Crazy buying, plagiarism controversy, overseas big IP... Despite the continuous criticism, there is no doubt that "Romance of the Three Kingdoms • Strategy Edition" has become a "generation of tyrants" who play an important role in the mobile game circle.
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Author | Dong Zibo
Edit | Lin Juemin
If the SLG's track is compared to the "chaotic world" of the crowd fighting and the Central Plains chasing deer, then "Romance of the Three Kingdoms • Strategy Edition" should be called a "tyrant".
It has been operating for more than three years and has always maintained strong results. After going online, it has dominated the best-seller list for a long time. According to Qimai data, the total revenue of the Three Kingdoms Chronicles Strategy Edition (hereinafter referred to as "Three Wars") is estimated to total nearly US$1.2 billion on the IOS side. Attacking the city strategically, it is quite a sweeping trend.
The world knows that "Three Wars" has Ali's support behind it, and he does not hesitate to invest a large amount of cost. And "Three Wars" is by no means just a "rich second generation" born under the Ali system.
Just like the use of soldiers, Sun Tzu's Art of War Yun: "Soldiers are not expensive and beneficial, but there is no military advance, which is enough to force, anticipate the enemy, and take people." "Smashing the money accurately and effectively, "Three Wars" has developed a self-contained purchase strategy, and relies on its own unique resources from all walks of life to form a unique differentiated competitive route.
Behind the glow, "Three Wars" is also controversial. It unabashedly uses "banknote power" to inflate advertising prices and use resources to dump competing products. And the entanglement with the "predecessor" of the same track, "The Coast of the Land", is even more fierce.
In fact, the deep relationship between "Three Wars" and "Rate the Land" is not just such a simple competition. And to tell the story of the three wars of "Owl", we must first start with a person with the name "Ding-Dong"...
1
"The same is the fallen man of the end of the world"
After 12 years in NetEase, Dingdong has long wanted to make his own game.
Zhan Zhonghui (flower name: Dingdang) programmer, his appearance is not proud, legendary early years of many interviews with NetEase fruitless, lack of Bole. In NetEase, he first did not focus on games, but halfway out of the house, came to the project team of "Big Talk WestWard Flight Online" to do back-end development.
Zhan Zhonghui (flower name: Dingdang)
In fact, Jingdong is Ding Lei's "pro-soldier" installed in NetEase games. NetEase Games, formerly known as Tianxia Technology, is a department acquired by NetEase as a whole. Allowing the employees of the original "Tianxia" department to manage themselves, Ding Lei was obviously not at ease. This is the arrangement of Jingle, this NetEase veteran into the NetEase game, ready to take over the baton at any time.
Ding Lei's personality has always been strong, and it is said that when NetEase acquired Tianxia Technology, many new employees poured into NetEase and worked with NetEase. Among them, many game artists like "strange costumes" and like to dye their hair. This made Ding Lei very unhappy, and he was also worried about affecting the morale of the company. Therefore, Ding Lei "ordered" that all of them should cut their hair and wash off the color, otherwise they would not be allowed to go to work. At that time, an employee with gray hair in the company said bluntly: Then we will not come to work at all. This remark echoed a hundred times, and Ding Lei had no choice but to give up.
At that time, it was the eventful autumn of NetEase. The company was accused of adulteration in the US stock market, Dustk suspended trading, and the stock price plummeted. And "Journey to the West Online" did not work miracles, because the wrong planning of the technical path, resulting in frequent client crashes.
The thunderstorm experienced by players has made "Journey to the West Online" falter, and the peak number of online people is only in the early 5,000s, not to mention the cash income generated, which also means that Liang Yuchong, the "boss" of the original "Tianxia" department, has gradually fallen out of favor.
According to Wu Yunyang (flower name: Yunfeng), another core developer of the "Journey to the West" series and "Fantasy Journey to the West", he recalled in his blog: At the time of NetEase's internal and external difficulties, Ding Lei made a phone call late at night and called him and Dingdang to a tea house on Guangzhou's Gold Rush Road. Yun Feng already felt wrong, Ding Lei has always loved to go to bars, and it is rare to talk about going to a tea house. In the private room of the tea house, Ding Lei said that he would entrust the game work to Dingdang, hoping that Dingdang would be able to turn the tide.
Wu Yunyang (flower name: Yunfeng)
Later, the success of the "Journey to the West" series and "Fantasy Journey to the West" proved the strength of Dingdong's strategizing and also established his position in the game circle.
