Text/Nine Lotus Treasure Lantern & Wang Dan

In the eyes of many people, the Spring Festival may mean a holiday for the New Year. But for manufacturers, this is not a time to relax - in addition to the summer vacation, the Spring Festival is another golden time for various products to show their muscles and grab traffic.

And in this year's Spring Festival scramble, Grape Jun found an unusual phenomenon:

Kuaishou is not a platform that started with game live broadcasting, but this time more than 40 games have chosen to cooperate with it for Spring Festival activities.

Even "Glory of Kings" and "Peace Elite", which have occupied the top two best-selling iOS lists in the country all year round, have also held special shows on Kuaishou's side; "Dark Zone Breakout", "Egg Boy Party" and other leading products of large manufacturers have also increased their exclusive rights.

Kuaishou Spring Festival file, many games launched cooperative activities

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This isn't the first time we've talked about the value of Kuaishou in game marketing. A year ago, we said that Kuaishou is building a content ecology and touching e-sports resources, and it is becoming a marketing center for more and more manufacturers.

But now Kuaishou's situation and status have obviously made a qualitative leap - at the marketing node of the New Year, it has become a common choice for in-depth cooperation with top products, and even the resource investment of some games is also inclined to it.

Head games flock to Kuaishou, and traffic plates are certainly a consideration. But in addition to this, I think there may be another sign worth paying attention to: Kuaishou used to frequently cooperate with manufacturers in content, but now, the cooperation model between them and manufacturers has become deeper and more diverse.

01

During the Spring Festival, the picture is lively

Take the "Game People's Spring Festival" series of activities, manufacturers and Kuaishou seem to have grasped the core key of the New Year's flavor through cooperation: liveliness. Specifically, there are more people, more programs, more ways to play, and more benefits.

Of course, everyone is not just a name and a simple linkage: this time, the manufacturer's resource investment in Kuaishou is not small, and some of the benefits of the Spring Festival stalls are only given to Kuaishou; At the same time, some of the activity content and special gameplay are also customized by the in-depth cooperation between the two sides, integrating the characteristics of the game and the Kuaishou ecology.

First of all, Kuaishou and manufacturers have enabled a large number of head anchor resources to ensure the quantity and quality of program content for the Spring Festival.

For example, the Kuaishou special event of "Peace Elite" "Lucky New Year Party", and the live broadcast of "King's New Year Wish Reunion", there are many popular anchors, professional players, and well-known hosts to help out and conduct collective group broadcasts, and the program has many tricks, in addition to the most common ring matches in PvP games, there are also singing, dancing, reunion dinners and other links, Kuaishou also fits the vertical screen live broadcast environment to make special interactive effects, which is equivalent to the game theme Spring Festival Gala with both talent and work......

"Auspicious New Year Party", you can click to view the larger picture

"The King's New Year Wish Reunion" live broadcast special, you can click to view the larger picture

Of course, in addition to the two special sessions, there were also many popular anchors who participated in other activities during the same period. According to Kuaishou's official statistics, there are more than 100 top anchors participating in this year's "Game People's Spring Festival".

On the one hand, the large number of people means that the lower limit of traffic will not be less, after all, the popular anchor itself is the traffic attraction point; On the other hand, a large number of anchors are working on the same stage, so that there is a better chance of colliding with explosive content and driving up the heat of game discussion.

Secondly, this time, the manufacturer has invested a lot in the welfare of the Kuaishou platform, and the two sides have done a lot of interactive gameplay based on the welfare.

For example, in the two special sessions mentioned above, each live broadcast will distribute cash red envelope rain, game virtual currency, game skins, digital physical prizes, etc., it is reported that this time there are 100,000 sets of game skins invested in "Glory of Kings" alone, worth more than 10 million yuan; "Dark Zone Breakout" also added millions of lucky bag props worth more than 10 million yuan; "Egg Boy Party" added millions of cash to be used for the Spring Festival production promotion activities (Spring Festival game exclusive topic content submission incentives).

The forms of participation for users to obtain benefits are also quite diverse, such as flipping cards for lucky draws, watching live broadcasts to receive benefits, red envelope rain, and opening black ...... with anchors The interactive gameplay that most people can think of, Kuaishou's activity is basically complete.

Finally, combined with the platform ecology, manufacturers and Kuaishou found multiple topic heating points.

As we mentioned earlier, anchors produce content (videos and live broadcasts), and from the audience's point of view, this is a basic ecological form. But for Kuaishou, who started with short videos, they also have another traffic conversion ecology: users produce short video content that has fun, and other users spread it after swiping it, or follow up to produce new content.

