The origin of tidal current can always be traced back to an original source point. It may be a minute or a second, and it is this momentary yes or no that determines the direction of the tide.
In 1992, while the ancient online game "Oriental Story" swept across the Asia-Pacific region, a young man named Rao Ruijun entered Daewoo Information and began his day-to-day career as a code farmer.
In the context of Taiwan Province at that time, Rao Ruijun, who was knocking on the code, was dreaming of a distant star. It took him three years to turn his star dream into a line-by-line code-yes, this is the star volunteer series that was later regarded as Bai Yueguang by countless simulation game lovers.
In the 1990s, although there were many domestic classics such as Xuanyuan Sword, Legend of the Sword and the Chivalrous Man and Monopoly in Daewoo Information, the well-made Star Volunteer 1 still occupied a place, and its sales volume and reputation were superior to those of the same type at the same time.
The year before the release of "Star Volunteer 1", a huge storm was taking place in the Japanese game industry.
At that time, the mainstream view of both the game industry and the player group believed that games were for men, regardless of women’s feelings. Keiko Okawa, then the wife of the president of Japan Glory Co., Ltd., had a bold idea-I want to make a game for women.
This is not an easy task. It took Kawa Keyco ten years to form a women soldiers team "Ruby Party" that can make games, and in 1994, it launched the world’s first love women love game "Angelique".
The gameplay of "Angelique" is not complicated. Players cultivate intimacy by playing dialogues and tasks between the heroine and nine handsome men with different personalities, thus promoting the game plot.
But this game is like a deep-water bomb, which has aroused strong response from female players. Even crossing the ocean over Haiti has influenced the production concept of Star Volunteer 2, pushing the star volunteer series to another peak.
This is also the difference between Star Volunteer 2 and the first generation. The protagonist becomes a female role, and the original business ingredients are abandoned to focus on love and cultivation.
As one of the best love women love games in the game history, Star Volunteer 2 has become the target of many manufacturers to follow suit. However, Daewoo failed to continue its love women love characteristics in the later Star Volunteer 2000, but changed back to the male protagonist and non-leisure play, resulting in a great decline in word of mouth and popularity.
Even if Daewoo made up for it later and returned to the road of female protagonist and love in the sequel, it just happened that the prosperity of female games in Taiwan Province was fading away, and it was difficult to recover its old glory.
On the contrary, after the Millennium, the mainland has just ushered in a breeze of Japanese B-girl culture.
seed
Love women love gameAlso known as B-girl game, as the name implies, it refers to a simulation game that is specially developed for women and takes love fantasy as the main line. It belongs to one of the love women games and began to flow into Chinese mainland from Japan after the Millennium.
At that time, various B-girl forums appeared constantly on the Internet, such as "Wing Dream Dance Domain", where players could download the Chinese version of Japanese stand-alone B-girl games. Many women were obsessed with it, but there were few love women love games developed by domestic manufacturers.
This is directly related to the scarcity of female players in China. According to the 29th Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development, by the end of December 2011, China’s Internet penetration rate was only nearly one third, and among the 531 million netizens, the proportion of women was 44.1%, 11.8 percentage points lower than that of men.
Coupled with the stand-alone micro-type, the domestic end-game with high configuration and high operation requirements is the mainstay, and major game manufacturers are not optimistic about the female game market. Even if we attach importance to female players, it is only to attract male players, such as the marriage system launched by Fantasy Westward Journey in 2003.
At this time, the domestic efforts to develop love women’s stand-alone love games are mostly small studios that generate electricity for love. These studios are short of funds, personnel and technology, and the quality of the games they produce is also unsightly. It was not until 2012 that Taiwan Province and the Mainland opened two golden flowers of love women’s love game: A Match Made in Heaven and The Queen’s Growth Plan.
Perhaps this is the unevenness of the world. Also as a stand-alone game of love women’s love produced by a small studio, Taiwan Province’s A Match Made in Heaven not only has exquisite characters, full voice lineup and rich plot lines, but also spent nearly two and a half years polishing it attentively, which is simply a representative of top students.
The game background of "A Match Made in Heaven" is set in ancient times. Sima Lisu, the heroine played by the player, fled down the mountain because of a big disaster at her cousin’s wedding, but she accidentally fell into the trap of a suspected black shop. Through the dialogue, she opened a chapter of love with five beautiful men with different personalities.
Looking back to the mainland, at this time, the end tour is king, but the page tour has killed a way out. According to the data of GPC&IDC, the number of web game users in China reached about 271 million in 2012. According to the scale of netizens at that time, nearly half of netizens were playing page games that year.
