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Regarding the impact of user gender on consumption ability, there has been a saying that according to big data statistics, the population is divided according to consumption ability, young women have the highest consumption ability, while men's consumption power is the lowest, or even worse than dogs.
This is the conclusion reached from the perspective of e-commerce 5 years ago. However, in the game industry, male users have always been the mainstay, but female users have been the "people" that game manufacturers have not been able to get for many years, until the emergence of "Love and Producer", "her economy" really appeared in the game field.
It is also the great influence of "Love and Producer", and developers generally regard "love" as a sufficient necessary condition for women to play games. But Quest Mobile offers a different perspective in the latest issue of the 2022 "Her Economy" Insight Report (hereinafter referred to as the report).
The hottest women are not in love
The report pointed out that as of January 2022, the number of monthly active users of women reached 582 million, accounting for 49.3% of the total mobile Internet users, which was basically the same as that of male users.
At the same time, the number of female users per capita month and the number of apps per month also increased slightly from 166.2 hours and 24.9 hours to 171.4 hours and 25.6 respectively.
More importantly, the online spending power of female users and the willingness to spend online have improved, and female users who are willing to spend more than 1,000 yuan per month have increased by 1.2% year-on-year. Female users with "medium" and "high" consumption intentions also increased by 2.6% over the same period last year.
Although the growth rate may seem unremarkable, given the huge base of 582 million female users, the actual number is actually quite impressive.
The increase in female user activity and willingness to spend is quickly reflected in specific games. The report lists 10 products with a SPIKE in DAUs greater than 500,000 users from August 2021 to January 2022.
Ranking first is NetEase's Harry Potter: Magical Awakening, whose DAU compound growth rate reached a staggering 282.5%, and the proportion of female users is also considerable, more than 59.7%. ByteDance's "Flower Yishan Heart Month" ranked second, with a compound growth rate of 101.7% DAU and 78.5% of female users.
The most surprising thing is that among these 10 products, there are 4 mobile games with more than 50% female users in "Harry Potter: Magic Awakening", "Huayishan Heart Moon", "Heart Delight Mahjong", and "Esper Love Synthesis", but none of these 4 products are "women's games" with the theme of love in traditional cognition.
"Harry Potter: Magic Awakening" theme is magic, the gameplay is RPG, the theme of "Flower Yishan Heart Moon" is national style, the gameplay is cultivation, the theme of "Heart Delight Mahjong" is national essence, the gameplay is mahjong, the theme of "Esper Love Synthesis" is cute pet, the gameplay is placement elimination... Similarly, the officials of the 4 games did not position their products as female.
There is no need to deliberately flatter, equality is "feminine"
Quest Mobile's Report isn't the only corroboration.
GameLook made a list of the main high-female users on the market based on third-party agency data, based on the february 2022 revenue indicator, and found that among the TOP16 products, only 4 products such as "Love of Light and Night" and "Love and Producer" were based on love, accounting for only a quarter.
The real ranking data breaks a stereotype that it is not only love, it is only women.
The most obvious nature is Harry Potter Magic Awakening, which accounts for more than half of the female users. Another hidden "female to" mobile game "Light And Encounter" under netease, as early as 2019, 50% of community users were women. Producer Chen Xinghan also told GameLook that "Light Encounter" once held a meeting in Japan, and among the 40 players who came, there were 37 girls.
The gameplay of "Light Encounter" is puzzle solving, and in Chen Xinghan's understanding, puzzle solving is a kind of game category of equality between men and women. In the game industry, "male and female equality" is in many cases equivalent to female orientation.
In addition to the all-gender products acting as "foreign aid", many products with women as the main target group are also working more and more to jump out of the shackles of love, such as "Lingyunnuo" of friendship time, "Absolute Interpretation" of NetEase, and "Brilliant Star Road" issued by Changyou Research and Development Tencent, all of which take the initiative to cut with love, with the pursuit of career success and the creation of independent women as the main line of the game.
After "Love and Producer", a large number of game companies joined the inner volume of the love theme, but there were very few who really achieved a double harvest of popularity and income, and for several years, only "Undetermined Event Book" and "Love of Light and Night" and other products were successful, but people realized that the road of love was too difficult to go.
Jumping out of the industry rolls, the real opponent is elsewhere
The new question left to the industry is, what are the criteria for defining female orientation?
Is it defined by the theme of love, or by the official positioning of the manufacturer? GameLook feels that since it is a market behavior, it should be left to the player to decide this issue.
In 2017, Aurora Big Data pointed out that at that time, "Glory of Kings" had 108 million female players, and female users accounted for more than half of all users, reaching 54.1%. Quest Mobile's "Report" also said that as of January 2022, the female audience of professional league content related to "Glory of Kings" and "Peace Elite" has surpassed that of men, reaching 50.4%.
Whether it is the female game leader Parchment Paper development "Backlight Infiltration" and other non-female products, or Tencent, NetEase, friendship time have made efforts to "do not talk about love and fight for career" of women to mobile games, or "Light Encounter", "Harry Potter Magic Awakening", "Glory of the King" and other popular products in the proportion of female users continue to rise, all show that the concept and meaning of women to products are constantly innovating.
Love games are women's games, but women's games are not only in love, their themes and gameplay are far beyond the definition of traditional women's games.
This also makes it possible for women to expand into games that the biggest obstacle is not other women's expansion into games, but other forms of entertainment for women, competing for the time of female users.
Quest Mobile's "Report" pointed out that among the user-scale penetration rate of female users in the typical segment of pan-entertainment, only 20.1% of the games were eliminated, 87.6% of the short videos, 79.6% of the online videos (long videos), 60.5% of the music and 30.3% of the pairs of reading were far more than the games.
Brush short videos, chase dramas, listen to music, visit Jinjiang... It wasn't until after this entertainment that female users remembered games.
How to play the unique advantages of the game to attract more female users is a challenge that aspires to become the next female blockbuster game and all developers who want to open up women to the market. Only in this way can the "she economy", which has swept countless industries, really exert its strength in the game market.
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GameLook Daily Game Industry Report
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