Many years later, Yunfeng recalled the late night when Ding Lei decided to change the coach that year, and only then did he think that the reason why he did not go to the bar that night was because Dingdang did not like to drink and never clubbing.
After 10 years, Dingdong has a high status in the circle, and it is not willing to just be the microphone of Ding Lei's game concept. His breakup with NetEase is difficult to call pleasant, Ding Lei "forced away" jingle, but also became a paragraph often told by the old people in the circle.
At that time, it just so happened that the cloud wind mentioned above also had a retreat. On his blog, he wrote: "Sometimes, I'm disappointed in the company. It seems to me that it is closed, lacks foresight, and is too focused on immediate interests. Personnel relations are also not as simple as they are on a small scale. There are more and more lazy people, inefficient development, and conservative technology. ”
Dingdang lobbied Yunfeng to start a business with him, and the two had a "revolutionary friendship" that had begun to be cultivated in "Journey to the West online", and they felt sorry for each other; Ping Su and the two also had a close personal relationship, and the two also rode together, riding from Guangzhou to Shenzhen via Zhuhai, and Yunfeng also fell on the way.
At that time, Yunfeng originally wanted to retire and live the life of a crane. But when I heard that Jingdong intended to start a business, I couldn't help but be moved. Tangled for some time, he also went from Dingdang, and Chen Wei'an, the vice president of NetEase at the time, in charge of "World of Warcraft" and "StarCraft", became one of the three founders of Jianyue Technology in the future.
Dingdong left NetEase on May 15, 2011, and a few days later, the news was disclosed by the company's financial report. As soon as the news came out, NetEase's stock price fell by 3.7%.
After leaving, Dingdang, Yunfeng and Chen Wei'an established Jianyue Technology in Guangzhou. High expectations were placed on it, but the market did not side with Jian Yue. After starting a business, Jian Yue tossed between Momo and Tencent, and there were many works, but there was no explosion.
Anecdotal rumors say that Jian Yue's silence is because of Tencent's shareholding in the early days, so that Jian Yue also contracted Tencent's "disease": self-contained and not thinking of making progress. There are also rumors that Tencent held Shares in Jian Yue for several years without a return, making the faces of the two parties lightless, or Century Huatong boss Wang Yao mediated from it, and finally Jian Yue and Tencent peacefully broke up.
Fast forward to 2017, as strong as jingle, cloud wind, but also difficult to escape the hero's shortness of breath. Now, they don't know if they are undervalued or if they are really weak.
On the other hand, Ali, as one of the "Royal Three Houses" of the domestic Internet, was also in a dilemma in the game at that time. The $5 billion acquisition of the UC Nine Tour system, the $200 million acquisition of Pea Pods, and the assignment of Yu Yongfu to take charge of Alibaba Games have not been able to create miracles for Alibaba on the game track.
Alibaba is not bad money, not bad IP, not bad resources, not bad channels. Everything is ready, Ali only owes the "East Wind" of self-developed explosive money.
Jia Ke, former general manager of Shenzhen Zhongqingbao, believes that Ali is not unable to do it, but is unwilling to do it - in other words, the strategy has not tilted in the direction of the game. At that time, Ma Yun's sentence "starve to death and not make a game" became a big shackle for Ali on the game track.
But making games is really making money, how many large and small Internet companies have switched to making games, and they have already made a lot of money. Moreover, as an important track of the Internet matrix, games have huge market potential.
Putting money away and not making money is a fool.
Ali can't look at it without being hungry, but as a late entrant, it is inevitable to throw a rat trap. Jia Ke told Leifeng Network that when the Group of Chinese mobile game players breaks through the 400 million mark, the ceiling of the mobile game market will gradually appear. Many years ago, "stock competition" has become the common understanding of many companies on the track.
If Jian Yue is compared to a famous courtier who has not met Huai Cai, then Ali is a hard-to-find lord. It may be inevitable to use the phrase "the same fallen man at the end of the world" to describe Jian Yue and Ali; but "why should we have known each other when we met" is enough to describe the combination of these two companies.
Legend has it that when Ali contacted Jian Yue, Tencent already had news, and there was also the possibility of cutting Hu in advance. He once cooperated with Jian Yue in "Every Day to Fight", and the final results were less than expected: Tencent gave Jian Yue "opportunities", but Jian Yue did not seize it.
