One year after becoming popular, MAU is still the top 10 in the world. Is this PartyGame mobile game

At this time last year, affected by the epidemic, the popularity of party games was completely detonated around the world, butAs we often say that the dividends of the epidemic to the game industry have passed, the popularity of party games has actually returned to normal.

"Jelly Bean: Ultimate Knockout" (hereinafter referred to as "Jelly Bean") once achieved 1.5 million players on the first day, 2 million sales on Steam in the first week, and 23 million hours watched on Twitch in a single week.The daily number of simultaneous online users on Steam has also returned to around 3,000 to 10,000.

But there is one game that is different.

According to App Annie's latest "2021 Q3 Popular Apps and Games Market Index Ranking",In the monthly active ranking of the world's most popular mobile games in the third quarter of 2021, apart from products such as "PUBG" and "Roblox" that are still at the top of the list, we can still see "Among Us" in the tenth place.

And according to App Annie's statistics, in the US, UK and other mobile game markets, "Among Us" can even rank in the top three in the monthly active list, and even touch "Pokemon GO".

After a year of being popular all over the world, why "Among Us" can walk out of a development curve different from other party games.

In the post-epidemic era, the second spring of party games

In fact, as a party game, "Among Us" has the same online volume as others, have also been affected to a large extent by the epidemic.

Let’s take Twitch’s live broadcast data as an example. The upper part of the figure below is the official new crown case statistics chart of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The figure below is the “AmoneThe highest number of simultaneous viewers in the "Us" division, and the number of live channel viewers.

Although it is different from the performance of the epidemic, "Among Us" still shows a downward trend overall.But almost every drop in the epidemic is also a small peak in the number of viewers in the "Among Us" division (people play games in isolation at home).

But the reduction of online volume does not mean that the game will not work.In the first half of this year, almost all major professional data organizations have published similar views such as "the game habits developed by players during the epidemic will not disappear with the end of the epidemic".The same is true for party games.

Just as a game category that is closely connected with interpersonal communication, party games should also move with the crowd.At the beginning of the article, the author mentioned "Jelly Bean Man", as a game that became popular with "Among Us". The subsequent different development of the two is the most direct and typical example.

In fact, judging from Steam data, the development trends of the two games are very similar.After the explosion in the second half of last year, in March this year, "Jelly Bean Man" and "Among Us" have fallen back to the current "normal state".to about 10,000 people.

But the difference is that although "Jelly Bean Man" already has a plan to transplant mobile games, butThe mobile game product has never been officially launched.

As for "Among Us", although the data performance of the game Steam is similar to that of "Jelly Bean Man", on the mobile side, according to the data of Qimai, it is an "online game" that allows players to connect across platforms, since the iOS platform has not been updated with a new version in the past 106 days, since September 1 last year, the game has never dropped out of the top 30 free games in the App Store in the United States, and the top 100 in the total free list.

Party games want to stay hot as players step out of the house and return to their pre-pandemic life,You have to go out of the house with the players, and this highlights the importance of mobile games.

Different from competitive games where "a good day with friends ends with a losing streak", party games are undoubtedly a new choice for offline entertainment for casual players, which is why GameLook believes that in the post-epidemicIn this era, if party games want to regain their second spring, they must target the mobile game market.

Authentic experience without discount

Of course, the success of "Among Us" is not only because of its early entry into the mobile game market, it is relativelyStable performance is also inseparable from the quality of the game itself.

"Among Us", a multiplayer online social strategy reasoning game, is one of the classic party games.There are also many relatively successful game products before.For example, "Salem Town" by independent game developer BlankMediaGames, in June 2017, when it was not launched on the mobile platform, registered users exceeded 5 million.

Ubisoft also released a VR werewolf killing game "Werewolves Within" in 2016, and even remade it into a movie.But for party games and popular games, they are too complicated in terms of the cost of playing and the process of the game.

"Werewolves Within" image source: Ubisoft

And""Among Us", whether it is the 2D art of the game, or the in-game gameplay such as "swipe card" and "Lianliankan", may be because the developer Innersloth only had three people at the beginning, and everything was kept simple.And this has certain advantages for live broadcast and the universality of games.

To give an inappropriate example, this is like the dance area and game area of station B. Most of the content in the dance area is for everyone on the Internet, because both professional and non-professionals can benefit from itWhat you want; and the audience in the game area must first be a game player, and secondly, the video must be a game you are familiar with, so naturally a large number of people have been screened out.

And this simplicity also provides a guarantee for the multi-platform experience of the game, developers can update the content of the game more timely and quickly; on the mobile device side, players can not experience Steam's creative workshop,There is almost no discount in the core experience of the game.

The "Family Portrait" released by the developer Innersloth in August

is in"Human Falling Dream", which is also a party game, is still in the process of continuous optimization and progress."Among Us" In the past year, the developer Innersloth, with a scale of less than 15 people, landed on the Switch within a few months after it became popular, and updated the iOS version of "Among Us" 14 times to solve the problem.Game server issues were resolved, and the August developer diary stated that colorblind support, a friend system, and a new map based on the Henry Stickmin series will be added to the game.

The developer even briefly decided to make "Among Us 2" last year, but after a month, Innersloth canceled the sequel plan and decided to add the content of the sequel to the original.And because Innersloth believes that the game's code base is "outdated and does not support adding too much new content", the development team plans to redesign the core code of the game to support new features, such as synchronizing various MODs that PC players can only enjoy.Go online to games on other platforms.

Although these refurbishment plans have been delayed together with the Xbox and PlayStation versions that were supposed to be launched in September this year, for such a small team of less than 20 people, the work of the past year has beenQuite an achievement.

Party games are about parties

In "After party games such as Among Us became popular, many domestic game companies have seen the potential of such games and launched similar products, such as Netease's "Hundred Ghosts Kindergarten" and "Egg Party".Zhaixing Network Technology (Kunshan) Co., Ltd., the developer of "Fried Chicken Party", also invested in it before, accounting for 70% of the shares and becoming its largest shareholder.

As for the other famous "Animal Party", needless to say, the game has already received nearly 3 million reservations on TapTap.

The history of social games in China can be described as long and well established.Experts in various relationships, but in China, apart from "Glory of the King", which can barely be regarded as a party game because of its nationality, there are few top game products that can be called party games.Even the werewolf-killing gameplay that is most suitable for parties can be turned into a krypton gold online game by various systems and leaderboards.

In fact, when we look back at popular games such as "Among Us" and "Jelly Bean Man", we will find that these party games are simpler and more direct than various online games.After all, a party in the general sense often refers to a happy time when three or five friends get together, rather than a business reception where adults have their own concerns.