Of course, this has something to do with the characteristics of instant play and simple operation of the page tour itself, but it is more due to the continuous innovation of the major web game platforms at that time. Among them, Queen’s Growth Plan, a high-quality love women love game produced by 4399, attracted a large number of early female players.
Players play the role of father in the game, set their daughters’ birthdays, zodiac signs and names, arrange trips to cultivate their daughters’ attributes, and reach 64 different endings in career or love after six years. It is worth noting that if you want to achieve a love ending with a specific man, you need to select the correct option to interact with him while meeting the requirements of the attribute point, which is difficult.
After these two games, China’s love women love game seemed to press the fast forward button, which ushered in a period of rapid development.
"orange light" era
The turning point occurred in 2013. This year, love women AVG game platform "Orange Light" was officially launched, and then two epoch-making love women mobile games, Miracle Warming and Love and Producer, were developed, and they were just established in Suzhou.
At the same time, the wave of mobileization under the empowerment of 4G technology has accelerated the expansion of the scale of female players-large screen, high resolution and full touch technology improve the user’s experience of operating mobile terminals, while 4G technology provides faster data transmission services, greatly reducing the entry threshold for games.
According to the report of Game Working Committee and talkingdata, the number of female players increased from less than one million in 2013 to 260 million in 2016, and the compound growth rate was as high as 50% between 2013 and 2016. In contrast, the compound growth rate of male players during this period was only 4.7%.
Orange Light was lucky enough to catch this ride. In the second year after its establishment, it launched the App, which made concerted efforts on the PC side and the mobile side. The number of users and authors kept rising, accumulating over 3,000 contracted authors, and the number of works published by platform authors also exceeded 1.2 million.
It was from 2013 that the love women love game of Orange Light began to emerge. In August, The Marriage Robbery of Crossing was launched. Although there are many defects in this trial of the suspected orange light love women love game, it still attracted many female players at that time.
What really made Orange Everbright a success was the interactive game of love women’s love in the entertainment circle, "The Star Way Shines in the Counter-attack", which was launched the following year. In the game, the player plays the heroine Su Orange in the entertainment circle, while trying to make a career through intrigue, while talking about love with the three male protagonists he met.
As soon as it was launched, this game was very popular. Not only did it have a series of commentary videos of bilibili’s famous UP master Xiaoyao San, but it was also filmed into a TV series of the same name three years later. Tencent video alone exceeded 2 billion broadcasts.
After the counter-attack, love women’s love games on the orange light have mushroomed, among which there are many excellent works. But what really impressed Luming Literature was the wife growth strategy, which was launched in 2016. Compared with the counter-attack, The Wife Growth Raiders adds more business cultivation elements, more like a "game" than an interactive story of love.
The story takes place in ancient times. In the game, the player plays the 13-year-old prostitute, Wen Luo. In order to achieve the goal of marrying a wife, it is necessary to strive to improve the five attributes of female popularity, speech, appearance, morality and reputation.
If there is a man who wants a strategy, he should also interact with him and cultivate intimacy to meet the requirements of the incident. After successful marriage, the game will not end, and the player will continue to play the role of a wife to manage family affairs until he dies of old age.
The most touching thing about this game is that players can not only choose their own love story, but also unlock the friendship story and family story through gifts, encounters, etc. Every character in the game has its own story, which is very wonderful and vivid.
It is with these love women love "interactive games" that Orange Light has made great achievements. According to the data disclosed at the 2017 Annual Meeting of Orange Light, as of December 2016, the registered users of orange light were close to 30 million, and the number of new authors increased by 190,000 compared with the previous year. The annual dividend income of authors was close to 20 million, which was a geometric multiple increase compared with the previous year.
Although the glory of the king and Yin Yang Shi, which were launched in the same year, were not specially designed and developed for female players, the proportion of female players exceeded that of male players. This began to make more R&D companies in China aware of the huge female market, while Orange Light ushered in an unprecedented crisis.
Crazy influx
Rain is coming, and the wind is building.
Before 2017, in addition to Orange Light, there were actually a handful of game manufacturers who were keenly aware of the urgent need behind the love mobile game in love women, China. Although orange light is good, it is not a professional game developer after all, and it is difficult to meet the higher-level needs of players. It is time for them to take the shot.
Agency or self-research? This is a problem.
