Text/hand tour that the devil touches the cat
Whenever I talk to my friends about the "party games" category of this year’s game market fire, Netease’s "Egg Party" is an unavoidable topic. After all, there are 30 million daily users, over 100 million monthly users, and over 100 million paradise UGC maps … It has too many auras.
It is no exaggeration to say that "Egg Party" refreshed the imagination of the outside world for party games, and it also made many people re-recognize the huge market potential of this category.
Behind these external eye-catching data, what deserves our discussion is the careful layout of the game in UGC for a long time-to be honest, perhaps many people didn’t expect it to develop so quickly.
In June of this year, Kwan, the producer of "Egg Party", announced at the first creators’ conference that Egg Paradise had achieved the achievement of adding millions of new maps and tens of millions of creators every week.
Just two months later, Egg Party once again announced the achievement that the total number of UGC maps in the game and monthly active users both exceeded 100 million. These data are enough to confirm the strong layout of Egg Party in UGC content.
Until last week, the "Egg Party" had a new action: the "Super Craftsman Recruitment" activity officially ended, and 500 outstanding creators were awarded the title of Super Craftsman, and they were invited to participate in the annual mysterious project of Egg Island, which also opened a grand prelude for the annual UGC event of Egg Island.
Although the activity is only a prelude, it still allows us to witness the deep "externalization" of UGC ecological relationship and the good interactive ecology as always. For example, the event not only attracted tens of thousands of creators to participate in the creation, but also won nearly one million votes in just four days of voting.
For another example, by inviting the author to create a personal booth, the activity can better help to condense the essence of UGC map into this landscape "miniature map", spread unlimited creativity as much as possible in the limited creative space, and vividly reproduce the far-reaching diverse motif in the UGC ecology-for example, the author noticed that there are both "Dunhuang Pipa" and "Fantasy Collection" booths that shoulder the heavy responsibility of inheriting traditional culture. There are also booths that pay attention to social phenomena and discuss topics such as campus bullying and mental illness.
From this, we once again see the flourishing and mature UGC ecology of Egg Party and its great influence.
Then, in just over a year, why can "Egg Party" make the UGC ecology truly unrepeatable? How to build a positive and benign creative ecology quickly, and continue to iterate and upgrade, and continue to build a creative ecological co-prosperity circle?
By analyzing this activity, maybe we can find our own answer.
01
Behind the super craftsman
It’s a hundred million growth stories and emotional flows.
If the content of UGC is a towering tree, then the creators are strong branches of this tree. On the one hand, they are an important guarantee for the prosperity and development of UGC content; On the other hand, their growth arc is a powerful mapping between their creative value and the official UGC ecological development.
Behind the 500 super craftsmen, it is the creator’s personal growth and the overall ecological synergy of UGC, which can solidify the higher brand value of UGC. The creators represented by super craftsmen constantly strengthen their personal IP characteristics with the help of the official stage, and they are mutually beneficial to the development of UGC, and jointly draw their own growth marks.
Taking the creator "Xuanzai Run" as an example, into the pit was attracted by the classic parkour game in the early days, and she came into contact with the function of the park workshop by chance. Its low threshold and high degree of freedom enabled her to easily reproduce the beautiful things in daily life into the map, depicting many scenes that were warmly healed in the booth "Love", and also realized her artistic dream all along.
Another example is the creator "Brown Bear", who is a "super daddy" in reality. He found the opportunity to realize "the dream of making games" in the powerful function of the egg workshop, and was invited to become an official full-time creator by virtue of his ingenious creative talent. While taking care of his family and career perfectly, he started a "second life" in the egg. In this super craftsman’s booth, "Brown Bear" continues the epic description style that it has always been good at, creating a magnificent and powerful "city of heroes", which is full of shock between the sword and the light.
