Mobile Games: standing on a wire to celebrate the riches

A singer may have only one famous song in his life. Even if you sing only one song all the time, as long as someone is willing to listen, theoretically there will be a chance to play the game, which will bring benefits to the artist. For a singer, as long as there is such an "explosion", there is only a problem of earning more and less.

However, not every industry can do this, such as games. Do you still remember the legend of candy crushing? In the App Store annual app download rankings officially announced by Apple at the end of last year, the elimination casual mobile game launched by Game Developer King became the top place for free app downloads. At that time, according to King, in just over a year, the game had gained more than 0.5 billion downloads, and the total number of players played more than 150 billion times. As of January 1, 97 million active users per day.

However, King's recent days have not been better off-led by a decline in analytics' expectations for Q2 revenue and the 2014 Performance Outlook, King's share price closed down 23% on Wednesday, the lowest value since the IPO. In this dilemma, King's answer is also very real, "it is difficult to create from the current game ." It is understood that at least five analysts have lowered King's stock rating.

This is not just a problem with King. Do you still remember to fight back the Angry Birds of the green pig through a slingshot? As a classic mobile game with the great development of the smartphone market, it has been popular all over the world. However, although "Angry Birds" has launched multiple versions to increase freshness since its launch in 2009, the profit of its developer Rovio declined in 2013, the Finnish company is preparing to enter the education industry, seeking for another starting point.

In fact, this has always been the case in the gaming industry. enix, a veteran game developer in Japan, has made its series of "Brave fights and evil dragons" generation after generation, and square's "Final Fantasy" series have more algebra. However, they finally met the ceiling and wanted to push new games or get involved in other industries to break through the development bottleneck. As a result, the two companies chose to formally merge into squareenix in 2003 to share their time.

Whether Rovio or square enix, from the perspective of the life cycle of explosive products, they represent a long life. There are a lot of short-lived people, such as the Popular crazy guess X Series last year, the cute face of homemade cartoon images this year, and the "Nervous cat" on the platform ", one is shorter than one.

Unlike the famous song, the fate of a game cannot be avoided. But such companies are also different. For example, squareenix is worthy of respect. Even if there are ups and downs, it still seeks long-term development, however, this is not the case for a large number of game developers in China today-a single product is booming and the company is growing rapidly. The decline of products led to the decline of the company.

A veteran of game development in China, Fishman, the founder of Firestone software, called this phenomenon a "Moon-throwing" game like a "neural cat" or even a "Day-throwing" game ", even a business model fails. In fact, I know everything about games, but many mobile games have different ideas. For example, during China joy this year, I talked to a mobile game entrepreneur about this topic. He also agreed that the current mobile game industry is "in the dark", but he is more concerned with "in the dark", which represents the possibility of overnight wealth. As for "Twilight", it is not too late to think about it when it comes to wealth.

It is such an impetuous mood that is filled with the whole industry: not to consider making high-quality goods, just think about how to get rich quickly; staring at developers in Japan and Europe and the United States to see what good game ideas are there, directly copy it, change it, and then go online. These practices are only for products, not for companies at all, let alone a business. Not to mention whether it is responsible to the player, but the biggest harm to the end is yourself.

The stock price plunged by 23% a day, and there is no good follow-up product or development plan to boost shareholder confidence. King's performance fully shows that the second-level market confidence is insufficient. Holding the explosion of the game watching the sky, and standing on the wire to celebrate the same thing. In the business world, this unhealthy situation cannot be sustained for a long time. I think of Zou Tao, CEO of xishanju. Two years later, all the impetuous products have exited. The rest are excellent products. The cake is big enough and everyone is happy.

Southern capital economic commentator/Fang Nan