Text/Lin Zhi & Thomas's Skull

Recently, there is a game that is hard not to notice - "Heartbeat Town". If you count the predecessor in a different direction, the game took eight years to make, the project was almost axed, and the team was reduced from more than 150 people to more than 80 people at one point.

But since it was launched on July 17, the number of downloads of "Heartbeat Town" has exceeded 10 million in ten days. As of press time (September 19), it has nearly 30 million downloads on TapTap alone, and its rating remains at 8.8.

"Heartbeat Town" was quite low-key when it was first launched, and the investment in Heartbeat was not large, and it was difficult to see how high the expectations were. On various social platforms, game-related secondary creations are indeed emerging, but it is difficult to say how much of the skyrocketing addition of this project comes from strength and luck.

Earlier, many people may have seen a video of a user pretending to be an NPC to "steal a car".

At the same time, although Huang Yimeng, CEO of XD at the time, once said that "Heartbeat Town" was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for XD. However, at that time, the content of this game was obviously insufficient, and many designs had room for optimization, and the commercialization was not complete. Many people thought it would slowly fall silent.

Today, however, with the new version of clothing and furniture, it made it to the top 10 of the game's best-selling list for the first time, and quickly reached sixth place.

Taking this opportunity, Grape Jun also wants to talk about how this game has no innovation at first glance, and is even a bit "outdated", how can so many people play it? Why is it a rare miracle in the industry?

01

Simulation of life, not of business

When you open "Heartbeat Town", the first thing you notice is its soft colors and warm and healing painting style. Each time they enter the game, users will randomly appear in a small town, with a maximum of 12 users per town.

There are also many NPCs with distinct personalities in the game, and they all have their own habits. For example, Duoduo likes to go out in special weather, such as when it rains or rainbows, it is easier to meet her.

Under the guidance of NPCs, users will gradually become familiar with the layout of the town: clothing stores, furniture stores, and will also start to build their own small home.

Outside of building, users are encouraged to develop hobbies such as fishing, cooking, and insect catching, which will gradually escalate as the user becomes proficient.

Xu Mudian said that "Heartbeat Town" is very restrained in design, and although there are less than 10 functions in the game, it takes a lot of time to design each function. While individual features may not be highly rated, they offer a unique experience that is different from mainstream games – giving users a unique sense of warmth and low stress, which is what they hope to achieve.

In the summer trend season, "Heartbeat Town" also added a limited sand sculpture hobby.

The game's beginner missions are not rushing, and the route guide allows the user to find NPCs quickly, and many times several NPCs are moving in adjacent places. Users sometimes bump into kittens along the way, and they can also interact with other users.

Once you've completed the Starter Missions, the core experience of the game won't change much: develop hobbies, buy more beautiful clothes, build a more beautiful house, and live in a small town with your best friends.

Two months after its launch, the update of "Heartbeat Town" still attracts many players.

The summer beach season has 60 million views on Xiaohongshu, and players have spontaneously shared many UGC built on their homes.

The Golden Acorn Chamber of Commerce's Secret Forest set, which launched today, offers a lot of forest-based clothing and furniture. This wave of updates should also be the reason why the game is on the top 6 best-selling list.

Swipe left and right to view

"Heartbeat Town" defines itself as a slow-paced life simulation game, and in the process of playing, users will also realize that this game is not much different from the general simulation business.

The most striking point is that the game does not have a strong sense of purpose.

Many management sims have clear short- and long-term goals, such as reaching a certain level of income, or completing specific missions, unlocking new areas, and so on.

But "Heartbeat Town" has done a lot of subtraction in the sense of purpose. The duration of the Daily Missions that users need to complete each time they go online is only about 15 minutes, and the game will not add more objectives or assign more tasks.

So why should users play the game after this? This involves different user groups and their different needs for a sense of purpose.

Traditionally, missions, achievements, battles, and confrontations are at the core of the player's pursuit; However, users, represented by women and young people, may care more about social interaction and self-creation in games. For example, you can dress up yourself, design your home, and whether you can do interesting things with your friends in games. Products such as "In the Name of Shining" have also taken a similar path.

In other words, traditional users need consistently valid goals to keep playing. But users of Heartbeat Town don't get bored easily because they set their own goals.

As a result, even if there are not too many tasks, the main users of this game can play - take the initiative to develop various hobbies, or go fishing with friends every day to watch the sunset together.

Secondly, the content of "Heartbeat Town" is not so single-camera.

Compared with allowing more lone wolf users to do tasks and consume game resources, and then achieve achievements; In fact, the game encourages users to make friends and spend a happy online time here.

For example, interacting with friends will increase the level of interaction, which in turn unlocks more intimate actions: touching the head, holding hands, hooking fingers, hugging, etc. For many players, the first time they go round and round with their gaming partner, it can be a very precious experience.

There's a hidden key here: while standalone content seems to help with retention, it can actually interrupt social networking - when a user goes online and sees that their friends are going to interact, but they don't want to be interrupted because the task is too long, it will cause significant damage to the game's social ecology. In addition, the stand-alone mission will also make the sense of "push" too strong, which is also inconsistent with the tone of "Heartbeat Town".

02

Socialize at your core

That's right, according to this logic, the lack of content when "Heartbeat Town" was first launched may have allowed the game to screen a group of core users earlier. And the high popularity of the community has allowed this group of users to skip the part of insufficient content and start socializing directly.

And once you get to this point, you will find a bigger difference in the game.

