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With the anticipation of a large number of players, the second anniversary of "Dark Zone Breakout" has finally arrived, and it’s all big things.

On the one hand, a variety of in-game activities have been launched one after another. There is the Dark Zone's own shrinking circle gameplay "North Mountain Law", which expands the gameplay of the product again; there are also a series of welfare activities and the arrival of the Deep Stalker series appearance; and the offline anniversary tickets were sold out immediately after they were launched.

Among them, the most important part of the second anniversary is the first plot mode "Abyss Walker". The conspiracy around the character "Renoir" once again extends Carmona's worldview and story advancement. Its plot PV ranked 7th on the entire B station as soon as it was released.

Overall, on the second anniversary of Dark Zone Breakout, the product has once again achieved further results. In addition to the continuous growth over the past two years and being repeatedly highlighted in Tencent's financial reports, the number of users nationwide this year officially exceeded 100 million. At the same time, it once again broke into the top ten of the iOS best-selling list, reaching No. 6. The topic of the two-year anniversary even topped the Douyin hot search list.

At this point, I am afraid that more and more people have realized that "Dark Zone Breakout" has become a "national-level" FPS mobile game.

On the other hand, from an industry perspective: Dark Zone Breakout has really made the tactical game FPS niche popular. After the emergence of similar products, it seems that a fierce competition has formed.

But when comparing them together, it can be found that "Dark Zone Breakout" is doing a good job of iteration down to earth, filling itself with more excellent content, and gradually becoming a "new generation of national FPS", while similar products are more "raising the banner" in a hurry. Not only has it not brought any crisis to "Dark Zone Breakout", this pursuit has made "Dark Zone Breakout"'s leading position in the track more prominent.

Why do I say that Dark Zone Breakout’s leading position in the track is more prominent?

In fact, if you understand the environment of the tactical game track well enough, you will understand that this pattern has been destined.

Let’s first look at the product level. Although many tactical game products choose the simulation route, if you ask which one is the most immersive, the first thing that comes to mind is "Dark Zone Breakout".

Its underlying foundation is that the gameplay design is realistic enough. For example, weapons, firstly, have no crosshairs, so you have to wait for subsequent modifications to add sights; secondly, there is no ammunition count display, so it all depends on inspection and estimation; for another example, injuries to different parts of the body will bring different effects. It is normal for leg injuries to affect movement speed, but it is rare for hand injuries to affect search speed and shooting accuracy.

Combined with high-quality graphics, players can easily immerse themselves in the "search-fight-evacuate" cycle once they get started.Players can focus on setting and achieving their own evacuation goals in each game. This can be lightly armed and running away after looting on the battlefield, or armed to the teeth and ambushing at the evacuation point to collect "tolls"... In the time flow from formulating strategies to successfully evacuating, players can easily enter a state similar to "flow", as if they are really in the intricate battlefield of Camona, and the pleasure of evacuation becomes a higher level of delayed satisfaction.

This kind of satisfaction requires high cost investment and R&D capabilities. Once users' appetites are whetted by "Dark Zone Breakout", low-quality products will find it difficult to survive.

Let’s talk about the ecological level. It presents a situation where officials, KOLs and ordinary players are everywhere.

Let’s take Bilibili as an example. The official account of Dark Zone Breakout is already a big UP host with millions of fans. Every month, there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of version/meme videos played, with a total playback volume of up to 250 million. Compared with other popular FPS games, Dark Zone Breakout, although it started late, has firmly ranked first, and has also driven the activeness of the ecosystem.

At the KOL level, it is also easy to find changes. For example, the UP host "Sniper Mike" with 1.85 million followers has been steadily updating "Dark Zone Breakout" since the end of last year, and it is the main product of recent video output. And this is not an isolated case. During the second anniversary, we saw a group of top KOLs reveal that they were playing "Dark Zone Breakout", including the top FPS anchor Buqiuren who made a high-profile appearance on Dark Zone in June.

Some ordinary users are also posting videos of "Dark Zone Breakout" out of interest and growing into KOLs.

A typical example is the content creator "Little Shark". His earliest video was released on August 13, 2022, when the Dark Zone was just launched. He was still a blogger trying to prove himself with gaming skills, until the famous "God of War jumped and fell to sleep" appeared, adding laughter to the originally serious battlefield. As of now, Little Shark has more than 510,000 fans on Douyin and nearly one million fans on the entire network. He has truly grown from an amateur video producer to an important member of the Dark Zone ecosystem.

A multi-layered, all-round, and continuously growing benign communication ecosystem will help products continue to expand their circle.

In addition, at the user level, "Dark Zone Breakout" has completed the process of "cognition for stickiness", and similar products have become "boosts".

Since it is difficult to catch up with Dark Zone Breakout with the same mode, similar products have come up with many diametrically opposed promotional points, such as "low operating threshold" and "high material explosion rate" to target the hardcore of Dark Zone Breakout, emphasizing "more refreshing experience" to hit the pain point of "sense of loss". However, this appeal to players who have already played Dark Zone Breakout is far weaker than expected.

The author once asked a Dark Zone Breakout player, "Do products that emphasize the ability to bring out large amounts of high-value supplies in each game give you a sense of déjà vu of private server games?" His answer was, "No, the fun of private servers is based on the fact that official servers cannot provide a fun enough experience, but after playing, Dark Zone Breakout is far more fun than those so-called fun products."

