According to the survey, so far this year, the overall market revenue of China’s game industry has reached 203.61 billion yuan. The game market’s growth rate rebounded for the first time after two consecutive years of decline, with 23% growth. In 2017, the revenue of China’s mobile game market was 116.12 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth of 41.7%, compared with 87.2% in 2015 and 59.2% in 2016. It is an indisputable fact that the growth rate is slowing down rapidly. As developers worry about the next growth in the mobile game market, one particular demographic has caught their attention: women.
From “Four Two-yuan Husbands” in 2017, “Frog Son” in early 2018, and “Cloud Sang Yu Yi” in the middle of this year, love changing clothes to develop a series of mobile games are all the rage. It is understood that most of these mobile game users are women. This opened the eyes of developers to the potential of female gamers and upended industry perceptions of the gaming market. It was these games that made us realize the possibilities of the female gaming market.
Right time, right place, the female mobile game market set sail
So why is there so much potential in the female mobile game market? Based on the analysis of market environment, audience and technology development within the industry, we can summarize the following three points:
First, catch the moment — there’s a big gap in the female mobile game market.
Statistics show that in 2018, 57.4% of Chinese mobile game users were male and 42.6% were female. In comparison, 75.9 percent of the total game audience is male and 24.1 percent is female. This data tells us two things: first, the audience for games is still overwhelmingly male; Second, there has been a huge increase in female users in mobile games.
In the game market, there are many games featuring female users, such as the representative MMORPG online game “Jixia Love Online Iii”, the ORANGE Light game of AVG class, and there are rich female games, but the overall game users are still dominated by men. At the same time, casual puzzle games still dominate the mobile game market. The single variety and lack of content simply cannot meet the needs of the growing female game users in the mobile game market. That said, right now, there is a demand for games for women, but there are few games for women. As a result, there is still a void in the female mobile game market.
Second, it has the right place — the “seven inches” of female players.
For women, their innate sensitivity makes it easy to recognize the gap between their ideal and real selves, and fantasy is a common way to bridge the gap. Seize this subtle psychology, seize the female players “seven inches”.
By “warm game” research and development, Cheetah Mobile Company (the original Kingsoft network) the entire platform of the exclusive agent of the world’s first fresh change around the world mobile phone game “warm change around the world”, is the love change to develop a hand game. In the game, players through matching the character requirements of the clothing to enter, solve puzzles, collect all kinds of clothing. At the same time, players can not only match their own, but also with other players to dress up PK; In addition, the operation is simple, but also need to consume a certain amount of brain, entertainment and intelligence, perfect to meet the needs of office workers, pressure female crowd.
It looks no different than any other game, but it cleverly captures the psychology of women, truly understands the needs of women, so as to please women and knock on the door of the female game market. What woman doesn’t love beautiful clothes, shoes and accessories? Character design combined with sweet and lovely, as if collecting forever beautiful costumes, even if they are just a piece of paper (warm to travel around the world is folded paper game), but the tiny mobile phone screen, “they are all my” – this is a kind of mixed with vanity, security, such as the complex mixture of satisfaction, pleasure this is a kind of ideal self satisfaction.
Third, the abundance of people — technological progress and content.
New things always have many shortcomings that are not easy to find, but the market has its own natural ability to adjust. After the new market share is allocated, the remaining enterprises will continue to improve their technology and make their products perfect in order to better develop and seize more market shares. The same is true for love.
In terms of the form of game expression, there are changes from 2D to 3D, plane to three-dimensional. The ancestor of this kind of mobile games, “Nuannuan series” and the peak of love and Producer, are paper folding games, in which the characters are presented in 2D form. Up to now, the ordinary 2D mode can no longer satisfy female players, so there is a 3D love game “Cloud Hangyu yi” co-developed by Tencent and Kingsoft.
In terms of game content, there is more gameplay and more content. From the traditional style of a task, set suit, competitive pk, in the love and the producer of all kinds and different styles of “virtual boyfriend” “love”, “cloud type clothes” pinched face, clothing custom functions, to a large number of high-quality voice-over artists to join and characters, plot design of increasingly sophisticated, the whole love change the game system is yet to mature.
With the right combination of timing, location and people, the female mobile game market has become a potential market.
Behind the huge potential, female mobile games still have many deficiencies
So far, despite the popularity of the female gaming market, many women who play games don’t see themselves as “gamers.” Even though they haven’t lost any of the popular games, they still don’t see them as part of their lives or as important entertainment. This shows that there is still a lot of untapped potential in the female gaming market, and there is still a lot of room for improvement. However, after the rapid development of the early days of several hot mobile clothing changes have encountered varying degrees of problems.