While the official support and the creators’ self-growth complement each other, the creators’ sharing of creative interests has become an important part of UGC’s concept of "co-creation": "Langlang 11" and "Puxi Coke", which perfectly proves this point to the story of a good creative partner. By chance, they met in an author exchange group, and when they met for the first time, they hit it off in their creative ideas and pursuits. As an art student, "Puxi Coke." often helps science students "Langlang 11" optimize the artistic style of maps. And "Langlang 11" will often share its creative skills with "Puxi Coke."
This time, both of them showed their elegance in the "super craftsman recruitment activity", and "Langlang 11" carefully drew the super cute version of "Angel Egg", which was naive and endearing. The booth of "Deep Sea Relics" built by "Puxi Coke." leads users to sink into the deep blue sea and start a dreamy adventure.
Based on the above three cases, from ordinary users to creators, and then to symbiosis and common prosperity with the government, these diverse growth curves just bring together the three trump cards of Egg Party in creating UGC ecology: high-frequency iteration, convenient and easy-to-use UGC tools, diverse and high-return incentive system, and benign interactive creative atmosphere-which may be the sustainability of Egg Party.
02
Tools, Incentives and Operation with Three Axes
Help UGC reach its peak in ecology.
Recently, "Egg Party" announced the plan of "Creating an Egg Age Together", announcing that it will provide users with rich creative income with 500 million incentive funds within two years to encourage more users to join in the creation.
After research, the author found that the plan just echoes the three trump cards mentioned above-the "Co-Creation Age" plan is a three-in-one system based on powerful UGC tools of high-frequency iteration, multiple creative events covering all users as the carrier, and a perfect creator incentive and signing mechanism as the support, which actually realizes welfare overweight, affirms the value accumulation of creators’ personal growth, and better promotes the flow of emotions and relationships between creators, officials and creators.
On the whole, the UGC tools, incentive system and creative atmosphere, which are also reflected in the plan of "Creating an Egg Age Together", are not independent, but complement each other, and together constitute the thriving UGC ecology of today’s Egg Party. Let’s talk about tools first, which is an important cornerstone of UGC creation. No matter how good the game is, the tools are inconvenient and the creation threshold is too high, it will "persuade" a large number of users to some extent.
The project team of "Egg Party", which started with an editor, is even more familiar with this: on the one hand, they directly fill the creation friendliness of the creation tools through a large number of stupid templates with low threshold and visual operation forms. With the acceleration of the instrumentalization process, creators have gradually emerged more subdivided creative functional requirements. Therefore, Egg Party has successively introduced AIGC functions such as "one-click generation of pixel text/painting, flowers and architecture" and "video generation action", and recently broke the news about the king-fried functions such as "egg code" and "shooting UGC" which will be launched in the workshop, further liberating the creators from the tedious and repetitive creative steps.
On the other hand, in the practical stage of tools landing, Egg Party not only introduced the "nanny-level" instructions of workshops such as "Small Class of Egg Workshop" and "Open Class of Creator Workshop", but also launched a series of brand activities including online workshop UGC exchange meeting and "Craftsman Academy Training Camp", aiming at opening a window for creators to quickly understand the recent and future updates of workshops, and at the same time helping them with "old and new" teaching.
If the high-frequency iteration of tools helps creators to reduce their burdens and improve their efficiency, then the official incentive and signing mechanism based on low-threshold and diversified creative events affirms the creative value of creators from a broader dimension and gives rich realistic returns.
Under the planning system of "Creating Eggs Together", Egg Party has greatly increased more creative incentive events of all sizes, including "Artisans’ Creation Month" which is a permanent reading event, short-term activities such as "Workshop Components Reward Order", "Paradise Artisans’ Great Welfare" and "Vehicle Competition", as well as comprehensive "Workshop Creation Competition" and so on, even according to festivals and game season versions. Each activity has a different focus, and the creativity dedicated to the smallest and smallest can be captured, amplified and seen.
