In recent years, SLG has become the main product among the products issued by Chinese game manufacturers overseas.
Half of the top 10 Chinese mobile games overseas income list is SLG, which is an exaggerated proportion!
Let's take a look at how SLG mobile games are becoming more and more popular all over the world.
The first to seize the opportunity of mobile game SLG is mainly the team that has made achievements in the era of web games.
For example, in 2011, Kabam in the United States launched "Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North" and other mobile games adapted from web games, which have achieved some success.
Compared with the previous web games, the overall system of these games does not have much innovation compared with the traditional mode of web games. It mainly adapts the screen and operation to the characteristics of the mobile end, and also meets the needs of early mobile game players.
The most pioneering product that has really brought about a major change in SLG online games is the "Game of War" or GOW launched by another American company, Machine Zone, in 2013.
The design of GOW is quite different from the traditional web games, which brings new vitality to the traditional SLG online games. Once launched, it has achieved great success and become one of the best-selling mobile games in the world in 2014 and 2015.
In the five years to August 2018, the game's total revenue reached $2.8 billion, with a peak of more than $100 million a month.
As a result, Machine Zone and Supercell and King are called the top three mobile games companies in the world, and have been dominant for many years in a row!
Starting from around 2014, Chinese manufacturers have seen opportunities in the SLG mobile game market and began to launch SLG mobile games similar to GOW, which we call GOW-like.
Among them, the earliest and most well-known "Clash of Kings", referred to as COK, even GOW because of its great success in the global market, and even people called the products that followed GOW as COK-like, rather than GOW-like, and similar products emerged one after another, such as IGG's "Lords Mobile", Funplus's "King of Avalon" and so on, which have achieved great success in the global market.
So what are the key breakthroughs made by GOW and subsequent GOW-like products that make SLG online games tens or even hundreds of times better on the mobile side than in the era of web games?
I summed up two main points: greatly strengthening and deepening the social system, and the positive feedback loop model of the "buy ad quantity" model.
Let's start with the social system.
In fact, the main system of GOW is basically similar to SLG online games, and the main change comes from its great enhancement to the alliance system.
As we mentioned before, the prototype of the SLG online game framework is a simplified stand-alone SLG 4X framework + MMORPG social system, which greatly simplifies the local strategy of individual players, focusing on the social and struggle between people, tribes, alliances and alliances. GOW firmly grasps the core point of "human-to-human confrontation and social interaction" in online games.
Making full use of the characteristics that mobile games can be accessed anytime and anywhere, we have dug deeper and more thoroughly on the road of "social interaction".
The reason why I mentioned MMO, repeatedly here is that MMO is really a big treasure house of online game design.
Most of the design concepts we are talking about here, especially complex social relationship systems, have been fully tested by Chinese game designers in MMO PC games a long time ago.
I heard that Machine Zone's founder is a senior MMO player who plays crazily in Zhengtu all day long, and there are many aspects of his GOW design that draw lessons from Zhengtu.
It can be said that 4X play after social enhancement, resulting in a new positioning and experience:
Exploration: from the way of exploring maps and fog on a stand-alone machine to "information fog", players need to learn about the battlefield, the situation and the whole game through a lot of social interaction and communication.
Expansion: compared with the web game SLG, the expansion in GOW pays more attention to the game between alliances, which requires more people to compete and cooperate together, which leads to more complex conflicts and cooperative strategies.
Development: enhanced social design in GOW allows other players to participate in their own construction, management and development. Through social behavior, players can not only meet their social needs, but also get practical benefits in many games, driving players to form the habit of social games.
In addition, enhanced alliance development also allows players to focus on the growth of the entire alliance and community from just focusing on the development of their own strength.
Conquest: GOW also introduces more social elements in the war, the war has changed from the confrontation of several strong ones to the confrontation of several powerful alliances and even nations, the scale of the war has become larger, the number of people involved in the war has become wider, and those who are strong have gained a greater sense of achievement than before.
On the road to social reinforcement, GOW has made it even more extreme by launching a global server and a built-in automatic chat translation system.
The automatic translation system designed by it is quite intelligent, supports many acronyms commonly used in games, and makes it easy for players from different countries and languages to communicate, which has become standard for almost all GOW-like games since then.
This design, on the one hand, introduces religious, cultural, ethnic and national conflicts in the real world into the game world, and greatly strengthens the sense of conflict in the game world, even because these real conflict topics attract non-game players to join the war, and the victory or defeat of the war in the game has a deeper impact on the player's mood and experience.
On the other hand, the addition of the sense of reality further stimulates the social needs of players in the game, interacts with more social games provided by GOW, and forms a positive flywheel.
Therefore, GOW greatly strengthens and deepens the social system, which makes players play more social games, greatly improves the long-term retention of SLG online game players, and lays a solid foundation for the life cycle and sustainable profitability of SLG games.
Another ingenious success of GOW is that it has also created a highly efficient model for operating games: buying a lot of advertising.
All potential players are brainwashed and over-bombed by a huge amount of advertising marketing and promotion costs that far exceed the traditional standards of the industry.
If you look at the input-output ratio in the short term, no one can understand it and think that it is purely losing money to buy users.
Of course, this trick has long become a formula-level standard operation in today's mobile games circle, but it was the only company that dared to do so at that time, especially in the relatively peaceful European and American markets.
Why would Machine Zone do that?
Mainly because, although GOW has successfully created a market for SLG mobile games, it still has some inherent difficulties:
1. The natural number of new players in this game is relatively small.
Because the strategy of playing is complicated, the threshold is relatively high, and the feedback of sensory experience in art is weak, it lacks the first attraction to the European and American users who are used to playing AAA games on game consoles.
2. The player turnover rate is still high. The pace of the game is slow, it takes a long time, and the novice is easy to lose.
3. The wastage rate of non-paying and low-paying players is high.
The antagonism is too strong, the frustration after the defeat is huge, and it is easy to persuade the player to quit.
This kind of predicament causes the user group of SLG online games to be limited to a small range, which is not easy to make a popular style.
And the mass buying advertising model created by GOW played ahead of time. After precise calculation, it was found that even if 90% of the users bought were lost, the remaining loyal users retained very well, and their long-term contributions were still considerable, so they ventured to put in the advertising budget according to the payback cycle of 6 to 12 months. In addition, the mobile game market was still in the early stage of competition at that time, and the cost of buying volume was relatively low.
Such a crazy launch makes it a major customer of the platform and advertising sellers, can get a variety of additional benefits such as accurate delivery, but also can borrow the way of overload to indirectly shield competitors.
In this way, GOW did not solve the dilemma of SLG online games from the game design, but found a feasible solution from the operation mode, successfully continued to introduce new players for SLG online games, maintained the ecology of the game, and ensured the life cycle and profitability of the game.
Of course, it is easy to solve the problem with money. If all games spend so much money on advertising, won't there be no room for GOW soon?
This is about the magic of the SLG online game player ecosystem built by GOW, GOW's game model, which can accurately screen out whale-paying players with strong payment power from all players.
Then through in-game play, we can maximize the value of high-paying players, resulting in the average ARPU value of GOW paying users is more than 7 times higher than other categories of games.
This is the economic basis of the GOW buying ad model, if other games want to copy this model casually, not to mention making money, the family will lose more money.
Therefore, the buying mode of GOW is also known as the "meat grinder".
In terms of the business model, this is a simple business, but it only applies to specific game categories and specific products, and this way of overdrawing the market also has the problem of vicious competition and the final overall life cycle.