It is becoming more and more difficult to form a game, and there are fewer and fewer players
Is it still possible to "kill" scripts?
The industry has ushered in a wave of store closures in the past two years, and practitioners are looking forward to using "standardization" to break the situation
Our reporter Tu Chenxin and Yu Quan
There used to be a saying among script killing enthusiasts: A day spent killing scripts takes a year on earth. This immersive board game has attracted many young people who are eager to socialize offline and enter the store to experience a completely different life. Some people want to get addicted to detectives, some want to relieve stress and heal, and even singles want to get out of singles.
During the Mid-Autumn Festival that just passed, the script sales industry showed polarization: some script sales stores successfully attracted a large number of customers through careful planning and marketing, and the venues were full; there were also quite a few stores that were empty and in trouble.
In the eyes of many people in the industry, the former is lucky, and the latter is the norm, because the popularity of script killing has continued to cool down since last year. In April 2024, the national offline script-killing game revenue was 180 million yuan, a decrease of 110 million yuan compared with the same period last year.
When hiking, camping, music festivals, concerts, etc. have a firm grip on young people, can scripts that appear to be "outdated" still be killed?
From having a store every 10 steps
to the cold wave of bankruptcy quietly sweeping across
The source of script killing is "Murder Mystery", which was born in England in the 19th century. It is one of the most popular party games in Europe and the United States. At the end of the 20th century, this game was introduced to our country and became popular among white-collar workers in big cities. In 2013, commercial script-killing stores began to appear in China. In 2016, script-killing games suddenly emerged in the offline leisure and entertainment industry and quickly exploded across the country.
In 2017, the number of registered offline stores in China only exceeded 1,000, but by December 2019, the number of offline stores nationwide had soared to 12,000. Data from the Meituan Research Institute shows that in April 2021, there were 45,000 script-killing stores in China. The script of first-tier cities kills every street, "there is a store every 10 steps".
After years of development, the script killing industry chain has become increasingly complete, covering the four links of authors, publishers, stores, and players. Sun Haofan, the operator of script sales, told reporters that authors and publishers who are upstream in the industry chain "eat meat" and have the initiative, while store owners "eat soup" and often ask the former to provide "city exclusive copies" and "city exclusive copies". Limited Edition" to gain a competitive advantage.
But after many businesses flocked to the market, the script-killing industry experienced a roller coaster-like ups and downs in the number of stores in the next three years.
In May 2021, moose opened its first script-killing store in Shanghai and expanded rapidly. At its peak, it had 6 stores and a total investment of more than 2 million yuan. However, as time goes by, the craze in the script-killing industry seems to have subsided, and now, the number of moose stores has been reduced to three.
This cold wave seems to be quietly sweeping through the entire script killing industry. It is understood that the number of script-killing stores in Shanghai alone has dropped sharply from more than 2,000 at its peak to six to seven hundred today. The situation in other major cities is similar.
Market competition has fallen into a vicious circle
The vitality of the entire industry has dried up
The script killing market has cooled down, first of all due to the reduction in the number of players. As the novelty gradually dissipated, the enthusiasm of those non-experienced players who had just tried it also receded like the tide, leaving only a group of hardcore veteran players. The market has thus fallen into a struggle for stocks.
During the Mid-Autumn Festival, veteran player Shao Linlin made an appointment with seven or eight friends, but none of them could find the people to play the script. "It takes six people to play a game, and it is getting more and more difficult to form a game. Friends who used to play together are either crazy about the script." If you get tired of playing, you may say you don’t have time.”
Apart from players’ enthusiasm retreating, practitioners also seem to be facing a collision between ideals and reality, especially the most critical DM (the moderator).
In script killing, excellent DMs are indispensable soul figures, and their existence is crucial to the entire game experience.An excellent DM needs to have precise expression skills, tolerance, responsibility, empathy, perseverance and self-motivation. They must not only be able to guide players into the plot, but also be able to continuously improve themselves to keep the game fresh. . But nowadays, many excellent DMs have left script killing stores. In the end, the store had to put some thought into the script. But according to Lao Wang, the script killing operator, the content of today's scripts seems to have gone to another extreme: "The content is becoming more and more profound and complicated, resulting in a very high threshold for players."
In addition, a A veteran who has been in this industry for seven or eight years also revealed to reporters the undercurrents surging in the industry: on platforms such as Dianping and Meituan, inexplicable negative reviews have sprung up; in order to compete for talents, some stores have They spend a lot of money to poach people; even worse, they break into the store without reservation, take photos of the script cabinet, secretly open the script box, steal clue cards, and even arbitrarily alter the script to ruin the game experience...
These behaviors , not only affects the normal market competition environment, but also seriously damages the overall reputation of the script killing industry. If things go on like this, fewer and fewer people will be willing to join this industry, and the industry's vitality and innovation capabilities will gradually dry up.
After "Barbaric Growth"
Where is the future of script killing?
Amidst all the empty talk about the script killing industry, some people are sticking to it and are confident. In Lao Wang's eyes, the current cooling down of script sales is the large-scale bursting of market bubbles. This is a huge opportunity in his eyes, and he is catching up with the peak period of this wave of development.
Lao Wang’s script-killing chain brand ti has so far opened 66 chain stores in 13 provinces and cities across the country. Since this year, he has been acquiring a large number of poorly managed and closed script-selling stores in China. In his words, they are called "joint operations."
In fact, a counter-intuitive fact is that from the perspective of the general market environment, the script-killing market is in short supply. According to statistics from professional platforms, the market supply of script killing can only meet 92%-93% of demand. In contrast, in the leisure and entertainment industry, the supply-to-sales ratio of KTV, Internet cafes, billiards, etc. is greater than 1.
Another indisputable fact is that compared to other entertainment industries, the current script-killing operators do have problems with irregular operations and even "grass-top teams". A script-killing operator told reporters that a healthy script-killing store should have management personnel, front-line service personnel, as well as personnel, finance, and training personnel. The key to breaking the situation lies in the three words "standardization".
"We require store managers, customer service, and hosts to have standardized management processes for pre-sales, sales, and after-sales to ensure players' trust in the brand and each store." Lao Wang said.
In addition, standardized stores, on the basis of ensuring quality, can give potential customers a stable expectation in terms of service and experience. This also helps new players and target audiences feel confident and bold to enter the store and experience the script. kill.
The healthy development of the industry requires operators to have a broader vision. They must not only retain existing players, but also boldly innovate, improve service quality and game experience, and attract more new players to join. Only by continuously growing the market pie can the industry continue to prosper. The scripts that have experienced "barbaric growth" are waiting for domestic practitioners to explore and create a set of standards and systems that are in line with China's national conditions.
(Qianjiang Evening News)
