Chen Yuetian, the founder of Huofeng Capital, who is known in the industry as "the two-dimensional catcher" and "the angel investor who best understands young people", recently reviewed the upcoming Telegram Mini App game Catizen on WeChat , and also talked about the future of the game. After a number of WeChat game developers migrated to Telegram, where is the future for cryptocurrency game manufacturers?
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ToggleCatizen’s success: transforming distribution platform to achieve traffic monetization
Chen Yuetian first mentioned: "As an investor in the game industry, one of the questions I am most frequently asked is: 'The success of a game company often depends on a certain popular game, but the birth and production of ideas in this creative industry often There is huge uncertainty, does it mean that there is no value in investing in game companies and teams?”
He said that this is actually about the sustainability and replicability of game industry products and business models.
He said that with the industrialization of the game industry, sequels to popular games are an effective way to extend the life of the company, and the success rate of sequels is also increasing. The second step is to shape the game IP and continue to let the IP shine through other media forms, and novels become comics, animations, movies and television. TV has become games, board games, and novels. In the entire content industry category, media forms can be migrated.
The last step is to use the users and traffic brought by popular games to establish a game distribution platform, and this is actually what Catizen will do next.
Then he first disclosed that he had invested in Catizen, and said that the launch of Catizen Mini Game Center represented that Catizen had changed from a TG mini-game to TG's assets and application distribution platform. While competing products are still hesitant to invest in Telegram Mini App, Catizen has grown into a distribution platform.
He said that the entire TG mini-game industry is currently in the stage of starting from scratch, from zero to one, and this is the time when there will be the greatest traffic dividend. Only after this stage is completed will optimization need to be considered. He also said that from the perspective of a game investor, he believes that there are only two ways to make popular games on Telegram. One is to cooperate with projects that already have a large number of users to gain user numbers (for example: Catizen), and the other is to improve the quality. . However, improving quality requires funds. According to the current market conditions, it is actually difficult to improve quality efficiently.
Web2 Competition Impacts Web3: Now as Web2 Was in 2004
Chen Yuetian also actually reviewed several games in Catizen Mini Game Center, such as synthetic tower defense, numerical card games, shooting games, placement treasure chest games, etc. He also pointed out that in the era of mobile games, there have been popular games with high DAU (daily active users) and high income in these fields. They are also games that have no threshold to play and are the games that can best divert traffic.
In addition, he said that judging from past experience, players' needs will continue to diverge, and a variety of more casual gameplay needs to be provided for players to achieve effective retention. The choice of game types is enough to prove that the team is very aware of the possibilities of small games and has tried its best to produce products that can occupy the market.
He said that the current experience of these seven mini-games is that each game can basically be played for 10 to 20 minutes. Judging from the accumulated experience of China's Web 2 game industry, clearer data will begin to be available only after the user's operational feedback is established.
In addition, the Game Center initial page displays the number of players, and airdrop labels are also given for games with airdrop rewards. Currently, the game is displayed in English, but explanations and localized pages may be needed for players in each region. Since these games come from the Catizen portal, by default these users have TON wallets, so payment should not be a problem.
He then pointed out that in Web 2 games starting from King of Salted Fish, placing and reducing operations have become the main demands of small game players. Simple thinking, playing without getting tired, and making it easier for players to enter the flow experience of the game are the main directions of game design. Therefore, whether it is King of Salted Fish, Crazy Knights, Xun Dao Da Qian, or Monopoly Go, the design direction of these products is to allow players to obtain random rewards and gain the happiness and joy of level improvement after simple operations. A sense of accomplishment.
And said that as a person who is going through the third industry cycle, he feels that the competition of Web 2 is affecting Web 3, and the maturity of products and business models is becoming more and more important. If the cycle of 21 years is equivalent to that of 2000, The Internet is now equivalent to 2004. In theory, companies with gaming and SMS payment as business models should have been born.
Reflecting on gameplay, can we still produce good games if we only care about traffic monetization?
The author adds: First of all, we can note Chen Yuetian’s statement of interests as an investor in Catizen, and therefore we may have to adopt a more conservative attitude towards the content. Many game teams on WeChat have migrated to Telegram in the face of fierce competition from Web 2, and Catizen is one of them. In addition to understanding Chen Yuetian’s views on game trends from his original article, we can also see that what he really admires about Catizen is not only the quality of the games, but also the first-mover advantage and the means of monetizing traffic through the launch of the distribution platform. For new games, choosing Catizen as a publishing platform can benefit from traffic, but as more games use this platform, competition is still inevitable.
In the general direction, we can see that simple game modes have become mainstream, but simple game modes do not mean that the game team can act cheaply. In " Reviewing the Black Wukong Producer's Old Article "Who Murdered Our Game?", are blockchain games making the same mistake again? 》, we saw a warning from the producer of Black Wukong.
In China's online game industry, planning responsibilities have gradually deviated from the original intention of "creating interesting games" and instead focused on how to make players addicted and how to guide consumption.
This is also a reflection on blockchain games, especially in the snobbish crypto. Many people put how to make profits more important than the gameplay of the game itself. Users want to make money, and the team also wants to make money, but they cannot make sustainable games. This is the current situation we are facing.
