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It is said that flowers bloom inside the wall and are fragrant outside the wall. This has become a major trend for mobile games going overseas. So, after the popular blockbusters that have been far ahead in the overseas best-selling lists return home, will they be unable to adapt to the local environment or will they remain popular?

Last week, Lilith, a well-known overseas game manufacturer, used its new placement game "Sword and Expedition: Departure" to reveal to us the challenges currently faced by some of the "returned" mobile games.

1. Even a dragon has to coil? It topped the charts in 60 countries overseas, but it couldn’t make it into the top five best-selling titles in China.

As for "Sword & Expedition: Departure", you can regard "Sword & Expedition: Departure" as the orthodox sequel of "Sword & Expedition". Its core idea of ​​"leaving the machine idle to gain resources, using diamonds to draw cards to raise heroes, and deploying troops to pass levels cleverly" is in line with the first generation of works.

(It is still a card drawing game in essence)

If I had to summarize the biggest change in this game in one sentence, it would be that it has evolved from 2D to 3D.

The 2D paper figures in the previous generation of games now all have high-definition 3D models;

The original 2D flat battlefield with only 5 positions has now become a 3D battlefield with terrain height differences and more battle grids.

The background stories of some popular characters also come alive through the joint interpretation of the open world and scene performances.

If you really want to define it with a word, then it would be most appropriate to say that "Sword & Expedition: Departure" is the Plus enhanced version of "Sword & Expedition".

Of course, just like some Apple phones, which can be sold for a few thousand more dollars by adding a Plus title, some people are attracted by the "Plus" concept and are willing to pay for the upgraded version.

Obviously, the fundamental starting point for Lilith to launch "Sword and Expedition: Departure" is to match the demand of overseas casual players who want to play Plus and create more IP payment points.

It turns out that Lilith's market sense is extremely sharp and accurate.

In the first month of its release, "Sword and Expedition: Departure" topped the app store charts in more than 60 countries and regions, ranked 10th on the overseas revenue list, and topped the overseas revenue growth list.

It is worth mentioning that the cumulative revenue on the European and American IOS platform alone reached 68.7821 million US dollars (approximately RMB 481 million). The revenue from the entire platform is more than enough to exceed 500 million, and at most it is estimated to reach the threshold of 1 billion monthly income.

However, this hot spicy chicken dish that has made a lot of money overseas has not made much of a breakthrough in the domestic market.

Currently, Sword and Expedition: Departure is only ranked seventh on the best-selling list. Even so, this popularity was gained by the manufacturer through a large amount of advertising.

According to the data, from the start of pre-download on August 7 to August 12, the total downloads of "Sword and Expedition: Departure" on iOS were 595,219, and the total downloads on all platforms should be around one million.

This result is barely acceptable, not to mention compared with the first generation of works, even compared with the placement mobile games produced by small companies on the market.

As for the revenue situation, it is not ideal. In recent days, the estimated revenue of "Sword and Expedition" on iOS is only 2,545,447 yuan. On average, the average player's desire to pay is 4.276 yuan per person. Even the small goal of 6 yuan per player for the first recharge expected by the mobile game manufacturer has not been achieved.

Second, is the reason for poor sales being that you haven’t won over others? The domestic placement market has become a red ocean

So the question is, why did a mobile game that made 500 million yuan overseas only sell over a million copies in its first week in China? To answer this question, we need to analyze the different market environments at home and abroad.

Although modern idle games with RPG as the main body and numerical growth as the core gameplay originated from Clicker Heroes released by Playsaurus, it was Sword and Expedition, which combined the strengths of hundreds of domestic companies, that really revitalized this market and made small and medium-sized manufacturers see that it was profitable to make idle mobile games.

（《Clicker Heroes》）

The reason is simple, mainly because "Sword and Expedition" was one of the few games at the time that dared to spend a lot of energy and money, and invested resources into polishing the character portraits, character backgrounds, and plot narration of mobile games.

It was also the game that dared to build a large number of gift package pop-ups into the game and continuously launched consumption activities. It was repeatedly pushed to the forefront of public opinion because of keywords such as "inducing consumption" and "stimulating krypton gold".

To put it bluntly, the emergence of "Sword and Expedition" has set a precedent for the industry: idle mobile games do not necessarily have to develop into light casual games. Idle card games that require a lot of krypton and liver are not only loved by players, but also make more money for manufacturers. However, everyone knows the domestic R&D environment. As long as there is a new game with the potential to make money and attract players, a bunch of copycat games will emerge in a few weeks.

After a large number of "Sword and Expedition" mode reskinned mobile games, domestic fans of placement mobile games have long been aesthetically fatigued with this type of gameplay, so naturally they are not very interested in the "Sword and Expedition: Departure" which is just a new take on the game, even though it is an orthodox sequel from the original team.

On the contrary, the environment for idle mobile games abroad is still a blue ocean. Although they started earlier than us, they are far less capable than domestic manufacturers in scroll art, scroll gameplay, and scroll consumption activities.

Therefore, even if Lilith released "Sword and Expedition: Departure" six years after the internal beta test, foreigners still felt that this numerical development system was not too outdated and they could continue to play it happily.

In fact, it is not uncommon for overseas games like "Sword and Expedition: Departure" to be extremely popular overseas but frequently encounter a cold reception in China.

For example, this year's new game "The Lord of the Rings: Dissidia" under NetEase has entered the top 10 best-selling lists in 28 countries, won Google's "Best Story Game of 2022" award, and has accumulated more than 10 million downloads worldwide. However, in the domestic market, it still cannot make a big splash.

Of course, Lilith is not unaware of the differences in the mobile game market environment at home and abroad, and has done a lot of burden-reducing operations that meet the needs of domestic players, such as one-click importing of top-notch lineups, automatic pathfinding in the open world, and shared equipment for the entire lineup.

But the key issue is that if the problem of numerical inflation is not solved, the current "Sword & Expedition: Departure" and the "Sword & Expedition" a few years ago will eventually face the deadlock of "hard work in the early stage, leisure time in the later stage, and new characters stronger than each other", and today's players no longer have the patience to slowly accumulate materials by placing them.

Summarize

In the past few years, both manufacturers and players generally felt that the domestic game industry could not compare with overseas ones, and even if they went overseas, they had to have good products to open up the market. However, with the increase in the number of small and medium-sized domestic manufacturers and the intensification of competition, at least in the field of mobile games, we are indeed at the forefront of the world, which is also the fundamental reason why those mobile games that are popular overseas are frequently unpopular in China.

Therefore, when these manufacturers find that the major domestic mobile game tracks are a red ocean and they cannot compete even if they want to, it may be an opportunity for the stand-alone and PC game markets to rise again.