This time, the manufacturer and Kuaishou combined the platform's short video advantage longboard and launched a related video hot gameplay - under the magic (video special effects) option of casual shooting, players can find ways to play such as peace shake and king face swap. The former will prompt the player to dance with Peaceshake and switch the background to the Peace Elite game scene; The latter will combine AI technology to draw the photographer as a character in "Glory of Kings".

Peaceful shake and shoot gameplay

XX shake, this is the type of content that is easy to explode on the short video platform, there are one or two XX shakes out of the circle, and someone will soon follow up and launch more XX shake videos; And AI face swapping is also another type of rectification that is easy to cause discussion, because you never know who you are most like in the eyes of AI, it may surprise people, and it may also be lively.

Combined with the activity gameplay launched by the short video ecosystem, it can not only accelerate the spread of game topics, but also have a higher probability of producing explosive content in the platform ecology, and at the same time, it also transforms the identity of players and viewers into participants and co-creators who can participate and arouse the heat of the topic.

This may be the special feature of Kuaishou game marketing: it is not a simple pseudonymous linkage, but a set of content + interaction + ecological in-depth cooperation model. In this process, Kuaishou's identity is not only a "traffic platform", but also a marketing participant who actively mobilizes, integrates and uses its own resources.

And this in-depth cooperation has also brought unexpected results:

On the one hand, there is a lot of traffic attracted by cooperative activities and benefits - the cumulative number of users watching the live broadcast of "King's New Year Wish Reunion" reached 75.2 million, and the highest number of online users reached 3.39 million; The cumulative number of viewers of the "Happy New Year Party" reached 69.01 million, and the highest number of online users reached 3.25 million.

On the other hand, there are also quite a lot of users who participate in content creation and gameplay and heating topics in disguise - the cumulative number of submissions to the Spring Festival video of "Honor of Kings" has reached 370,000, the cumulative number of views of the topic has reached 5 billion, and the cumulative number of hot spots on the list has reached 67 times; The cumulative number of videos of the "Peace Elite" event has reached 73,000, the cumulative number of views of the topic has reached 6 billion, and the cumulative number of hot spots on the list has reached 46 times.

02

Why does everyone choose Kuaishou?

So, why is Kuaishou suddenly so popular in the game circle? In fact, this is really not a sudden or accidental event, because throughout 2024, whether it is the hot head hits, or the classic games that have been around for some years, or the new products that need to be exposed, they are all grabbing the traffic cake of Kuaishou, and most of them have eaten it.

Take head products such as "Glory of Kings" as an example, we have also talked about it before, the total number of viewers in the Kuaishou live broadcast room of the KPL spring finals last year was as high as 35.93 million, and the highest number of simultaneous online users reached 1.11 million, setting a record for the live broadcast of Kuaishou e-sports events.

Several other heads, such as "Peace Elite" and "Crossfire", set a new record high in Kuaishou last year.

For example, "Peace Elite", as one of the most popular games in China, its data in Kuaishou can be called terrifying: the average number of monthly live viewers reached 184 million, the average number of monthly anchors exceeded 320,000, the average number of monthly game short video broadcasts was 22 billion, and the average number of monthly creators exceeded 2.71 million.

As a game series that has been in operation for a long time, "CrossFire" has also reached a strategic cooperation with Kuaishou, which has rejuvenated its second spring: since the "CrossFire" series has designated Kuaishou as the official short video cooperation platform for e-sports, it has become the most significant growth game product on the platform. According to Kuaishou's official data, the average daily VV of the 2024Q4 "CrossFire Mobile Game" version increased by 45.46% year-on-year, and the average daily game live viewing time of users increased by 124.87% year-on-year.

The results of the competition are even better than ever. Kuaishou will take advantage of the off-season of the "CrossFire Mobile Game" event in 2024 to hold three CFM Kuaishou Legend Cups, according to public information, the CFM Legend Cup Summer Tournament is particularly outstanding because of the event innovation and real-time prediction function of the event, and the consumption data even surpasses PEL, becoming the second largest event in Kuaishou, with an average increase of 5-10 times in the popularity of the second-way ecological anchor of the event, and the overall consumption data of the event accounts for more than 70% of the edition area.

After seeing Kuaishou's capabilities, not only these influential evergreen games, but also some new games came to test the waters. As far as we know about the new games, such as "Firefly Assault", "Heartbeat Town", "Need for Speed: Assemble", etc., in the first month of the open beta, Kuaishou has reached the top 1 of the all-content platform in terms of live broadcast, video supply and consumption scale, and the number of head anchors, and has maintained such results for a long time since then.