It is not difficult to see that the hardcore aspect does not bring a burden to the players of Dark Zone Breakout, but a more immersive flow experience. The sufficiently hardcore content design highlights the core goals of the tactical game and the value of the collected materials. They affect the players' tactical choices in a game at any time and constitute a unique stimulating emotional feedback.

From another perspective, "Dark Zone Breakout" can also acquire easily converted users from more similar products.

In the past, when there was a relative lack of new tactical game products, the hardcore nature of Dark Zone Breakout did screen out users. Some users may have left due to the difficulty of learning in the early stages, and with the addition of more new generation users, there is a pool of users to tap into in the market. Similar products that take a low-threshold route will quickly attract a group of interested users to become familiar with tactical game play.

Due to its limited positioning, it is difficult and unsuitable for Dark Zone Breakout to make design downgrades, and similar products just fill in this gap.

After choosing a category segment, users will always select a game that is more suitable for them based on changes in their experience demands. Dark Zone Breakout and similar products have together formed an environment for layered services to users, and the "unique" hardcore experience it provides is more in line with the ultimate goal of users pursuing a differentiated experience after becoming familiar with the category, which naturally leads to "Dark Zone Breakout".

So although the competition in the tactical game track seems dangerous, in fact, "Dark Zone Breakout" is always at the forefront of the road.

Next, "Dark Zone Breakout" may lead the FPS category to break through

Although it is a latecomer in the FPS category, the scale of "Dark Zone Breakout" and the explosive trend of tactical games driven by it have determined that the influence of "Dark Zone Breakout" has jumped out of the segmented track and upgraded to the entire FPS category - now and in the future, a large number of new users will be exposed to FPS games starting from "Dark Zone Breakout".

The author found that "Dark Zone Breakout" is also actively expanding the product content dimensions horizontally, pursuing a new stage in the FPS category.

On the one hand, "Dark Zone Breakout" is exploring the current weak links in the FPS category.

Most shooting mobile games focus on the gameplay, and you probably haven’t heard of any product that has become popular because of the “story”. However, the story campaign mode and Peace Walker launched in the second anniversary version of Dark Zone Breakout sparked discussion.

On Bilibili, you can search for a large number of new videos related to the story mode, including "magnifying glass to study details" and "hidden plots", which theoretically only exist in other categories with storytelling as the core experience. Even in just a few days, popular phrases such as "just doing business" and "good night, then" have been formed.

This is because the project team based the game culture of "Dark Zone Breakout" on the explosive point of the story mode: collecting high-level supplies in the core gameplay of "Dark Zone Breakout" has become a habit of players. When everyone enters the story mode and finds a large amount of resources, they can't help but collect them carefully, but when they advance to the end, they will be killed by the "Styx" story, and finally they can't take out a single piece of supplies from a large backpack.

In fact, many players also understand that it is impossible to bring it out (otherwise it will affect the original mode's collection value), but being directly restricted by the system and being "killed" by the characters in the plot and thus unable to bring it out are completely different psychological feelings. The newly appeared image of "Styx" has won the title of "the strongest backstab king", and even his words have become a hot topic.

Beyond a single scene, the greatest significance of this event is that "Dark Zone Breakout" has proved the impact of excellent plots on users. It can be found that a large number of UP hosts have conducted detailed research on the relationship between the game and the entire world view of "Dark Zone Breakout". The constantly expanding and supplementing game world view will therefore become the new foundation of the product.

On the other hand, Dark Zone Breakout is incorporating more FPS category segmented gameplay within its own framework.

At the end of April, Dark Zone Breakout launched the 4V4 annihilation gameplay, which is based on the team battles in regular FPS games. For the second anniversary, Dark Zone Breakout brought out the Beishan Law shrinking circle gameplay, which is based on the tactical competition that has been popular for many years. Everyone is familiar with these old gameplays, but Dark Zone Breakout has created a completely different experience.

Taking the latest Kitama Law as an example, the collection of weapons and props has the "unknown fun of unboxing" compared to traditional tactical competitions. Due to the hardcore design, combat requires more attention to physical condition, and further enhances the flow of high rewards brought by relying on gun skills when encountering enemies suddenly. There are also settings such as automatic recovery of energy values ​​when entering the circle, which are also clearly different from traditional tactical competitions.

The effect of this change is that even if you have played other FPS games before, you can still find new fun in the integrated gameplay of Dark Zone Breakout. And we can also predict that in the future, Dark Zone Breakout will continue to include more FPS games, which will also bring positive feedback to the entire FPS ecosystem, allowing some old games to attract more attention from users.

When the entire FPS category gameplay has reached a stagnation, perhaps this is also the opportunity for Dark Zone, as a new generation of "FPS for all", to combine its own gameplay design framework to start a change.

Conclusion:

"Dark Zone Breakout" may be one of the products that best demonstrates Tencent's strategy of making evergreen games.

The performance of this product in the early days was not outstanding. At least in terms of commercialization, it was not even in the top ten in Tencent's product lineup. However, Tencent's focus on products that are expected to become evergreen games is not the initial revenue, but the user engagement and retention. This allows them to focus on iterative exploration of potential products, so we have seen the steady rise of "Dark Zone Breakout".

At this stage, "Dark Zone Breakout" has actually become a weather vane for the expansion of the entire FPS field. With such a product that is still in its explosive growth period leading the way, the changes in FPS in the next few years are worth looking forward to.