Ohayoo News — June 2021

8 min readJul 23, 2021

Chinese Market Updates🗓

The casual gaming market enters the off-season, and the number of downloads continues to decline. Meanwhile, simulation gaming stays popular, and all three newly released games on this month’s ranking fall into this category.

This fortnight covers the first half of the May Day holiday. The well-prepared My Diner has seized this opportunity and its investment in advertising campaign peaked right before the holiday. Moreover, My Diner has continued to invest in advertisements, leading to a relatively large increase in downloads.

Ohayoo Games Performance📊

The Happy Life of Blueberry and China Truck Simulator has both topped the rankings, indicating that the marketing approach of “User acquisition advertising + integrated content marketing campaign” is becoming increasingly mature.

After being released, Cell to Singularity, a novel Idle Game, has entered the top 10 on the ranking at its peak.

Highlights✨

How Popular and Competitive can Otome Games be?

Source: DataEye

Analysis of Typical Otome Games for Mobile

Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice is a romance simulation game targeted towards women; Shining Nikki combines ACG culture with 3D dress-up; Fate of the Empress integrates romance into class promotion in the imperial city; Tears of Themis focuses on detective adventure of love and wits; Legend Of Civert has the biggest selling point of cute pets and attractive plot; The Throne of Girl, an adventurous otome RPG, boasts a grand worldview as well.

Analysis of Copywriting & Advertising

Copywriting highlights individuality and game features. Romantic otome games which emphasize plot design will invest more advertising material on vertical social platforms such as Weibo, bilibili, Taptap, etc. They tend to use visual design of various clothes to convey a sense of sufficient options, and advertise through videos showing beautiful dress-up effects on public channels. These otome games like to use narration to strengthen interaction with the audience, and the layout of video material is either horizontal or vertical depending on the game’s screen settings or plots. As for the video length, female players prefer medium-length videos of more than 30 seconds; and as for the presentation mode, these videos mostly choose 3D material.

How to Share a Piece of Metaverse Pie when Roblox is Difficult to Imitate?

Source: Youxiputao

Product Form of Roblox

It is like a combination of QQ, 4399 and 66RPG. With a unique developer ecology and a complete economic system, this product features high costs to maintain cloud technology, globalization, content security and developer ecology. The success of Roblox is unprecedented and hard to copy: its development team has a background of education majors, and they only want to build a platform, not a game. They also resonate with teenagers who love to share and socialize, and are not too picky about the quality of UGC content.

Future Trend of Metaverse

Metaverse features eight characteristics: identity, friendship, immersive experience, low latency, diversity, arbitrary location, economic system and etiquette. If we want to create a real Metaverse, perhaps we still need to wait before VR, AR, AI and even brain-computer interface technologies really become mature. In the future, the infrastructure of Metaverse will be designed together by several leading companies, who will connect different platforms and thus greatly lowering the cost of content adaptation.

Game Trends🔥

Otome Game, or the Game Targeted Towards Women, is Witnessing Increasing Popularity, and its Future Development Will Have Many Possibilities.

Whether in the domestic or overseas market, an increasing number of otome games have entered the top rankings.

In overseas markets, many hyper-casual games with female characters as heroines, such as Hair Challenge and High Heel, have topped the casual gaming rankings. Therefore, developers are advised to combine female elements such as high heels, manicures, hairstyles, clothing, and body features with parkour.

In the domestic market, many otome games have achieved good market performance after being released, such as Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice and Shining Nikki developed by Paper Studio, Fate of the Empress by Friend Times, Tears of Themis by miHoYo, Legend of Civert by NuVerse, and The Throne of Girl by Rastar. Recently, the interactive visual novel Time Princess has gained its game publication number. In view of its excellent performance overseas, it is expected to be a “dark horse” in the otome gaming market. It is worth noting that although the domestic otome gaming market has great potential, it also faces a lack of high-quality and creative products. There are only a few leading products with similar features, which fail to fully tap the needs of female players. It is therefore critical to gain a thorough understanding of the characteristics and preferences of female players in order to thrive in this market.

