Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

During the Spring Festival, I brushed on bilibili an animated UP LOL mobile game video about a group of animal friends about "ganging up during the Spring Festival".

For every picture in the video, LOL players will probably recall the elevated blood pressure in the past. For example, teammates who love to play, eat and love waves, shaking their golden bodies at critical moments and being blown out with self-confidence, are all personal experiences. At that time, the video went straight to the front page, and now it has been played more than 5 million times, while on Douyin, it has been viewed more than 30 million times, so that "can not forget the star and wild Gwen" has become the new hot stem.

Bilibili UP@ Xingyou Ye was not long after Zoe went online for mobile games, and it was only convenient to play with her mobile phone at home during the Spring Festival. Taking this opportunity, several friends who used to play with me pulled me to play ranked again to see what it was like to play on the mobile phone as one of the most difficult but also fun heroes in the original PC game.

After being beaten like this by the enemy Zoe, I was surprised to find that many friends went back to the Spring Festival activities. In recent months, LOL mobile games on social media such as WeChat moments have become less common than when they were online, but when it comes to personal feelings, its occurrence rate has picked up in a variety of different scenes-I can see Yasso coming to E with his phone screen E (maybe I should call it "3 come and 3 go") when I rank in the mall more than once.

However, as soon as I went to the forum, I felt that many people returned to the pit and began to complain about "is the game getting cold" because there were not as many friends as before, and it seemed as if it had disappeared from public view-however, when you open the app market or live streaming platform, LOL mobile games are still at the top of the lists, and there seems to be a strange contrast: how many people are still playing LOL mobile games?

1. The difference between perception and reality as a practitioner who started to experience LOL mobile games from the Alpha test, and is also an old player of PC games that S3 began to play LOL, although I only play mobile games now, I have been looking forward to the extent to which the fist game can do it.

Because from the beginning of the A test, we can see that the fist designer wants to bring the PC game experience to the mobile phone rather than doing a homogeneous MOBA mobile game, coupled with a lot of small optimizations on lens and control, obviously want to do something relatively new in the mobile phone MOBA.

The question is whether such a big IP work can achieve commercial and word-of-mouth success when it enters the field of MOBA mobile games, which is already the Red Sea.

The start of LOL mobile games is obviously a high starting point. We must still remember the fact that all kinds of KOL gathered in the live room of mobile games for more than 20 weeks without deleting the file test.

The reason why some people say "cold" is obviously compared with the thousands of PC gamers and almost all the gamers in the network who came to taste the new pageant when the national service did not delete the files. In fact, from the global data (earlier than the opening of national service), the number of users of LOL mobile games has been rising steadily.

As estimated by the third-party data statistics website Activeplayer, the number of LOLM's monthly active users abroad has remained at around 20 million, which has been on a steady upward trend since its official launch.

In terms of revenue, according to Sensor Tower, the total revenue of LOL mobile games reached 500 million US dollars around July last year. The payment situation after the official launch of national service is also quite considerable. As far as AppStore is concerned, after entering a period of smooth operation, the estimated monthly income of LOL mobile games on various big data platforms has always been maintained at more than 20 million US dollars, and has been maintained in the top 10.

This paid activity obviously has nothing to do with "cool".

As a long-term operation of competitive games, such data feedback is obviously quite optimistic.

So, why does the argument of "getting cold" still appear under such circumstances?

two。 What did LOL mobile games do during the inevitable period of chaos? from the feedback of my personal friend list, during the period of not deleting files, most of the players who abandoned the pit gradually became "salted fish" because of complaining about the problems of the game experience, and LOL mobile games did have certain twists and turns because of problems inside and outside the game content after it was launched.

For example, there are common dissatisfaction among competitive gamers: matching mechanism, reporting system and game environment.

From the beginning of my first seven-game losing streak in LOL mobile games, I began to feel that my recent teammates were playing better than each other. Even if I was not a C, my teammates were steadily collapsing. Even if we use metaphysics to stop fighting, we still encounter mysterious teammates who are not ban heroes and grab the position of their teammates, which can only be blamed on the matching mechanism in the end.

"elo is really messing with me" this is also the situation encountered by many players, coupled with the "posturing" in the bureau, and the pure cute newcomers who do not recognize the hero will not come out of the equipment, more or less began to feel that the game environment problem is very big.

Part of the reason for this is that there are almost no "zone stages" in the early stages of game testing. LOL veteran players, mobile game MOBA veteran players, the former two combined players with higher Rank, coupled with the double admiration of ignorance, naturally produce such a chaotic environment.

Who can see that Yasso is not desperate? of course, apart from these standards, the content of LOL mobile games can easily get completely different feedback from players of different orientations.

For LOL veteran players, although LOL mobile games have certain operational learning costs, the sense of recovery is in place. But for other players who have MOBA mobile game experience but no LOL experience, the longer alignment period and the slow speed of changing lines may be a little too slow.

To ensure that the flavor of the LOL PC game remains, but also to ensure a comfortable mobile experience and rhythm, this problem is very difficult.

In fact, "changing hands" is not as simple as transplanting. The engine and numerical structure have been changed. In fact, the experience of fists in the PC game LOL cannot be completely reused on mobile games, so we can only learn and grow at the same time.

For more than a year since I went online, I can feel the "urgency" of the designer and operator of the fist. Er, diligent.

Whether it's "planning face-to-face", including social platform exchanges, live streaming interactions, and special programs produced by joint content authors, or "summoner sessions" based on version updates to share product content that involves ideas, development ideas, optimized content, and player suggestions and exchanges, LOL mobile games officials have collected a large number of user opinions on social platforms and answered questions.