Tencent chose to stand by and watch, and Ali and Jian Yue were able to combine smoothly.
A friend of the game circle of Leifeng Network said: If Jian Yue finally chooses to join Tencent, with Tencent's system, I am afraid it will be difficult to complete the explosion that can shake the industry. There are few people in Ali who understand the game's self-research, and they are also in urgent need of success, which will give Jian Yue enough freedom to do development.
Combining with Ali is the best ending for Jian Yue, and also the best beginning for DingDong and Yunfeng. Just two years later, "Three Wars" turned out to be a blockbuster.
"Is Jian Yue very good?" It is rumored that on the eve of Jian Yue's acquisition, an executive at Tencent said so. I don't know if I saw the results of "Three Battles" today, whether my intestines should be repentant.
"Lingxi Interactive Entertainment" is a new brand of Ali Games after accepting Jian Yue, which plays an important role in today's game industry.
Dingdong proved to the world that after he left NetEase, he could still make games that detonated the market; Ali also proved to the world that as one of the three giants of China's Internet, Ali was not "born" without game genes.
Many years later, Mansong, head of the 360 game mobile game product department, recalled that he would often sigh: "When we went to Jian Yue to see the project, they said that they were developing an SLG project, and internal secrecy was kept secret." Now that I think about it, it's probably Three Wars. ”
2
"Three Strategies" for Buying "Three Wars"
To do "Three Wars", it is actually a trick of Jingdong to go "dangerous chess".
SLG can indeed earn, and the revenue strength is not bad. But usually SLG has a high entry threshold, and it is difficult for new players to enter the pit, and the retention is also pitiful. According to a person familiar with SLG's operations, "If SLG's 30-day retention can reach 7%, it is already a 'chosen person'." Usually this number is only 5% of the qualifying line. ”
And on this track, there are too many "big mountains" to cross. Even if it is not mentioned that "Hulai Three Kingdoms 2", "King of Avalon", "Kingdom Era" and other strong enemies are around; the same type of "Coast of the Land" is famous for "difficult to attack", which has been on the best-seller list for many years.
So someone asked, "Why should 'Three Wars' surpass them?" ”
With Ali's support, Dingdong is no longer "afraid of the head" as it was when starting a business. Faced with the siege of competitors, "Three Wars" chose a positive breakthrough in the buying market.
Although today, "Three Wars" is not yet a "national game", the advertising of "Three Wars" can be called a "national advertising". In terms of purchase volume, no matter what precision delivery is in the early stage of "Three Wars", it has chosen the strategy of "flooding the golden mountain". The momentum is huge, so that many new users "come to visit".
"Sun Tzu's Art of War" Yun: "With the way of the soldiers, ten will encircle it, and five will attack it." And the first measure of the purchase volume of "Three Wars" is to "hold high and fight high, and clear the field of the wall": use "banknote ability" to raise the purchase price.
People in the industry know that the purchase price has been "rolled" out of the new world. In 2018, due to the first "edition number cold winter", the purchase price surged. People shouted: "1 person actually wants 100 yuan, too expensive!" ”
They don't know that after a few years, the price of SLG purchases can rise to about 400-500 yuan / person. And in the crowded Three Kingdoms circuit, the price may be speculated higher.
An SLG practitioner indignantly said to Leifeng Network that the price of buying volume is so high that it is "lifted" by Ali.
When bidding at CPM (by number of impressions), I first bid an absolute high price. If you follow, your profit space will be compressed by me; if you don't follow, you won't get the display, and you can only watch the user being robbed by "Three Wars".
With this trick, "Three Battles" ruthlessly drove competitors out of the track in an almost arbitrary way.
For the purchase price that has been "rolled out of the sky", Mansong recalled to Leifeng Network that the cost of obtaining customers in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2017" was not low. They recently cooperated with Luo Yonghao on a buying advertisement, but when the cost reached 300 per person, they were afraid to continue to invest.
According to an advertiser close to "Three Wars", the purchase price of "Three Wars" can reach 600 yuan / person, and the price of overseas purchases will be lower, but it will not be much lower. Another advertiser said that as far as he knew, "Three Wars" at its peak, a month of information flow advertising invested 1 billion.