Focusing on a single case may not be intuitive enough. According to insiders, in 2024, game manufacturers will have more than 15 times more than 15 times their content budgets on Kuaishou; Among them, the investment in the promotion of Kuaishou's new games, the promotion of new games, and the promotion of new versions has increased by more than 10 times. Now many friends should be able to see that the game circle is really eyeing Kuaishou in 2024.

So the question is, what did Kuaishou do to make these three types of games willing to "play" with Kuaishou? In my opinion, the core lies in the fact that Kuaishou provides full-link support from exposure to conversion for games with different life cycles and needs through the triple engine of "content ecology + event resources + precise user consumption chain".

Combined with their new actions in recent years, it is not difficult to find an essential change after peeling back the cocoon: Kuaishou not only has a large traffic, but also forms a mature ecology that is very suitable for all kinds of game cooperation, and it is the kind of healthy ecology that game manufacturers value when they are important nodes or new game announcements. The construction of the Kuaishou ecosystem can be roughly divided into 4 dimensions.

The first is to expand the army of creators and consolidate the game content community.

For example, if you talk about the commentary and hosting that e-sports audiences like to watch the most, Kuaishou has signed a lot of contracts: take "Glory of Kings" as an example, the official commentators and hosts of the event, such as Bottle, Tianyun, Ling'er, and Xiaolu, have collectively signed Kuaishou, and they have accumulated hundreds of thousands or even millions of fans on the platform.

Audiences come to the platform for content, whether it is for fun, professional strategies, or event commentary, these are all part of the content. From this point of view, the creator of content is the premise and infrastructure condition for a platform to absorb volume. The output of a large amount of content will also increase the probability of the output of explosive content.

One of the more prominent examples is the subway escape mode of "Peace Elite" in June last year. As soon as the new gameplay was released, the relevant content on Kuaishou exploded immediately, and as a result, "Shuai Yu" and "Unspeakable", two super head anchors with 12.89 million and 29.72 million fans, appeared. Among them, the video "The First Subway Tycoon on the Whole Network" released by "Unspeakable" also reached 1.312 million likes.

The second is to continue to invest in the field of e-sports.

The first is the esports team resource aspect. Their own KSG team has various game divisions such as "Honor of Kings" and "Peace Elite", and recently established a fighting game division. With such a team, Kuaishou can make a fuss in many game fields.

What's more, in addition to their own teams, the head e-sports clubs of different games such as RW, RSG, Wolves, TJB, Q9, EP and so on are deeply bound to Kuaishou. In the field of Honor of Kings e-sports, in addition to its own team, Kuaishou also has some "brother teams". For example, the platform's head anchors Tianci, Lala, Saobai, etc., are not only KPL second-way commentators, but also investors or shareholders of the KPL team.

The second is the event resources. Kuaishou has purchased the live broadcast rights of many e-sports activities, in addition to KPL, CFML and other competitions, last year they also became a short video and live broadcast strategic cooperation platform for the 2024 Saudi Arabia E-sports World Cup.

Kuaishou also combined events with e-sports resources. After their exclusive contracted anchor "Kid" Zeng Zhuojun won the "Street Fighter" world championship in the Saudi Esports World Cup, Kuaishou and Zeng Zhuojun also jointly launched the "Kuaishou Fighting Carnival Mentor Century Cup 3", and announced the establishment of the Kuaishou Esports KSG Fighting Division on New Year's Day this year, and they will represent Kuaishou to participate in the future global fighting e-sports top events.

Today, Kuaishou's hard work in the fighting game track has made a difference: with manufacturer cooperation, e-sports events, top players and commentary-type anchors, their supply of high-quality content in this field has reached more than 90% of the market share.

Finally, there is the investment of offline resources. The year before last, we talked about the Kuaishou Taihu International E-sports Stadium jointly built with the local area in Suzhou. For an online platform, this may not be necessary, but if you want to leave the impression of "Kuaishou and e-sports are deeply bound" in the pan-user circle, this kind of strong resource investment may be necessary.

The third is to integrate and mobilize the above-mentioned ecological resources, cooperate with manufacturers to carry out various e-sports activities, or provide customized solutions. After all, no one understands their own superior resources and audience needs better than Kuaishou himself.

For example, the aforementioned "Peace Elite", after the subway escape mode exploded, they cooperated with Kuaishou to hold the "Metro Tycoon Cup". The final of this competition once reached a peak of 190,000 people, and finally attracted more than 59 million Kuaishou users to watch it online;

Previously, "Need for Speed: The Assembly" and Kuaishou Live Summer Festival also carried out a combination of online and offline publicity, which included not only the download activities provided by Kuaishou for the game, but also the creation of guiding the content ecology. After the launch of "Need for Speed: Gathering", they also did the first linkage offline event for the product, "Kuaishou×Need for Speed: Assemble Hot Bay Speed Party".

