What kind of community can help a mobile game that has been in operation for 10 years stabilize its player community, give a boost during the hot cycle, and help the game become the number one hot search on Weibo?
Behind "Subway Surfers", Fanbook of iDreamSky played such a role.
The mobile Internet traffic dividend is gradually disappearing, and community content marketing has become more and more important and is becoming an industry trend. How to feed back games through reasonable community ecology and content marketing is a major issue that game manufacturers attach great importance to nowadays.
html On December 14, the Fanbook Community Ecology Conference, a sub-forum of the China Game Industry Annual Conference, was held in Guangzhou. The conference attracted many game companies, academics and media representatives, who jointly discussed the development and transformation of user communities in the game industry. The theme of theconference focuses on the challenges faced by traditional community operations: such as slow information transmission and complex management processes. They jointly discussed how the industry can use the potential energy of the community to increase the number and quality of users, and use AI technology to promote long-term development.
01 New form of community in the future? AI
, which understands "observation of words and emotions" and can accompany players, is not an unfamiliar concept to the game industry community, but the key to operation lies in how to connect the production and consumption ends of content. At the
conference, Guan Song, co-founder of iDreamSky, introduced in detail the latest development of Fanbook, as well as their understanding and practical operation of "dual-end reconstruction" in his speech.
Guan Song revealed that Fanbook will have nearly 10 million new users in 2023, with a growth rate far exceeding last year's level. In the second half of the year alone, 25,000 new communities were added, an increase of more than 10 times compared to the first half of the year. The number of qualified and certified content creators reached more than 5,000, an increase of 66% compared to the first half of the year. The content created by these creators has been exposed more than 1 billion times on major platforms.
Guan Song also further explained how Fanbook achieves "dual-end reconstruction". Fanbook first proposed the concept of "channel community" and put it into practice. Fanbook connects producers on one end and consumers on the other, achieving efficient collaboration between both ends through in-depth interaction and connection. Producers can focus more on producing high-quality products and providing quality services by listening to users' feedback and needs. Consumers can interact more directly with game manufacturers through Fanbook communities, find like-minded fans, and have the opportunity to deeply participate in the production and distribution process of games, gaining a higher sense of participation.
As the scale of Fanbook continues to expand, the "channel" function has gradually gained recognition and following from more and more game manufacturers. Fanbook officially launched a new version at the
conference. The new version provides comprehensive and efficient solutions to common problems faced by game manufacturers in user operations, operation activity creation, content secondary creation and dissemination fission, and AI empowerment. The new version of
Fanbook will support the operation of 10 million level users, achieving more efficient user reach. Help manufacturers improve operational efficiency through the construction of operational building blocks. The centralized management function for creators helps create more popular content. The rapid deployment of AI tools can achieve multi-dimensional application innovation. The series of new features of
will not only provide game manufacturers with a new interactive community, but will also better connect producers and consumers. Fanbook quickly built a prop mall page through the building block module, and then held regular promotions in the game's Fanbook community to guide users to participate. At the same time, it also supports a distribution model, allowing game KOLs to help "bring goods" to further expand sales channels, and KOLs can also gain revenue from it.
"The advent of the AI era has improved operational efficiency and enriched community gameplay. However, developing an AI application requires investing a lot of industrial resources, including training models, GPU resources, etc., and many manufacturers have difficulty getting started quickly. Therefore, Fanbook can be used for game development , especially game operations, which provide full-process AI empowerment. Through lightweight training and personalized fine-tuning, you can quickly deploy a new AI-integrated game community on Fanbook.
Looking back at ChinaJoy, we introduced to you the Common AI gameplay and cases.This includes the use of AI capabilities to allow players to create content based on game IP, as well as AI public opinion management and monitoring, AI customer service, etc. In the recent new version of Fanbook, we are intensively developing and testing it, hoping to bring new capabilities such as AI companionship to all communities and partners.
Let me explain the concept of AI companionship. When players come to the community, they have already expressed their recognition and love for the game, world view, and specific characters. At this time, if a game's AI character is deployed in the community to help players solve daily problems in the game, or even become an emotional companion and connection in daily life, this will have a positive impact on player stickiness and enhance IP loyalty. We also hope to be able to provide such capabilities to our partners as soon as possible. Therefore, we are internally testing the character of Cala Picchu as an example of an AI companion. "Guan Song described it this way.
02 How to start from scratch and how to do a good job in community maintenance
Dream World has its own understanding of the establishment and operation of Fanbook. Other practitioners also have their own views on this work. Subsequent During the keynote speech session, several practitioners also discussed several perspectives: "Why do we want to build a community?" started and shared his views.