Why is "Three Wars" so dare to vote? Leifeng network contacted a lot of SLG practitioners, they all have such questions. In the case that the cost of customer acquisition is speculated to nearly 600 / person, how does "Three Wars" achieve a balance between buying volume and profitability?
An SLG practitioner who has been engaged in operation for many years estimated that at the purchase price of 500 yuan / person for "Three Wars", the cycle of recovering costs in the three wars will be one to two years. This means that "Three Wars" is likely to be in a state of loss as a whole before 2021.
In a word: "Three Wars" so much to buy, money can be earned back?
Mentioning this, we have to mention the terrible revenue capacity of "Three Wars".
Leifeng Network once contacted an SLG player, in the "Three Wars" as an alliance lord and a general, many times in an important position; in real life, he is also a technology company boss, the company is not small.
He said that in a game such as the three wars to compete with the player's "banknote ability", the status is high enough, and it must be "krypton" enough. Tens of thousands of pieces for SLGs such as "Three Wars" are just "a drop in the ocean".
The player said that with the "shipment" ratio of the draw cards in "Three Battles", about 300 yuan must be charged to produce an "orange card" (the highest quality and strongest warrior). In the game, 100 orange cards are medium.
In SLG, players are usually very sensitive to strength and weakness, and in game operation, they often like to give game users "seniority ranking" according to contribution and combat strength, which further touches the nerves of players. In order to pursue "full red", some people recharge tens of thousands to draw cards, and the actual combat strength may increase by only 5%.
The "bosses" in real life attach great importance to winning and losing, but most of them have little time to play games. I heard that many bosses will give their accounts to secretaries and drivers, let them help themselves "liver" games, and only get on themselves when they are siege. Anecdotal rumors, there are also people will go online to hire college students, a few thousand yuan a month, to help themselves take care of all the game operations.
So that it can be earned, "Three Wars" also has the confidence to burn money in terms of buying. An industry insider familiar with the game buying model told Leifeng that in the final analysis, buying volume and profitability are only digital games. As long as you earn more than you spend, the company can be profitable.
A "full red number" can bring 300,000-500,000 total turnover, and a server can have at least 10 or so "full red numbers". In some regions after the service, there may be 80-100 "full red numbers" in the server.
In a word: SLG active players have the characteristics of strong paying power and high viscosity, even if the cost of customer acquisition is high, if you can "luckily" hatch some big R in it, then it is not difficult to earn back the cost of buying.
In this way, why is the amount of purchase not a kind of "card draw"?
On the other hand, buying is not a "brainless money" game. The second plan of "Three Wars" is "flowers on the trees, and all the grass and trees are soldiers." An industry insider familiar with the way of buying said that although they all know that the purchase volume of "Three Wars" is huge, the actual number of their purchases may not be as dense as the perception.
How to spend "small" money and do "big" things? The routine of "Three Wars" is to carry out carpet bombing in an extremely wide range of blows through centralized and full-network launch in a short period of time. The person told Leifeng Network that this routine needs to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the early stage, which can make the whole network be brainwashed by this round of publicity, and after the "Three Wars" reduces the intensity of investment for a period of time, it can continue to maintain its voice and influence among players.
The "private field" delivery is not the first of the "Three Wars", and Lilith is also a strong player who knows this well. To learn this trick and use it thoroughly, "Three Wars" must have spent a lot of effort.
However, the saturation advertising "bombing" is not a long-term solution after all, and the purchase volume of the "flood irrigation" type will inevitably gradually tighten. After tightening, how to ensure the effectiveness of advertising delivery and continue to remain firm? This is to mention the third plan of the purchase volume of "Three Wars", "reuse elite soldiers": abandon "low-end" materials, focus on high-quality content, star effect.
A few years ago, the purchase volume of mobile games and page games was also occupied by "a dog at the beginning", "brothers will come to cut me" and various "kun". Buying materials competes with who is more sinking, weirder, and more topical.
No one thought of buying as "content", as long as I was "earthy" enough and put enough to occupy the attention market.
A few years later, these purchase materials above have long been submerged in the old paper pile of Internet history. Game manufacturers have found that relying on talent and celebrity materials, advertising resources can bring high conversion rates in the case of large exposure.
A person close to the business related to "Three Wars" said that it was Ali and "Three Wars" who explored this path.
Legend has it that the first wave of "Three Wars" was launched, and a set of materials ran for a whole month. At the time, footage for other games could only run for two or three days at most.