Bilibili chose the former. After introducing Japanese B mobile games for the first time in 2015, it announced in 2017 that it would introduce A3! Full-fledged troupe. The folding of paper took two and a half years to launch the self-developed B-girl mobile game "Love and Producer" at the end of 2017.
To everyone’s surprise, less than two weeks after its release, this mobile game, which was not optimistic at that time, squeezed the glory of the king into the second place in the App Store free game list and became a frequent visitor in the top 10 free games list in China. And in just one month, it exceeded 7 million downloads, and the accumulated running water exceeded 200 million yuan, which was quite eye-catching.
At this time, the major game manufacturers only realized later: Is the consumption power of female players in China so great?
It may be more intuitive to explain with data. According to Mob Research Institute’s own model, the market size of love games in love women, China increased from 4.85 billion yuan in 2016 to 7.82 billion yuan in 2017, with a growth rate of 61.2%.
From the actual sales revenue, the consumption potential of female players can not be underestimated. After 2017, female users in China’s game market account for nearly half of the total users, but their contribution to the market revenue is less than a quarter of the overall game market revenue.
But what really forces major game manufacturers to make up their minds is the market where other game categories are gradually saturated. Taking MMO game category as an example, according to the data of F. Jost Sullivan, if the MMO is divided by the running water of self-research, the top5 game companies have carved up 58.3% of the market share, among which Netease ranked first, accounting for 33% of the market, far ahead of other companies.
However, the love women Love Mobile Games, which has no restrictions on gameplay and simple operation, is different. Because it wins by content and has obvious segmentation trend, it is difficult to form a competitive pattern of "one product dominates".
In addition, according to Toubao Research Institute, the average development cost of a love women love game is about 60,000 yuan. At present, ARPUIt is between 20 and 50 yuan, and has the trend of continuous improvement, with the characteristics of low investment and high return.
This is undoubtedly a tempting big cake for all game manufacturers. As a result, the entire China women’s game market was detonated, followed by wave upon wave of gold diggers.
Among them, Youzu.com and Netease took the lead, and launched love women’s love mobile games "Please the Broker" and "Meet the Cold Water" in 2018 and 2019, respectively, but neither of them caused much splash.
By 2020, according to the Game Teahouse, among the 23 love women games that will be launched soon or ready to be launched, 19 are love women love games, which shows that the popularity of love women love mobile game market is strong, but the works produced by both large manufacturers and small and medium-sized manufacturers have failed to surpass the previous work "Love and Producer".
According to seven wheat data, "Love and Producer" has always maintained a stable leading position in the best-selling list of App Store, while the other three love women love mobile games produced by big manufacturers fluctuated greatly and even declined.
Then, why is it difficult for China’s mobile game market to see such explosions as "Love and Producer"?
The explosion of dystocia
The reason is nothing more than two levels: developers and players.
For R&D companies, it is easy to get started with love women’s love mobile games, but it is difficult to produce high-quality products. Asi, who worked as a copywriter for nearly a year in a love game launched by a waist manufacturer last year, even said that the budget is limited, the innovation is limited, and the experience of R&D personnel is limited. How can we do a good job in love women’s love mobile game?
Yes,Nowadays, China’s love women love mobile game market seems to be full of flowers, but it has never been really valued by game manufacturers. Large manufacturers have no special projects to expand resources, while small and medium-sized manufacturers are unable to do so.
In addition, considering the problem of realization, it is difficult for R&D personnel to resist the pressure of users’ cognitive costs and break through the original model to make drastic innovations in the game.
In addition, love women’s love mobile game is mainly a light game, and the homogenization of gameplay is obvious, which will gradually evolve intoA three-piece assembly line with exquisite and handsome image, strong business ability, excellent voice and sweet pet plot.
As Mr. Qi Baishi said: "Those who learn from me live like I die." Therefore, it is difficult for the newly released love women love mobile game to surpass the previous one, and even it is very difficult to survive. As a result, the game project team where Asi belongs was dissolved due to the difficulty in realizing it. But not only their games, but also the same type of mobile games launched in the same period last year suffered a landslide.
The biggest problem is the lack of talents within the industry. The game industry is an industry with a serious imbalance between men and women. In 2018, the proportion of female employees in the game industry in China was only 27.3%, far lower than the female employment ratio of the whole society of 43.7% in the same period.
However, the thinking of women and men is completely different, especially in making love women’s love mobile games. According to the interview report of Game Grape to a game production team, male and female painters have very different definitions of cute pet image. For example, male painters may only know cats and dogs with big eyes when they are cute pets, while female painters will add some other dynamic dimensions.
