There are always people who say that there is no idol culture in China, and virtual idols are no exception. No, the once prosperous V-circle is now less and less in the public eye. However, there are always project teams who do not believe in evil and want to challenge stereotypes. In August, Tencent unexpectedly announced a virtual idol game project "Void Ring", although it has been a while, but today I still want to talk to you, after all, in the past three months, a lot of things have happened.

The PV of "Void Ring" is well versed in the status quo of the V circle, and the game content is not shown much, and it is intensively playing stalks throughout. The 6-minute video is not so much a game PV as a big inventory of famous memes in the V circle.

Due to the large number of characters in the scene, the average number of screens assigned to each character is not much, but as a PV, this arrangement is a success. A large number of virtual anchor fans arrived at the scene as soon as possible and carried out high-intensity barrage output. The 6 million views reflect that the mobilization ability of fans in the V circle is still strong, and the comment area of more than 50,000 has become a battlefield for "cordial communication" between anchor fans.

In any case, the goal of "bombing the streets" in the PV of "Void Ring" has indeed been achieved. But why did Tencent launch this project at a time when the V circle was gradually declining? Does "Void Ring" want to make a small circle game for fans to absorb the last traffic of the V circle, or does it want to revive the V circle and make it "great again"? If it's the latter, can a game project really turn things around and save the V circle from danger? Or, as the poisonous netizen said, is it just to organize a game of casual dinner in advance on the road to the decline of the V circle?

What kind of game will Void Ring be?

The PV of "Void Ring" was made to play stalks, and it was to find out how much active traffic there was in the V circle, so there was not much content involved in the game in the PV. PV inserts some possible game scenarios in the gap between playing memes, such as different weapons and equipment in the battle screen, a contract signing process in the development part, a practice room, and a living room......

According to the clues provided by PV, everyone began to make big conjectures about the game form of "Void Ring". The possibility of a music game was ruled out in the first place, and there was no such display in the PV.

The likelihood of otherworldly RPGs is also relatively low. The anchors' outfits are mainly urban style, and they really travel to another world to fight monsters, not only can't change their clothes well, but they can't have fun anymore.

Although PV has battle images, it doesn't seem to be very likely to be made into an action or fighting game. After all, action games are difficult to produce and pick players, and it is not easy to combine them with the cultivation elements of virtual idols.

Taken together, more people speculate that the game may still learn from the idea of "Horse Racing Girl" and "School Idol Master": combat is just a form of performance, and what the player has to do is to configure the team or tactics in advance as a commander or producer, and then watch the characters act according to tactics on the field.

If the battle can still be glimpsed, then the PV does not show the cultivation mode and the card drawing kryptonite mode at all. Considering that most of the virtual streamers are not original to the game, but each has a character with independent activities of fans, it may not be a good idea to divide the characters by SSR rarity.

Idols have their own fans, and the strength of the card face can easily become a rhythm flashpoint. And there is another layer of uncontrollable factors for virtual idols, that is, they may retire, collapse or even touch the red line at any time. Therefore, the gacha of "Void Ring" may also learn from Japanese games, and introduce "clothing" or "combat equipment" of different rarities for the same character.

And for those who have graduated, the game can also consider sports games such as FIFA, with limited cards issued by year, and today's graduates will not be hindered from joining the "dream team" of the past. If the game can solve the copyright problem after the retirement of idols, it is not impossible to become a virtual anchor museum.

In short, there are many templates that can be used for "Void Ring", and many of them are ready-made. It must be said that the biggest disadvantage of these ready-made templates is that idol games are generally very liver and time-consuming. But think about it, the most important thing for these users who can chase the V circle with high intensity and can't soak in the cyber community 24 hours a day is time! A hyper-liver game is exactly what this user group needs.

So, don't use the needs of ordinary players to understand the kitchen game. In many details, the game is not guided by the needs of pan-players, and it prioritizes the needs of its own target group.

Of course, all of the above is just speculation. Tencent has never said what the genre of "Void Ring" will be. After the PV was released, except for opening the official website to make an appointment, there was no other news.

Void Ring is better than a game project

After chatting about PV, let's go back to the question, why did Tencent make "Void Ring"?

The domestic V circle has cooled down rapidly in the past two years, not only disappeared from the financial report analysis of many companies, but also disappeared from the attention list of many fans. "Void Ring" also verifies this. PV is equivalent to a descending order of popularity of the hard stalks in the V circle in the past two years, but people who can't understand it are still confused. It's hard for you to explain to someone who doesn't mix in the V circle where the fun is with this black meme dense PV video.

There are many reasons for the ebb tide of the V-ring. But a fundamental problem is that the V-Circle's ability to attract new users has rapidly declined. This decline, the superiority of the small circle naturally crowds out newcomers, which is naturally one of the reasons, but more importantly, the departure of capital.

Regardless of whether fans in the V circle want to admit it or not, the hottest years in the V circle are the years when capital frantically poured in. Projects such as A-SOUL relied on the help of multiple capitals to break the circle. On the one hand, capital is interested in the technical content of virtual idols and has scientific and technological stories to tell, and on the other hand, it is interested in the market potential of virtual idols. Capital enters the V circle not to do charity, but to make money.

But soon, neither of these conditions was true. On the one hand, with the crazy technology tree of generative AI in the past two years, the virtual anchor who performs in the middle of the game has become no longer fashionable, and there is no longer a sexy technology story to tell. On the other hand, the existence of the people in China makes virtual idols in a very unstable state on the road to commercialization, and they may explode at any time. As a result, compared with real anchors, virtual anchors have failed to give full play to their advantages, and there are many disadvantages, and the capital that has come back to taste will naturally slowly withdraw.

