Zhang Shule is a columnist for People's Daily Online and People's Post and Telegraph

The little game is still at the end of the chain of contempt,

Without innovation, we can only survive by burning money.

After just a few years of development, the user scale of the Mini Game has reached the 1 billion mark.

Recently, at the WeChat Mini Game Developer Conference, the WeChat Mini Game team said that after 6 years of development, the Mini Game has an efficient, stable and long-term business environment.

At the same time, it also said that the number of Mini Game users has reached 1 billion, and the monthly active users have reached 500 million, and the user usage time has continued to grow.

For domestic game bigwigs, attacking mini-games has also become a rigid need.

01 One billion users, is it a blue ocean?

At the 2024 Journey Carnival, Zhao Jianfeng, the person in charge of the Journey IP track and the game producer of "Original Journey", announced that he would fully promote the mini game version of "Original Journey" this year.

Entering the mini game is not a whim, he mentioned in the interview that as early as 2020, Giant Network began to plan the layout of the mini game.

Sanqi Mutual Entertainment also made early efforts in the mini game track, and its "Seeking the Way" launched by it has dominated the WeChat mini game best-selling list for half a year since mid-2023.

At the same time, the enthusiasm of game manufacturers for mobile games and mini-games has also come and gone.

The data shows that in the first half of the year, the number of mobile game apps in the domestic market has declined to a certain extent.

On July 8, the "White Paper on Mobile Game Effect Advertising in the Mainland Market in the First Half of 2024" (hereinafter referred to as the "White Paper") released by DataEye, a data research institution, showed that the number of mobile game apps in the mainland market in the first half of 2024 was about 14,600, down 9.9% from 16,200 in the first half of 2023, the lowest in the past three years.

On the other hand, the number of mini games is on the rise.

In the first half of 2024, more than 13,900 WeChat mini games will be invested, a year-on-year increase of 42%. In the same period in 2022 and 2023, it will increase by 95% and 73% year-on-year, respectively.

In other words, in the first half of the year, mini-games that relied more on click-and-click assessment than APP games accounted for half of the purchases.

13,900 mini games participated, which is quite close to the 14,600 entries of APP games.

This also means that more and more game manufacturers are beginning to target the cake of mini games.

The continuous increase in the number of mini games confirms the continuous attention of enterprises to this track.

02 Mini-games, surpassing mobile games?

An industry voice is also emerging, that is, the market space of mini games continues to increase, and the space of the mobile game market will be squeezed in the future.

At the same time, the growth of advertising volume also means that the competition in the industry is also intensifying.

Previously, the core advantage of game companies in the layout of Mini Games was that the R&D investment of Mini Games was relatively low, and the cost of buying volume was relatively low, but the growth rate of Mini Games also slowed down.

This seems to illustrate the fatigue of the mini-game again.

As mentioned in the report, the ranking of the Mini Game Launch List almost matches the corresponding popularity and best-selling list rankings, which proves the contribution of buying volume to WeChat Mini Games.

The mini game track continues to be hot, and at the same time, the short life cycle of mini games and the high dependence on delivery are also highlighted.

Compared with the WeChat mini game list in the same period last year, only "I Am a Big Boss" is still in the top 10 of the delivery list, and "The King of Salted Fish", which was originally ranked first on the list, has been ranked 12th on the list.

The fierce competition behind this can be seen.

03 Why are they burning money?

What types of mobile game products will the growth of Mini Games have a greater impact on?

Relying on buying quantity is popular, and if you don't buy volume, it will decline, which seems to have become a huge problem for small games, how to break it?

Will the Mini Game market experience a boom and then a depression?

In this regard, Li Zhe, a reporter from China Business Daily, had an exchange with Shule, and this monkey thought:

Mini games are still at the end of the chain of contempt, and without innovation, they can only survive by burning money.

Mini games are a dimensionality reduction field, and games that were previously popular but outdated on mobile games can gradually enter mini games after technical iteration to form a secondary growth, which is also the fundamental reason for the influx of small and medium-sized game manufacturers.

Due to the generation gap in technology, it is more of a supplement to the mobile game market, but it will have an impact on some unenterprising mobile game manufacturers.

Specifically, the affected mobile game categories are the pre-mainstream game categories at the beginning of the rise of mobile games such as casual puzzles, tower defense, and cards.

After all, it is precisely these categories that are limited by the network and hardware that Mini Games are attacking that flourish back then.

At the same time, the slowdown in mobile game delivery is due to the weakening of users due to the previous excessive purchase volume, and the conversion rate continues to decline, and the cost of buying volume has risen.

On the other hand, the crazy buying volume of mini games is precisely following the footsteps of buying mobile games.

This kind of buying volume game has a common feature, that is, changing skins and copycats, which are just copies and pastes of the classic gameplay of the past, without their own experience moat, and can only rely on buying volume to maintain activity.

All in all, a mini-game that lacks its own innovative experience will die if it doesn't buy it, which makes it only "can't stop buying", which is almost a common problem for most mini-games.

04 The future of mini-games?

If you want to break the game, Mini Games can't just transplant the previous generation of client games (online games, mobile games) like the previous browser games, but use your own fragmented game experience to innovate some categories that belong to Mini Games.

Previously, a number of phenomenal hits in small games, such as Traveling Frog and Sheep, have given some ideas.

Although it has not escaped the "monthly sale", it has also proved that the logic of "innovation does not depend on buying volume" is feasible.

As for whether the mini game market will experience a boom and depression, there is no need to worry too much.

The Mini Game market will only stabilize, just like browser games, which are actually mini games on PC, which have also gone through prosperity, and then stabilized, and their market share is also stable.

It's just that the history of the game gives another answer, that is, like browser games, the explosion is fast, but the ceiling is obvious, and it is not easy to make it bigger.

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