From the selected spokesperson, "Three Wars" also formed a luxurious "lineup". From Gao Xiaosong and Guo Degang to Hu Ge and Li Naiwen, the invited star "wrists" are not small. Many players associated with Leifeng Network said that they watched the advertisements of Guo Degang or Hu Ge before entering the pit of "Three Wars".
And "Three Wars" even "burned" the war fire of the battlefield to the cinema, and jointly produced with Wu Yusen, launched the movie "Chuanliu".
As soon as this film came out, everyone in the buying circle was shocked: Ali made a new height by the "volume" of the purchase volume.
Ali is still Ali after all, there must be no shortage of resources, and it may not be difficult to leverage some artist resources from the perspective of the group. Especially in the early stage of the operation of "Three Wars", Gao Xiaosong, who was stationed in the "frontline" of advertising resources, was also the chairman of Ali Music at that time. Advertising your own products is also "reasonable".
However, when Gao Xiaosong frequently appeared in "Three Wars" to buy materials, some people also foresaw that Gao Xiaosong's value as an "artist" was paid more attention, which meant that his value at the company's management level was ignored, and the position of the chairman of Ali Music was also in jeopardy. A few years later, Gao Xiaosong stepped down from Ali, but this is another story.
An insider who is familiar with Guo Degang broke the news to LeiFeng Network: "Like Lao Guo, small jobs are not picked up, and big jobs are sky-high." Even if there is a 'relationship', it is just a ticket that allows you to sit down with him and talk about cooperation; if there is no relationship, normal do not talk.
"After all, it is the power of capital." Finally he added.
Using capital and resources at hand to the extreme, Ali's accumulation in other fields has finally become his own help in the game track. Just to say this, others can't learn it if they want to.
Speaking of "Three Wars", the content that pays attention to the amount of purchase and star marketing have higher requirements for the producer, and the cost is naturally higher. What is the logic of doing this? Where is the value of the in-depth and branded marketing model?
In 2015, Zeng Hang left from Touch Technology as the director of strategy. He wanted to get back into the media industry and do his own content. Just a few years later, he has made Junwu one of China's top military community brands, and game advertising — especially SLG games — is now one of their most important business segments.
The role of the military in the entire pattern link is somewhat similar to the "advertising agency" mentioned earlier, but the difference is that the military is less subject to the platform. They have their own publishing channels. Junwu has in-depth cooperation with a large number of high-quality KOLs such as Zhang Zhaozhong and Jin Canrong, and at the same time has its own shooting and editing production capabilities, and has self-operated Chinese video brands and fan groups such as "Junwu Sub-Plane", which is more like traditional media roles.
The user portraits of military fans highly coincide with the portraits of SLG players. Therefore, from "The Coast of the Land" to "Three Wars", and then to Tencent's recently launched "Return to the Empire", they have cooperated with Junwu. Promote conversion by embedding ads in customized popular science videos.
As a military enthusiast, Zeng Hang himself is an SLG player, and he also spends a lot of time chatting with players in the game: "Why do you have to charge so much money? "Why would you spend so much time on it?" He can see that SLG can leverage huge revenue and output value with a small user base.
"This is also why we are more willing to carry out in-depth cooperation with SLG games," Zeng Hang said, "in general cooperation, we mainly take the mode of selling advertising resources; and we still have some resources, not officially sold to the outside world, only for customers who cooperate in depth or sign framework agreements with us, for example, we have accumulated no less than 50,000 game private domain users today." At the same time, for users who cooperate deeply, we will take the CPA (user behavior) and other models of actual effect pricing. ”
After 8 months, the 2021 edition winter is finally over. However, the "Sword of Damocles" of the version policy still brings deep fear to the entire game circle. Zeng Hang said that today's game industry is "a family with an old, if there is a treasure." Products with version numbers must be able to achieve long-tail operations in order to maximize the value of hard-won versions.
3
Behind the glow of "Three Wars"
"In the end, Ali's energy is too great, and we can't defeat it." A friend in the game circle said this to Leifeng Network. A few years ago, while writing an email in his office, he received a phone call from a high-level government agency claiming to be a relevant high-level government agency, saying that the game he had listed was a "vest bag" and a violation, and asked them to immediately remove the game and impose a fine.