First of all, the developers’ shallow understanding of female gamers is the number one flaw in this genre. A good example is Love and Producer. “Love and Producer” is a love mystery puzzle game for young female users released by Wuhu Diizhe Network Technology Co., LTD on December 20, 2017. Although the company has made innovations in gameplay, what impresses people most is its crazy “money”.
After seeing the appeal of husbands to female gamers, developers stopped focusing on story design and began to focus on how to get players to top up their money. This foreshadowed his subsequent Waterloo, but the last straw that broke the camel’s back was his wrong grasp of female psychology.
While Love and Producer did well at first by capturing the female psyche, game makers still don’t fully understand the female psyche. Women are as addicted to dating games as they are to TV shows. This kind of RPG-like experience, let them have a strong sense of participation, not because they fall in love with the virtual character addicted to extricate themselves. The hit game Love and Producer misunderstood women’s psychology and tried to “force” players to spend money in order to fall in love. Sure enough, it has lost a lot of players and is no longer the dominant player in the market.
Secondly, the lack of strong engagement and durability is the second biggest disadvantage of such games. For example, travel Frog, a once-popular mobile placement game from Hit-Point, managed to get a better handle on female gamers than Love and Producer, but failed to keep up.
Light gameplay, positive emotional engagement, and unique style are key factors in Travel Frog’s success, but none of these factors contribute to strong user engagement and sustain because it relies on these traits that are now replaceable. The so-called light gameplay is not as good as wechat “mini games”, and the survival of “mobilizing players’ emotions for user use” can not be developed for a long time.
A similar thing happened a few years ago with Hit-Point, a placement game with a similar setting, except that the main character was a cat. According to big data, Cats In the Backyard has been among the top three free apps in The Japanese app market for several times. Since July 2017, the number of downloads has fallen below 17 million. Hence the importance of sustainability.
Finally, game homogenization is a serious problem. The game industry has high requirements for content, and it is even more difficult for domestic game companies to “do well in content”, which is the weakness of most companies. In the current industry, a successful game is often copied by others, after all, it is the easiest way to succeed. In addition, with the popularity of smart phones, people’s processing time becomes fragmented, and their acceptance of new things becomes higher and higher. As a result, the market demand suddenly increases, which promotes the emergence of a large number of mobile games.
In this situation of “learning from the trend + large market demand”, games without quality content are everywhere, but they are only a flash in the pan, and there are even a large number of mobile games in pursuit of “fast food” survival. How to make “content” mobile games, avoid the development of “fast food” has become a top priority.
How to continue the rise of Female mobile Games
It’s good to see more attention being paid to the female gaming market, including the success of the Love To Grow Costume genre, but it’s hard to say whether the female gaming market is on the rise because there are still a lot of issues to be worked out. How can developers capture the female psyche? Is the female game market only for dress-up games? Is the female game market going to have to go down the hard, low IQ, low manipulation road? Not so, I think. So what’s the rise of female mobile gaming?
First, better grasp the female psychology. More extensive female psychological research, scientific analysis of female psychology, the establishment of a comprehensive and extensive database, the production of female logic, give play to the advantages of female character games; Then, the development of game IP, improve the establishment of “surrounding culture”, through the game to extend its related TV dramas, novels, cultural creation, etc., in line with the reality, and then through these “surrounding” to attract more players, prolong the life of the game.
Second, adhere to innovative development, improve the game model of the lack of sustainability, the pursuit of sustainable development of the game. At the same time, it should enrich the types of games for women. Nowadays, the types of games for women are too single. Although female players prefer love and costume games, the more reason is that they have no choice. By making more kinds of games for women, we can more comprehensively develop the female game market and tap the potential of the female game market.
Third, shift the mindset towards women as gamers rather than as game content. The current male-only gaming market, coupled with the lack of game genres for women, has led to a misconception that women are only good for casual games. Men and women are naturally different, but according to big data, men and women are more and more alike in their psychological traits than they used to be, and sticking to male logic is counterproductive to tapping into the female gaming market.
On the whole, after the explosive growth in the early stage of China’s mobile game industry, the market has become saturated and the capital has gradually cooled down. In terms of products, although the number of newly released mobile games has increased exponentially in recent years, the homogenization is very serious and the audience has become aesthetic fatigue. At present, how to maintain quality is the key. The seemingly easy market for women’s games, which still has a lot of potential to grow, needs more focus on quality. However, opportunities and challenges coexist, high risk and high return, looking forward to the future changes in the Chinese women’s game market!
Article/Liu Kuang public number, ID: Liukuang110, this article first kuang Venture capital network