More importantly, even women may not be able to make love games that are popular with women. Take AS’s project team as an example. Except for the two main strategies, all the other members are women, and they have failed to grasp the psychology of female players. This is because they have never played love women love games before, and they are all games that male players like.
It can be said that from talents to game makers, there are many problems, but players complain a lot. Aze, who has eleven years’ experience in love women games, said that the love women love games on the market are too similar, and the style of painting, the design of people and the plot are not very good, and the plot is the most important.
But the plot is the core competitiveness to attract female players. Different from male players, female players are more likely to be attracted by the plot in the game and even become dependent.
For example, Hades is considered to be a purely masculine action game in general, but based on the family problems among Greek gods, it designed dialogues with different NPCs and other complicated plot forms, which was unexpectedly loved and supported by many female players.
In addition to the plot, the sense of substitution is also the primary pursuit of female players. As a group with high vision and strong emotional needs, contemporary women have long been under pressure from family and society in love and marriage, but they usually can’t realize their imaginary life in the real world, so games have become the best outlet.
However, most love women love games on the market now set the protagonist’s personality and story in advance, which makes the players feel limited. So, how to break through the old model and let players get more freshness? New technology empowerment may be an answer.
Where is the way out?
In this regard, as the birthplace of love women’s love game, Japan has something to say.
Different from the mainstream game industry in China, which is a mobile game, Japanese console game culture is more popular, and VR and AR technologies have also been applied to love games in love women. For example, at the Tokyo Game Show in 2016, the developer Voltage unveiled a small game system of "sitting in a chair with VR glasses and being knocked by a handsome character’ chair’".
Although some well-known male-oriented game works at that time also contained similar functions, because this is the first love women love game with VR technology, it still caused a great topic and brought it into a brand-new and real "virtual boyfriend" evolution era.
In addition to "chair thump", the popular love women love game "The Imprisoned Palm" launched in the same year has also used VR technology since 17 years. Players can use the touch screen of the mobile phone to simulate the glass when visiting the prison in the "VR Meeting" held in Capcom’s entertainment facilities, thus realizing "meeting the imprisoned characters".
Here VR technology shows a sense of existence, there AR.Technology has also begun to flow into love women’s game market, such as virtual digital character AR perfromers, who has been playing with fans at concert venues for 16 years, can respond according to their enthusiasm, and can chat with fans coming here.
If the above application of VR and AR technology is only a short experience or supplement. So if VR technology is really applied to love women’s love game, we have to mention the new work VR Boyfriend that Japanese game developer ILLUSION will launch this year against VR Girlfriend.
In this game, players can customize the appearance, hairstyle, muscles, clothes and even voice of their boyfriends, and then have an "adult coffee shop romance" with their own boyfriends from an intuitive first perspective. Although the image of the male protagonist in the released promotional film has been vomited by many players, it is considered that his painting style is too grave and rigid, but this does not prevent them from expecting this game.
Looking back to China, although it sounds very exciting to virtualize love women’s love game, due to the domestic game environment, game manufacturers have more abacus on 3D technology.
For example, the next-generation 3D love mobile game "Love and Deep Space" will be launched soon. From the preview, this game combines action and adventure elements in addition to love elements. In order to improve the sense of substitution, officials also said in Weibo that they are developing the function of squeezing the face of the hostess.
But folding paper is not the first person to eat crabs. As early as November 2019, Netease launched the 3D mobile game "Flowers and Sword". Although "Flowers and Sword" is not a love women love game in a strict sense, female players can pinch their faces for their characters, or upload photos to automatically generate characters, enhance their goodwill through interaction, and constantly unlock the plot.
It is worth mentioning that, although Flowers and Sword has many defects: for example, the 3D modeling of male characters crashed, which was vomited by many players, but it was still popular once it was launched. According to the data of Seven Wheat, the download volume and income in the App Store in that month were among the top ten in the rankings.
In addition to Netease, Tencent also made some moves on the way to 3D. Before Love Between Light and Night was officially launched, the official news broke out in Weibo, and a new 3D stand-alone work derived from IP will be recreated with its old worldview, which will be operated by the Northern Lights Studio, the production team of "A Mobile Tour with a Moon Sword".
Looking back at the history, love women’s love game has gone from being neglected to being sought after by capital in China, and the players have experienced the baptism from low-quality to high-quality works, so it is becoming more and more difficult to explode. Who can seize the opportunity to become the next Love and Producer in the 3D era? Let’s wait and see.