"With the vest bag, we recognized it, and at that time we only thought that the control had become stricter." But I really didn't figure out why there would be such a high-level person to manage the vest bag thing. Knowing that he had suffered a dumb loss, this friend could only consider himself unlucky. Later, he found that the products of many friends around him were also "affected", and even a product of 37 Mutual Entertainment was rumored to have become a victim.
It is rumored that the driving force behind this "cleansing" is Ali's legal department. Legend has it that their phones are able to hit very high places directly and have a direct impact. Through such means, the friend speculated that it helped Ali crush a large number of small and medium-sized competitors.
As mentioned earlier, by raising the purchase price, "Three Wars" used money to "smash" a bloody road on the SLG track. Many small and medium-sized products, because they can't keep up with Ali's bidding, can't get incremental, and have to quit.
The success of "Three Wars" is not "inviting guests to dinner". And the "bloody" competition on China's Internet track has always added an intriguing color to history.
If cleaning up small and medium-sized products can only be regarded as the "small test knife" of "Three Wars", then the dispute with the predecessor of the same type of work, "The Coast of the Land", can be called "dragon and tiger fight".
Before 2015, the SLG track was still an old product template: each player had a main city that could be used for construction, point-to-point marching, siege. The main point of payment is to obtain troops and resources, or shorten the recruitment and construction time.
In 2014, Clash of Kings (also known as COK) was released. As a "set of masters" of traditional SLG page games and mobile games, COK burst into flames on the line, and there were countless disciples for a time. One of the largest disciples touched Tencent's "Gone with the Wind" and directly purchased and used the source code of COK, which was clearly to copy the success of COK.
A year later, NetEase's "Coast of the Land" was launched, but it was like an "ugly duckling": at the beginning of the launch, it began to "climb the list" from 120 on the best-seller list, and hovered around 30 for several years. From the beginning of the project, it was not optimistic, and it took many years to gradually stabilize in the head of SLG, and also dragged out a "land-like" road.
SLG is a category with complex product logic, and the logic of The Soil-Like is even more difficult to understand, and it is difficult to explain the mechanism. A person in the project department of NetEase's "Coast of the Land" simply described the subversion of the SLG game to Leifeng Network:
The first is the design of the plot and the city, so that players have more consideration for the route planning of the march, and the addition of RTS (real-time strategy game) elements makes winning and losing more than just numerical matchup. A double player of "Three Wars" and "Rate the Earth" said to Leifeng Network: This kind of game should fight for hand speed, operation, and tactics, which made me feel the feeling of playing Red Alert, interstellar, and empire in those years.
At the same time, COK-like's SLG idea is "Viking logic", which completely defeats the other party and then plunders the other party's resources; while the rate-like is more partial to the control and competition of the land, gradually compressing the space of the enemy's land, which is more in line with the imagination of the eastern players for "conquest".
The second is to cut the direct link between resources and payment, and put the core payment point on the card draw. On the one hand, the adverse consequences of letting players lose battles and lose soldiers are decoupled from direct economic losses, so that players will not "dare not fight"; on the other hand, the "shipment" of the card drawing mode is not certain, the uncertainty between the player's recharge and the improvement of combat strength is very strong, the "pit" of Krypton gold is also larger, and the higher the revenue potential of the game.
The design of the season system divides the original long-term endless game experience into a season that lasts for dozens of days. At the end of the season, the player's land and resources will be cleared again and restarted in the new season.
As a latecomer to "The Shores of the Land", it is impossible not to benchmark the former in the development of "Three Wars", plus even the producer Zhou Bingshu is a "graduate" of NetEase, and the relationship between "Three Wars" and "Rate Soil" has attracted people's reverie from the beginning, and the two are often compared by players as similar products.
A mountain does not tolerate two tigers, between "Three Wars" and "Rate the Land", how can it not compete for a high?
Coupled with the fact that SLG takes a lot of time, energy, and even money on players, it is difficult for a player to "enter the pit" of two SLG games at the same time. Between similar SLG games, to a large extent, they face a "zero-sum game".
Under this homogenization, "bloody" competition is inevitable.
A NetEase student told Leifeng Network that in the competition between "Rate Soil" and "Three Wars", the most obvious point is the price war of drawing cards: in "Rate Soil", about every 40 or so times to draw cards, you can guarantee a 5-star warrior; and "Three Wars" is a clear price of 30 draws, that is, 10 draws lower than "Rate Soil", nakedly showing that it is necessary to grab users at a price.