And this whole set of customized solutions has brought quite obvious results: the game not only brought 330,000 download users on the first day of launch, the topic #Need for Speed Gathering# has also exceeded 1.83 billion plays so far, the peak online live broadcast room is 100,000+, and in terms of related content creation, it has also incubated the TOP1 anchor "Fansheng" on the whole game network.

Fourth, in terms of content consumption, Kuaishou has gathered a group of users who love to watch games and are willing to pay for games.

Whether it is the record number of viewers of KPL or the fact that CFML has become the second largest event on the platform, these data that intuitively reflect the activity and user volume all confirm in disguise that the audience group, the ultimate end of the Kuaishou game content ecological chain, is quite interested in the game.

And these users also have a high willingness to consume: "CrossFire" previously cooperated exclusively with Kuaishou to hold their first live broadcast of the goods, and the platform's well-known game anchors were responsible for bringing the goods. According to official data, the total exposure of this live broadcast reached 72 million, the number of viewers exceeded 12 million, the sales exceeded 10 million yuan within 30 minutes, and the number of orders directly exceeded 600,000 orders in 3 hours.

For example, based on the needs of C-end users, Kuaishou also focuses on the nodes with the highest user attention, and conducts full-link marketing through booking activities, building search atmosphere construction, building strategy groups, and high-quality anchors to accompany them, so as to enhance the influence of nodes among gamers.

When you see this, you will find that their ecological construction idea is actually a two-step process:

First of all, with the "copyright + professional players + commentary hosts" of the core event as the traction, plus the second-way and head/middle-waist anchors as the content supply, a composite model of "the largest event traffic party + copyright party + derivative ecology" is formed to produce a steady stream of content.

The second step is that after having a large enough content pool, they use an efficient content consumption and conversion mechanism to allow users to gradually evolve from the state of accepting content output (anchors and contestants create content, and the platform mobilizes resources to engage in exclusive activities) to the state of active content consumption (viewers who love to watch and are willing to consume). Kuaishou's game marketing ecological chain is also running.

In this way, it is not surprising that so many leading game products have come to the Kuaishou platform to "pay New Year's greetings".

03

Are they just getting started?

But in fact, judging from the current pace of development of Kuaishou, it is not their upper limit yet.

Why?

First of all, because their traffic disk is still growing.

Judging from the data, in Q3 2024, Kuaishou's daily active users will exceed the milestone of 400 million, reaching 408 million, and the average daily active users will increase by 5.4% year-on-year. The average monthly active users also reached 714 million, a year-on-year increase of 4.3%.

If you look at the game track, Kuaishou has 30 million active game creators as of Q3 2024, and in the first half of last year alone, the total number of game content sharing on the Kuaishou platform reached 2.03 billion.

The second is the change in the form of Kuaishou.

This Chinese New Year event itself. If you dissect this series of New Year activities, you will find that Kuaishou is not just to make the traffic disk bigger and attract everyone to advertise, but to upgrade to an ecological co-builder by integrating its own ecology, resources, and game highlights, and improve the efficiency of manufacturers to obtain traffic here.

The route of extending the game ecology through the event has been opened up by them, so even if they just copy this methodology, they can also bring more players the awareness of "watching the game and playing fast".

And that's the basics. Now Kuaishou also has the ability to run its own competitions, so for some game products that do not have copyright events, Kuaishou can directly "change" them for manufacturers.

In addition to increasing the number, their methodology may also be able to compound, or expand the breadth. For example, in the case of this year's Spring Festival, Kuaishou took advantage of the time of the festival to make a big event for a number of games at the same time to expand its influence.

If Kuaishou's follow-up integration and resource mobilization methods become more and more diverse and mature, combined with their game ecology and the traffic potential of copyright events, they may be able to hold a larger game event and further expand the traffic cake for all manufacturers.

In addition, it should not be forgotten that as a comprehensive content platform, Kuaishou can also link and integrate games with other forms of entertainment content, so that games can reach more users on the platform through various ways, which brings greater imagination space.

At the end of the day, for most game manufacturers, the final destination is naturally where they can get traffic. And now these top games are voting with their feet and coming to the Kuaishou platform, I am afraid it means that the road that Kuaishou is currently taking has begun to have an effect.

As for how much potential can Kuaishou's ecology and methodology unleash? This may have to be left to manufacturers to explore further in the future.

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