Hand tour developer profit space gradually shrinking

With the rapid expansion of the market scale of the hand tour, many people in the game industry are very alert, such as hand-swim winter theory, hand-travel bubble theory ... Like。 The idea is absurd, but for now, the global heat of hand-swimming and the controversy over business models are the side effects of the emerging market's explosive growth over the past few years.

Therefore, we believe that the hand tour will continue to grow and expand, this year, the Global Hand tour market is expected to break the 25 billion dollar scale. But if there is a blind optimism about the future, there are still too many uncertainties. There may still be a sudden change in the future that will hinder growth in the field of hand travel. So, let's look at the factors that are worth the vigilance of the entire tour industry:

More and more developers take a conservative approach

In today's field of hand travel, such as tribal conflict and candy Legends still determine the size of the hand market, as two games earn more than 1 billion dollars. But the problem now is that these are free games, and the field of free game innovation is not much, such as you can often see in the Income list game type and play similar game, and if you go to the App Store search elimination game or strategy hand tour, it is likely to appear hundreds of shanzhai works.

In the hand tour market, the free model dominates, and the game, which does not require a fee threshold, is naturally attractive, and supercell, a tribal conflict developer, continues to advertise and balance the game, making the game last longer and earning 1.8 billion dollars this year, with the result that A lot of Shanzhai version of the attack, including Disney and EA so the "Star Wars" and "Call of Duty" IP moved out of the COC core practice. Since this kind of play has been validated, many companies are unwilling to change quickly.

Player Preferences changed

But doing so is dangerous for the hand-travel industry, players ' preferences will change, but the emergence of a similar game, which means that the industry's pursuit of innovation in the company is declining, more and more companies are beginning to favor conservatism, triple elimination, real-time multiplayer games or gaming and so on a large number of content, Once the preferences of most players have changed, the entire hand-travel industry is in jeopardy.

Hand tour developer profit space gradually shrinking

Just imagine, if the next big one is another type of game, then there will be thousands of games to imitate, then start a vicious cycle, but obviously the first game will get the most revenue. But what we need to worry about here is that if everyone is aiming at the winner's game, the creative power of the overall market will become weaker.

Indeed, we also saw a successful game like Flappy Bird, which has had an impact on a lot of people, but what we can't ignore is that the revenue of this game has no place in the income list, and the quality of the game is low, The success of many Flappy Bird games may have been achieved by the absence of any payment options and viral transmission.

In addition, the continued growth of user purchase costs are also a step-by-step to the developer's profit space compression, although the player's game time is growing, but the future is likely to increase the player's consumption can not catch up with the growth of the cost of hand travel, the company's profits may be a subtle decline.

On the other hand, although the income list can provide a good exposure to the game on the list, the rankings are easy to change, leading to a lot of high-income gaming companies looking for other ways to buy users, so that a small team with no budget can only exclaiming.

The emergence of other new gaming platforms

Generally speaking, people use mobile phone to play games only as a second function, the main function of the mobile phone is to communicate with people, login social network and so on. Indeed, it is also one of the most important activities, but ultimately not the primary function. Once a better gaming device emerges, the hand-travel industry is in crisis because players are forced to move to new platforms because they can't find the games they want.

In addition, as the free model faces more and more policy regulation, if there is a very stringent payment requirements in the future, it will directly affect the experience of hand-play, so that many free game income reduction, thus affecting the entire hand market.

The other side of the problem

The above said so much, in fact, mainly to give developers to mention a wake up. If you look at the problem of cost growth from the other side, what we can find is that as more and more games have become homogeneous, developers have to spell money to buy users, and if many developers focus on innovation, more players will enter the market.

Currently, the free +IAP model has been accepted by most players, and in the short term this model will not be outdated, more and more people will hold mobile devices, meaning that the potential users will continue to grow, players will devote more time to play games, the company's overall revenue will continue to grow, There are wearable and virtual reality devices related to mobile technology.

But no matter how optimistic it is, I hope readers will not take the cost of growing users for granted. Technology will improve, but if most developers are unwilling to innovate, there is no guarantee that the next technological advance will bring the march to a more prosperous place, or take the hands of developers into ' Winter '.