There are also rumors that after the launch of "Three Wars", the operators targeted and poached many management and KOLs from the big alliance (large alliance) of "Rate The Land", and dug them up collectively to "Three Wars". SLG is a "human game", once the KOL is lost, the game may suffer from a cliff-like player loss. Legend has it that many of the big leagues in the first district of "Three Wars" have turned from the land.
Although horizontal transfer of users between SLG products is not uncommon, if the rumors are conclusive, then this way of soliciting customers is too "straightforward".
More widely known is the controversy over "plagiarism" between "Rate The Land" and "Three Wars". The netease planner said: At the time of the establishment of the three wars, the operation of "The Coast of the Land" has long been mature, and the system is roughly fixed; and the development of the "Three Wars" is largely benchmarked against the "Rate Of The Land", and because there is enough analysis of the "Rate Of the Land", it can differentiate the competition and meet the expectations of some players that the "Rate of the Land" cannot meet.
At the same time, in the subsequent version update, "Three Wars" is also suspected of borrowing the creativity of "Rate Land". "The most unpleasant thing for the product team of "Rate Soil" is that as long as there is any new content in "Rate Soil", you can see similar content in the three battles every once in a while." This NetEase classmate said so.
Not only that, but what makes this NetEase classmate even more angry is that obviously many systems are similar to "Rate Soil", but "Three Wars" wants to make itself the pioneer of this SLG category. "Their current target strategy for "Three Wars" is actually to treat themselves as people who fill the gap in the market when "Rate" does not exist. This is evident in media articles and interviews for the anniversary of "Three World Wars.". ”
Price wars, digging the foot of the wall, "Rate the Soil" can be endured. But in the matter of plagiarism controversy, "Rate the Soil" can't stand it.
Not only on social media, directly naming the plagiarism of "Three Wars", NetEase even filed a complaint against lingxi mutual entertainment behind "three wars" in court, requesting the court to support it.
In the plagiarism dispute of game intellectual property rights, it is often difficult for the plaintiff to prove that the other party has plagiarized. Especially at the level of gameplay, the law only protects expression, not ideas, and usually the court will not support the claim of plagiarism of gameplay. Even if the court supports the plaintiff, there are still a lot of litigation costs, a lot of time and energy involved, and usually a case may take several years to get a first-instance judgment.
Tree big trick, "Rate the Soil" has had the experience of "being copied" before. Through legal proceedings, two games, "Battleship Storm" and "Thousand Armies", have been "cut off" by NetEase.
However, behind the "war" of the "Three Wars" lawsuits of "Rate Soil" and "Three Wars" is the "fairy fight" of the two major Internet giants of NetEase and Ali. Both sides have their own special legal departments responsible for handling disputes, and neither side is afraid of a war of attrition and a protracted war.
Although the outcome of the plagiarism case is still pending, between "Rate the Soil" and "Three Wars", the first-instance judgment of one case has been decided, and the result is that the defendant Fang Lingxi Mutual Entertainment has lost the lawsuit. The cause of the case is not plagiarism in the three wars, but commercial advertising slander.
On April 5, 2020, the server of Rinpoche of The Land crashed, and a large number of players had difficulty logging in. In a room of Douyu anchors known as "G God", two Douyu users suspected of planning with soil openly confronted fans in the live broadcast room, and the rhythm was taken to Weibo hot search (don't forget, Weibo is also a product of Ali).
NetEase must have attached great importance to it, and finally found the two Douyu users who were doing things and sued them, but in the end it was an out-of-court settlement, and the two users also explained and apologized to the audience during the live broadcast.
This is a misunderstanding caused by the player's personal behavior, and "Three Wars" seems to want to take advantage of this opportunity to suppress "The Coast of the Land".
After Ali Entertainment acquired UC, UC's AijiuYou was also included in Ali's pocket. And Aijiuyou, now Ali's game purchase company, has placed 7 advertising materials on major platforms, which are suspected of pointing to "The Coast of the Land", and even the "project team intimidates players" into the advertisement.
The "G God" of the Douyu live broadcast room involved in the incident was rumored to have directly joined Ali from college after 2 months.
In the end, this suspected one-on-one operation was determined by the court of first instance to be commercial defamation, and even the litigation costs were added together to award Lingxi Interactive Entertainment to NetEase 88,700 yuan. Although it is far from NetEase's original demand of 1 million, it does allow NetEase to occupy a certain public opinion advantage in the fight with "Three Wars".
