience of mobile games. Perhaps in the near future, there will be good games that dare to put down the mobile market and pay attention to the PC channel, showing the industry the spending power of computer players.

It is true that the game does not need to be deliberately divided into channels, but the user portraits of mobile games and terminal games are not quite the same, one is to hope to have game entertainment in fragmented time and convenient channels, and the other is to experience the game immersively, and it is difficult to bring together two completely different needs into one game, don't think about "Genshin Impact", its current problems and players' dissatisfaction are actually the foreshadowing of multiple ends.

Therefore, in our view, multi-terminal games are the product of the development of the industry and the transition period of market adaptation, and the future high-quality games will find their most suitable users and bring them the most needed game services.

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