When talking about the necessity of building a community, Deng Yongjin, Vice President of Pasiya Technology, proposed that the development and distribution of game products should "start with community marketing."
He elaborated on how to start from daily The community is operated in three aspects: publicity, problem collection and player classification management. Clarifying the location of target users and placing advertisements in a targeted manner can effectively reach the target group. In addition, he also pointed out that inviting core players to try out each updated version will help Unexpected problems can be discovered, thereby improving the certainty of product R&D investment. Ke Tianyu, the project leader of
Youtang Culture Community, shared his own team’s personal experience in building a Fanbook community from scratch and creating a replicable methodology that produces continuous changes. . He pointed out that the effective "link" between products and users has a strong chain effect. Although benefits can be used in the early stage to attract users to voluntarily join the community, in the long run, maintaining the vitality and stickiness of the community still requires socialization and entertainment. As well as multi-dimensional construction of high-quality content.
Under the transition from incremental market to stock market, after establishing a community, how to achieve stable user growth?
Dream World C1 Studio Director Yoyo shared the user experience Changes in operating concepts and logic, as well as existing pain points. She said that in the face of extremely large user groups, the Fanbook community has achieved significant improvements in operational efficiency, reflecting the "easy to use" side. In terms of "useful", Fanbook It has a very significant impact on game distribution and product data growth, as well as on community scale and commercialization growth.
In addition, on the topic of combining AIGC with the dividends of the times, Jiao Jun, CEO of Chengdu Thousand Layers Tower, believes that with the help of AI, AI can Effectively empower new ways to play community operations and improve community operation efficiency. He summarized the "16-character formula" for the success of "Flower Thousand Bones" and emphasized solving industry pain points through community operations. "Flower Thousand Bones" empowered AI in Fanbook community It can be mainly reflected in two aspects: planning exciting and diverse activities based on IP content to attract community users to participate; and interoperability of game product data to achieve community AI data analysis.
03 “Where have all the users gone? "
In the next roundtable forum session, Quwan Technology Vice President Zhuang Minghao, "Next Stop Jianghu" series producer Peng Xinlong, Mowen Xidong founder Chi Jianqiang, and Putaojun focused on "the future of community: users are all Where did it go? " launched an in-depth discussion.
Peng Xinlong said from the perspective of content development that current users will be diverted according to their interests and "move along with the content."This model is very beneficial to small and medium-sized content manufacturers. Through the channel and community model, when users follow the content, the product has a greater chance of being successful.
Their games once had forty or fifty QQ groups with 3,000 people. , but as a small and medium-sized content developer, the management cost is not enough to carry out detailed maintenance of the customer base, and a community that can centrally maintain and provide free templates is needed. This allows you to collect questions and provide activities from users.
Chi Jianqiang pointed out that the rising stars in community business have solved this demand very well and can be "all in one". Manufacturers can operate their own users and at the same time connect content creators and consumers well. Such products should have great opportunities in the future.
At the same time, he also said that the private domain model like Fanbook has great potential:
"I build a channel myself, and my own users can be reached by myself and play with them. I think this is a good private domain model." form. Why do you want to build a WeChat group? Because you can talk to users directly. The number of public accounts is also very large, but it is a matter in the public domain. The private domain can grow together for a long time and gain emotional value together. I I feel that if we don’t create a private domain in the future, it will be almost impossible to play.”
Zhuang Minghao pointed out from another perspective that “the boundaries between games and social networking are becoming increasingly blurred.” The opposite of this phenomenon may mean that some large-scale party games may be a huge challenge to these third-party businesses with more social functions.
"When the social and community capabilities of the game itself are strong, what will become of the value, significance and space of third-party existence? This is a question that no one has considered much before. Is it also a huge challenge? ? Maybe we will see it next year."
04 annual awards announced, continuing to empower the community ecology
As of now, there are 10+ communities with 1 million people, 20+ communities with 100,000 people, and 100+ communities with 10,000 people in Fanbook indivual. In order to recognize such enterprises that have made outstanding achievements in the community ecology, Fanbook has established the annual star award for the first time, including "Glory of the King", "Egg Boy Party", "Subway Surfers", "Light Encounter", "Ball Battle" ”, “Love of Light and Night” and 16 other communities won this award.
Among the winners who won the honor of "Best Operating Community of the Year", they include long-term operating communities with millions of people, new communities that have just started but achieved high activity, and those who use AI technology to continuously innovate community gameplay. community. Fan Yuewei, vice president of
Dreamworld and head of Fanbook product, presented awards to these community leaders. He said, "What you participate in is the hot product. This sentence comes from Fanbook's vision of community ecology. Only new and old friends Only by participating together and being user-centered can we create blockbuster games."