Specifically, the social interaction of "Heartbeat Town" has two great characteristics: altruism and protection.

First of all, in the course of the game, players will encounter countless scenarios that require the help of others: a friend can repair a broken fishing tool, and a friend can give food when he has no physical strength to cut down a tree...... These are the ones that allow users to take the initiative to give positive feedback to others, making it easier for them to be treated genuinely in the game.

But in Heartbeat Town, users rarely or even get additional in-game rewards for helping others.

is a bit similar to "Light · Encounter", "Heartbeat Town" emphasizes altruism. In this game, taking the initiative to repair items for others is similar to the experience of holding a friend's hand and leading the other party to fly to each "golden man" in "Light · Encounter".

If a user makes a loaf of bread in the game, sells it to earn 200 gold coins, and chooses to give it to other users so that they can eat the bread to increase their stamina, and the user himself cannot actually get any direct benefits. But it also means that when being helped, the user also knows that the other party is just doing it out of kindness and not for anything in return, which will be more warm.

"There is no reward for helping others." It's a counterintuitive choice, but it also makes the experience more authentic and healing. From their emphasis on the "altruistic" attribute of social interaction, we can see that they are trying to build a utopian ideal town, just like their English name - Heartopia.

At the same time, they are very concerned about social protection. "Heartbeat Town" does not broadcast, and chatting with strangers also requires prop conditions to ensure a certain social distance. This should reduce the occurrence of harassment and give female and younger users a more reassuring experience, rather than being asked "do you want to be dealt with?" as soon as they go live. "How old are you?" ”

What a user who played 700 hours said on Taptap

This kind of design idea also makes the game have a lot of counter-sense places.

For example, the town's map isn't small and is full of paths, but the game doesn't offer features like "one-click home". Intuitively, this doesn't help the user experience much. But when you ride a vehicle or simply walk home, you'll find yourself more likely to meet and interact with other NPCs and players along the way.

03

Why is "Heartbeat Town" a miracle?

From the point of view of Grape Jun, the phased success of "Heartbeat Town" belongs to at least two miracles.

First, it is a miracle that withstands the pressure of the company. It's hard to imagine how much judgment the team has to make that defies common sense and how much pressure the team has to withstand behind the special positioning and design of "Heartbeat Town". Even just looking at the Weibo avatar of "Heartbeat Town", you can intuitively feel how many different positioning this game has.

"Heartbeat Town" was established in 2016 and has gone through four years of early exploration. Originally, the project was called Imagination World, a 3D sandbox game with construction at its core.

In 2020, Xu Mudian, the former producer of "My Knight" of Electric Soul, took over as the producer of "Heartbeat Town" and spent half a year sorting out the game framework. In 2021, they recruited many experienced industry leaders, including producers or main planners of successful projects, with a total of up to 150 project teams and middle offices. However, because everyone's work habits and values are not consistent, and the waterfall development model with high requirements for individual abilities is adopted, the team also spent a lot of time on demand communication.

In 2022, during the epidemic, the production capacity of many projects will be lost, and "Heartbeat Town" is no exception. At that time, the industry was once circulating the news that Xindong was going to cut this project, after all, the stock price of Xinding at that time was hardly optimistic, and there were many large projects in hand, and the cost was being strictly controlled. But in the end, the project was retained, but the team members were almost halved. Fortunately, the data of the next few tests were not bad, which led to the results at the beginning of the article.

Second, it is a miracle that challenges the traditional laws of R&D. Grape Jun has also communicated with some producers, and many of them believe that the biggest challenge of the life simulation category is its high degree of uncertainty.

Part of the uncertainty is that designs are hard to verify: social designs that seem to be validated may not work with a new set of art and a new group of users. When the team is planning a case, it is easy to say that the public is reasonable, and the mother-in-law is reasonable. How to reach a consensus and make things without repeating and making fewer mistakes is already a huge challenge;

Another part of the reason for the uncertainty is that social networking is difficult to verify through data: it is difficult to judge in the early stage of small-scale user research and testing, and it will only be clear after the public beta; And if the project has been online for a period of time and the community has not improved, the product will soon be in trouble.

This uncertainty is not in line with the business logic of most companies. Looking around, it's hard to prove the direction of your design thinking to decision-makers and teams; As far as the eye can see, there are almost no products to refer to. If it weren't for the boss's support, I'm afraid it would be difficult for similar projects to continue. Lilith's "Life Party", in which Wang Xinwen personally participated in the end, may be for similar reasons.

Therefore, from all angles, "Heartbeat Town" is a miracle that defies business intuition and even has a bit of warmth. A few years ago, everyone was complaining that XD had burned too much money to improve its self-research capabilities. But "Heartbeat Town" proves that such an environment really burns something unusual.

In 2022, Xu Mudian told Grape Jun that because of the existence of TapTap, as long as they can raise the scale of users, commercialization is no longer a problem. Having witnessed the reversal of "Sausage Party", XD will be more patient with projects that are "difficult at the beginning but have long-term value".

At that time, Grape Jun once asked Xu Mudian, what is the chance of "Heartbeat Town"? Xu Mudian said that in the past, when making products, everyone would do a lot of market analysis, count the coverage rate of similar products, and calculate their own opportunities to enter the game. But the core value of "Heartbeat Town" is different - in today's environment, it can convey more positive emotions: leisurely, loving, and healing.

He believes that this is an emotion that will be needed in the next 4~5 years. Perhaps, this is also the most needed emotion in the current anxious game industry.

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