It is worth affirming that the authorities have maintained a quite open attitude in the exchange, especially the elo matching mechanism, which many operators do not dare to mention and are easy to be scolded.

The attitude of fist games and domestic operators is also directly fed back on the update frequency and quality, trying to create the game content and rhythm that is unique to mobile games without losing flavor.

More importantly, in the process, you will find that LOL mobile games always maintain respect for the competitive experience, and do not want to speed up the pace to make the game "too easy".

For example, many new heroes and redo heroes make them have the expressive force and sense of operation in line with the mobile end while retaining the characteristics of the core mechanism of heroes, and have a more adequate interactive experience within the numerical framework and game rhythm of mobile games.

For example, Kalma in mobile games, the original trick has become passive, adding big group control tricks including Passive Skill's adjustment (such as VN's 2 skills), Monkey 2 skills from impenetrable walls to impenetrable walls, fists looking for opportunities to magnify heroic characteristics without changing the heroic difficulty.

Another manifestation of respect for competitive experience is "adherence to the competitive rhythm", that is, no matter how the content of the game changes, such situations as pre-alignment, mid-term support / Gank, and late-stage cooperation always exist and clear, and players can have more tactics and cooperation.

In order to achieve this unique competitive experience, LOL mobile games have involved frequent "structural adjustments" to the underlying logic and game rhythm over the past six months, including the movement speed of battle lines, the growth of health of siege vehicles and super soldiers, as well as the health and attack power of crystal hubs and defense towers. At the big content level, the emergence of elemental canyons, crystal pioneers and ancient dragons will change the game mechanism greatly, but still maintain the competitive rhythm.

These structural adjustments are all an attempt to plan the game's game rhythm within a reasonable range, while maintaining enough strategy and tactics, which is obviously impossible to achieve by reproducing most of the game content of the PC game.

So in the past year, mobile games have added a lot of unique props and effects to balance the balance and intensity of different functional characters in the game.

To the latest version 4.0a, the fist game has also directly opened the "defense tower burning" mechanism after a certain period of time, using a quite bold way to avoid the game process being too "turtle"; at the same time, it is necessary to create more opportunities for the inferior side to turn around. added the summoning crystal rebirth mechanism.

It seems that for more than a year, these adjustments have been "adding more noodles and more noodles". In fact, it is the embodiment that the LOL PC game development experience can not be applied to mobile games, and it is also the process that LOL mobile games must go through: MOBA games need a large sample and big data's adjustment in order to adapt to the game experience of most people, which cannot be done by designers and test suits alone.

And such time cost and the consumption of development energy are often beyond the imagination of players. For example, we often say that PC game heroes are not all done, and mobile games can be copied over. In fact, the two engines are different and the numerical structure is different, and the interaction mode has to adapt to mobile operation. In addition, the model and the original painting have to be redone, and what can be "copied" is actually just a skill document.

Of course, creating a unique competitive experience does not mean increasing the threshold. In fact, all the previous content basically affects heroic operations and game strategies / tactics, and the overall rhythm in the early, middle and later stages is still the traditional "line-to-GANK- team battle".

It has to be said that such a long-term dynamic adjustment makes the ecology of LOL mobile games much more benign than that at the beginning of the test.

3. It will be more interesting in the future to talk about the ecological changes of LOL mobile games since it has been in operation for more than a year. We might as well take a look at its product positioning.

Unlike the relatively strict time and energy requirements of PC games, LOL mobile games are a product that moves between "heavy" and "moderate to mild". For players who pursue the content and results of the season, it is obviously a heavy game, but like me, it is just a big fight while waiting in line. It is a light secondary game that fills up time. I just want to be able to play my beloved Lux outside.

In other words, what people want to play with is actually different from the beginning. From the beginning of the official operation to the present, it seems that the volume and discussion of the community have decreased, which is actually the usual end of the player screening process at the initial stage of operation, but at the ecological level, as more and more anchors and content authors join, live streaming, videos and other game-derived content are growing as a whole.

For a competitive game that does not take chapter content updates and does not talk about the large version cycle, it can still maintain a very stable number of users and considerable revenue data during the smooth operation period. Players and viewers have their own content to consume, which is a good performance in itself.

The live ecology of LOL mobile games also has the top three popularity in the mobile games section. Objectively speaking, LOL mobile games, which have been online for more than a year, can also be said to have completed quite smoothly the task of "League of Legends Universe" as a part of IP: expanding player groups, planning longer-term IP content, covering more fans and users, and attracting new players who do not know LOL to join the pit.

As for the mobile game MOBA, which has been exhausted in the domestic and Southeast Asian markets, being able to tear out such a large space just shows the influence and vitality of League of Legends IP.

To tell you the truth, from the point of view of an old LOL player, after the original PC game has been operating at a high level for more than a decade, there is not much surprise or surprise about League of Legends's influence on the universe and the number of active users. Whether I can still feel fresh and happy in the continuous content updates is what I care about. For example, although I am already familiar with the heroes of the PC game, I already have the urge to try when I hear that Zeli is about to launch the mobile game, and I think it is a pleasant experience.

No matter any category of games, winner takes all is an unhealthy thing after all. Players with different needs and different IP preferences can find games that meet their own needs and have fun in the market, and products also maintain competition and learning from each other. Only in this category can the market develop healthily.

This is also my expectation for LOL mobile games more than a year after launch: after accumulating enough mobile development experience in trial and error and changes, fists can make this product more interesting and perfect, and then more mobile games.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: travel Research Agency

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