After Rolling Pictures of Jiangnan Landscape, Business Simulation Games Set in Ancient Background Still Have Much Potential to Extract.

Lately, we see games similar to Rolling Pictures of Jiangnan Landscape perform well on China’s casual gaming rankings, for example, Ancient Merchant by Eworld and Big Boss Rich by Hainan Shangxuan, both combining traditional elements with business operation simulation. Meanwhile, although both games have exquisite graphics and relatively novel gameplay, the ratings on TapTap and iOS store are mediocre, which reflects the limitation of this type of games: high homogeneity. Today, “gameplay + traditional culture” is becoming a popular concept, and if we can enrich the whole storyline and launch a product catering to the demand of players, the new traditional style simulation game could become the next Rolling Pictures of Jiangnan Landscape. However, the common problem of business simulation games is, if they have similar graphic design, they are likely to end up in fierce competition for users; on the other hand, such aesthetics style is generally not fit for other types of gameplay.

Gameplay Tips💡

How to Make Hyper-casual Gameplay Mid-core or Hardcore

Background

As the market competition of hyper-casual games is getting fierce, their disadvantages of short life cycle and limited turnover are becoming obvious as well. Therefore, in recent years, some developers have tried to make hyper-casual gameplay mid or hardcore by adding data and content, so as to extend the user life cycle and increase the turnover. This issue of Ohayoo News will explore the way to make such games hardcore through several cases. Hopefully, developers will find it helpful.

Core Gameplay to Attract Users

While making hyper-casual gameplay mid or hardcore, the first thing is to ensure its attractiveness to users, so as to lower down acquisition cost per user. For example, chatting game as Happy Life of Blueberry has a gameplay which costs low unit price and is easy to learn, and has the potential to reach a large pool of casual game user base. Aiming to make casual games mid or hardcore, we can explore the direction of our project in categories with relatively low acquisition costs, such as hyper-casual and puzzle games.

Explore Long-term Game Set According to Core Gameplay

After deciding the core gameplay, we need to explore its values in the long term, and try to turn short-run pleasure gained from a single game into a continuous and lasting one. Here is an example of how to tap into the long-term values based on Battle and other types of gameplay.

Gameplay of Battle: Explore values from character attributes, skill attributes, building attributes and other attributes. Take Where to Run as an example. Based on the original gameplay of Crowd City, it also provides two characters: Big Brother and Small Soldier, and adds skills during the battle. It offers three paths of growth, i.e. Big Brother path, Small Soldier path, and skill development path, according to HP, Combat Effectiveness, Skill Effect, etc. The game has also established a long-term goal based on its level system.

Other types of gameplay: provide long-term content goals through decoration simulation, business simulation and idle gaming. When values can not be found in core gameplay, additional systems can be used as long-term goals. User’s LTV can be extended through the simple cycle of currency generated in core gameplay and consumed in additional systems. For example, in The Happy Life of Blueberry, the currency is generated in the main storyline through a level system of hyper-casual chatting, and is consumed through main page decoration and level-ups; while in Jade Master, currency can be gained through exhibits and consumed through opening new exhibitions.

Examples Suitable for Mid-core or Hardcore Gameplay

Developers can choose suitable prototypes for mid and hardcore design based on the gameplay and graphic style they are good at. Here are four game prototypes that might be used for mid and hardcore gameplay. Hopefully, developers will find them inspirational.

1. Swing Star

The prototype of the game topped the 2018 US rankings. You can clear the stage by pressing the screen to control the auxiliary line shot by RPG. As for gameplay, you can add flame, implementation and other obstacles to increase the difficulty to pass, and can try to add PvE modes; in terms of RPG, you can add HP, role type, role skills, and other values. In peripheral systems, you can try to add level rankings, missions, plots, etc, to create a long-term goal.

2. Character Builder

A prototype with high CTR. It can be combined with additional systems featuring Chinese culture, such as Male Virtue Academy or Kindergarten Simulation. In the main storyline, players should obtain currency by passing various stages such as spelling Chinese characters and telling four-character idioms, while in the additional systems, players will consume currency for business or cultivation simulation, thus forming a complete gaming cycle.

3. Come and Fight