With the withdrawal of capital, the V-circle could not escape the natural law of entropy increase and began to collapse. As the saying goes, the smaller the circle, the more broken things there are. Without the continuous influx of new users, the stagnant water will naturally become more and more foul-smelling. There are many reasons for community chaos, but one fundamental reason is that the pie is no longer bigger.

Like last month, @恬豆sprouted a birthday party that successfully broke through 10,000 ships (a reward mechanism). And this is already the best commercial result of this year's virtual anchor live broadcast, and it is not uncommon to live broadcast Wanjian a few years ago. The collapse of the circle is visible to the naked eye.

Because of this, Tencent's entry into the game is a surprise. Today's V circle has long become a hot potato, with a small flow and a lot of black mud. Is it worth it to end up for the sake of those black mud-stained traffic?

This still has to go back to the "Void Ring" project itself. On the one hand, this project is not led by a game studio group under Tencent IEG, at least I don't see the relevant LOGO appear in the PV, but it is led by Tencent's CDD (Content Development Department) department, which launched the "Star Pupil" project.

Similar to the positioning of projects such as miHoYo's "Deer Ming", Star Pupil is also a typical technology-led virtual idol project. The project focuses on research technology, supplemented by virtual idols. It is with the anchor point of technological exploration that Xingtong has not been abandoned by large companies. But after burning money for so long, the "eldest lady" also had to think about how to make money.

Therefore, the emergence of "Void Ring" may be a commercial exploration of the V circle by the CDD department. After all, compared to live broadcasting, making games is a more familiar commercial model for Tencent. And a big brawl plan like "Void Ring" can only be pushed in the context of the overall recession in the V circle.

Recalling a few years ago, when the virtual anchor was in full swing, capital was sought after, traffic was pouring in, and no one was convinced by anyone in that blazing atmosphere, everyone wanted to do a small goal, how could they succumb to the plan of a certain company? Only when the general trend is gone, the cold winter is coming, and it is difficult to support alone, will the various forces think of abandoning their previous suspicions and huddling together for warmth, and will consider cooperative projects such as "Void Ring".

At the end of the PV, it can be seen that "Void Ring" integrates the major Vs that are still alive today, and the coverage can be called an "all-star lineup". The success of the "Smash Bros. Bros. project" depends on the game in three points, and the IP integration ability of the leader in seven points.

Whether it is "Nintendo All-Stars" or Marvel's "Avengers", the first step in IP integration is to clarify IP ownership. Only by unifying the scattered IPs can we avoid internal friction, and the capital will be able to incubate with peace of mind.

Looking at the next door, the same is true for the development path of virtual streamers in Japan. The Warring States period of the V-circle has ended, and the best quality resources have finally been integrated into the hands of several big companies such as Rainbow Society and Hololive. The revenue structure of Day V has long shifted from live broadcast income to commodity sales and IP licensing income. This business model, translated into IP, is to sell the "holster" IP and commercialization, and no longer rely too much on the role of the actor as a "person".

Therefore, does Tencent have the plan to use "Void Ring" to integrate the V circle and fish out the valuable virtual idols to re-form the group IP? It cannot be said that there is no such possibility. But if you really have to take this step, the project cost of "Void Ring" is not something that a game can support.

Just making games can't save the V-circle

Looking back at Japan, it is true that many idol projects started with games, even mobile games. Far away are "Idol Master" (console game), "Idol Master: Cinderella Girl" (mobile game), near there is "Horse Racing Girl" (mobile game), and other two-dimensional idol projects are also indispensable for games, such as "LoveLive", "BanG Dream!" and so on.

For Japan, idol mobile games are already a very mature category. "School Idol Master", which was launched in Japan in June this year, achieved commercial success immediately after its launch by learning the performance form of "Horse Racing Girl" and the IP appeal of "Idol Master", which also caused the profit of Bandai Namco's game division to soar by 453.3% in the quarter (note: there is also a contribution from the Old Man Ring DLC).

However, a closer analysis will show that all idol projects in Japan that can succeed do so are not based on a single line of games, but on a cross-media basis, and are only successful through the joint operation of the entire ACG industrial system, such as games, manga, animation, voice actors, music production, and live events. And all this can only be established based on the idol economy consumption habits that Japan has cultivated over the years of commercialization.

On the other hand, in China, there is neither a mature ACG industry linkage mechanism nor a large-scale idol consumption culture. It's normal to imitate the idol games made in Japan, and it is normal not to do them. Games such as "Idol Dream Festival" are also flowering inside the wall, and fragrant outside the wall. And the domestic male idol game, one counts as one, and all of them are lying on the mass graves.

And games are already the strongest part of the domestic ACG industry, and games can't bring idols, let alone expect animation and comics to drive the idol career. And the "virtual" side of the virtual idol itself is closer to ACG culture. This is a family in Japan, but it has become a debuff in China, and it is placed in the two-dimensional circle where everything is now being cut, and the V circle is afraid that it will have been expelled from the second class long ago.

Therefore, the conclusion is still one sentence: just making a game can't save the V circle. If you want to do a virtual idol project and break the circle, it must be cross-media, and you must mobilize various upstream and downstream resources. However, the current situation in China is that neither the production side nor the consumption side have the conditions. What Tencent wants to do means that one person will carry everything and do everything in the whole industry chain by himself.

I can't bring it, I can't bring it no matter how much I think about it.

But there's a good saying: the role of the entrepreneur is to find opportunities where everyone doesn't think they are.

Maybe "Void Ring" is the challenger that breaks the game, and it is a new starting point for the revival of virtual idols. Who can say that this will not happen? The soldier has a saying that he will die and come back to life, and I hope that "Void Ring" will do everything completely, but don't just do half of this sentence.

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