For example, the resident monthly creative event "Craftsman’s Creation Month", as the name implies, the official will provide different creative track directions every month, so as to cover every minority theme as much as possible, help creators to refresh their creative thinking for the node on a monthly basis, and also provide them with rich egg coins and cash prizes. For example, in December, the Craftsman Creation Month was upgraded in an all-round way in terms of rewards. Inspired by the 1 million bonus, the creators were invited to play their ingenuity in five sub-tracks, including group building and viewing.
In contrast, the "Paradise Craftsman’s Great Welfare" is a short-term, limited-time creative welfare activity. For example, in the third week of November, the challenge is to make the first 4,000 maps with a heat value of 1,000 within the specified time, and then get the 200 yuan Prize.
At the same time, there are small and medium-sized construction competitions with different specific nodes in the competition system, including the "Egg Games" with the theme of national sports competition, and the "Never Robbed" map construction competition for linkage, etc …… The purpose is to make the construction competitions with each interesting sub-theme attract the attention of vertical users in this field as much as possible, and then radiate to all the creators with pan-interest.
Matching with the rich incentive events, it is the official mature official incentive and signing mechanism to help creators with different demands and different growth stages get more opportunities for upward growth.
Specifically, as long as the total number of trips to create maps exceeds 10,000, you can apply to join the official "incentive plan" and get stable cash income. For those creators who have higher pursuits and unique talents, the government will continue to dig them into official contract authors to open a clearer future for them. The official has also prepared a series of exclusive rights and interests for this group of contracted creators: on the one hand, it significantly enhances their creative income, on the other hand, it also has priority rights such as participating in various official exchange meetings and experiencing the new version of the editor in advance.
For social media content creators, the government has also opened official support and incentive rights on the whole platform. Excellent content creators can not only get revenue bonuses, but also get official platform traffic tilt, so that their whimsy can be seen by more people.
With mature tools and rich incentive creation system, the whole UGC ecology of Egg Party has become more stable.
Because of this, it can form a more friendly and benign environment atmosphere for creators in the game, which is helpful to the internal communication of creators’ ecology, thus promoting the flow of creativity, content and emotion among creators. The "Langlang 11" and "Puxi Coke" mentioned above strongly prove this point.
In fact, there are many related cases, such as "an excellent creator recommended a paradise workshop to a colleague, and the latter signed a contract to become an official author", "The author of Lao Liutu transformed into an anchor and became close friends with another anchor" ……………………………………………………………………………………………….
In my opinion, these cases actually use "creation" as "social currency" to closely combine the user groups in the game. Creators can share and discuss based on UGC content; Between the creator and the player, new social relations will be created because of UGC maps. Whether it is praise or suggestion, the former can gain more progress and sense of accomplishment. This kind of good cooperative creative atmosphere is the best "endorsement advertisement" of UGC ecology, which can attract more and more interested people to join it, so as to make the whole ecology more active and prosperous.
03
Breaking the upper limit, the biggest opponent of Egg Party is yourself.
After the above analysis and discussion, you may have a clearer understanding of the UGC ecology that Egg Party leads the whole industry. Generally speaking, if an UGC ecosystem wants to develop steadily, it needs to establish a close "bonding" relationship from top to bottom, from officials to users, and from creators to users, so as to co-create around content and make the ecosystem bigger and stronger.
The "Egg Party", which is a chain of "official stage-setting, creator singing and user voting", is to connect the first few together, push the creators who are valuable resources of UGC into the spotlight, and show their works in an enlarged way, so that the outside world can see the official respect and cherish the creative value of UGC.
In my opinion, this "super craftsman recruitment" activity has been so surprising that I can’t help but look forward to what kind of shock the upcoming annual UGC event will bring.
In the future, "Egg Party" may once again break the existing ceiling of UGC and constantly set up new benchmarks in this field. And where will its upper limit be? I don’t think anyone can give an accurate answer. But at least, it is now the only existence in this market, and it continues to create more and more "firsts".