The second instance trial of this case is still in progress, so everything has not yet been conclusively concluded...
Speaking of "Three Wars", Dingdang and the former Jian Yue executives are from NetEase, and the relationship with NetEase, even if it uses the metaphor of "breaking up", should have been "forgotten in the jianghu", so the sword is sharp, the knife is opposed, and it is inevitable that people will sigh.
However, to achieve "hegemony," we must be fierce and fast.2 For at least a few years, Rate Will Remain One of the Three Wars rivals; for a long time, Three Wars will be compared to Rate Soil.
It is true that "Rate the Land" has been operating for 7 years, and it is inevitable that the hero will be late. The revenue bottleneck of the card drawing model also forces it to bear the risk of player loss and launch a treasure system to ensure revenue. The today of "Rate the Land" is likely to be the tomorrow of "Three Wars".
Even today, the relationship between NetEase and Lingxi is still unclear, and there are needles hidden in the cotton. On the one hand, the two companies on the table are already "old and dead do not interact with each other", and there are still scolding wars on the social platform; while under the table, NetEase and Lingxi are still the head mobile game companies in the Guangzhou game circle, and the personnel exchanges are frequent.
Legend has it that the wife of a certain planner of "Rate The Land" is in the lingxi to operate the game. Although the two games have long been "incompatible"; on the personal level, the beaters should not be "not sharing the sky".
4
epilogue
Rolling water in the east of the Yangtze River, the waves exhaust the heroes, and the success or failure turns to the air.
In the first day of "Three Wars", there were Wei Wu's yang plots with whips, and there were also all-pervasive conspiracies. If you put "Three Wars" into the Chinese Internet history of HaohaoTangtang, as a model for giants to enter the game track of "halfway out of the house", "Three Wars" can be regarded as a "masterpiece".
The success of "Three Wars" has extraordinary reference significance for future generations of big manufacturers who have not yet entered the Internet: a good self-research team, a clever purchase strategy, a full use of capital and social resources, and a multi-angle constraint on competitors when necessary.
And the way of survival of "Three Wars" is undoubtedly like a dragon entering the river, stirring up layers of waves: the pattern of the buying market, to a certain extent, changed by its entry. Its appearance, riding the dust to take the head position of the SLG, has become another "legend" that other competitors can hardly look back.
Saying that the "three wars" are "over", it is "wrong" in the wrong time, the mobile game market has long been a red sea when it enters the game; it is "wrong" to absorb the genes of the latter in the era of barbaric growth of the Internet, brutal competition, and they will use capital as a cannonball to bomb the Web 2.0 market thinking.
However, if you want to survive on the SLG track of the Tiger Dragon Pan, "Three Wars" is not wrong; if you want to be the head of the Chinese mobile game industry, "Three Wars" is not wrong. All this is just the rules of the market, there is no right or wrong. All the controversy, all the "disgrace", will eventually only stay behind the glory of the proud achievements of "Three Wars" and gradually be forgotten by history.
It can be said that "Three Wars" fulfilled its dream. And from NetEase left Ding Dong and Cloud Wind, did their dream come true?
After Jian Yue was acquired by Ali, Dingdang no longer struggled in the front line, concentrated on company management, and turned from a producer to an "entrepreneur". It was also this year that DingDong was mentioned to M6 in Ali's rank, and the future of "Three Wars" within Ali was promising.
Yunfeng took the initiative to fade out of the management and put more energy into game research and development. In his spare time, he still loves to write two blogs, but he rarely recalls the past now, discusses more technical problems, and occasionally writes about his experience of playing board games with his baby.
One day in 2020, Yunfeng suddenly felt abdominal pain, rushed to seek medical treatment, was diagnosed with kidney stones, fortunately, the condition is not serious, drink more water and exercise more. A few days later, he wrote an article on his blog titled "Remembering an Experience That Is Better to Live Than To Die." In the article, he wrote: "The only gain this time was that there was a legitimate reason to push off an Ali managers meeting that night. Attending these meetings may be a more painful thing for me. ”
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"Dazuo Interview" is a series of topics newly opened by Leifeng Network, which aims to analyze the existing game "masterpieces" at home and abroad on the track, get a glimpse of the development history and prospects of China's game industry, and pass on the most core first-hand information to readers through interviews.
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