Will the cool and addictive “Wandans” be more popular than the skit?

What impact will the explosive popularity of live-action interactive video games, such as "It's Over! I'm Surrounded by Beauties!", have on the short drama market? If you are also interested in the short drama market, let's take a look~

Crazy short dramas are still booming, and another sub-segment - live-action interactive film and television games has become popular and is seen as the next trend.

"The top 100 in global revenue", "peak online sales exceeded 10,000", "97% favorable reviews, surpassing "It's Over! I'm Surrounded by Beauties!"..."

This is the report card for the real-life interactive love movie game "Beauty, Please Don't Disturb My Studies" which was launched at the end of March. According to third-party data and industry insiders' estimates, the game sold between 100,000 and 150,000 copies in the first week, with revenue exceeding US$500,000. It is estimated that sales will exceed 500,000 copies a year, and this does not include DLC revenue (referring to the subsequent downloadable content of the game, such as expansion packs). This has also led to a short-term increase in the stock price of the production company behind it.

What is a live-action interactive video game?

It can be simply understood as a form between film and television and games, with both film and television stories and game interactive gameplay. At the same time, the game characters are all played by real people rather than previous animated images, and the plot development is no longer a "dynamic PPT" but a video, so players seem to be playing games, but what they get more is a sense of immersion.

At present, the live-action interactive film and games on the market can be roughly divided into two categories: one is the plot immersion simulation, such as "The Invisible Guardian", "The Bad Detective of Shendu" and "Over the Room 13", and the other is the love experience simulation, represented by "It's Over! I'm Surrounded by Beauties!" (hereinafter referred to as "It's Over") which came out in the second half of last year.

The two have different playing experiences. The former is more like watching a traditional film or TV series, while the latter focuses on the player experience. Like short dramas, it attracts users with beauties, excitement, and control of emotions , which also makes this type of game more talked about.

Most of these games are available on the Steam platform. Currently, real-life love interactive video games targeting men, represented by "Whole," account for the vast majority of the interactive video games on the market.

According to rough statistics from industry insiders, from the end of January 2024 to now, 25 real-life interactive love movie games have been launched and confirmed to be released on Steam, and the number reached 7 in March, but it is still in the stage of increasing in number. Many industry insiders said that there will be another peak period of online launch in May and June.

Some big companies are also entering the live-action interactive film and game track. Youku participated in the "Please! Fall in Love with Me Tomorrow" launched in January this year. According to industry insiders, NetEase has just completed a live-action interactive film and game, and Tencent is also planning this business.

However, judging from the performance of the live-action interactive film games currently online, its hit rate is not high and the player reviews are mixed, but this still cannot stop the enthusiasm of practitioners to participate.

Many practitioners said that in addition to the similarities in content, live-action interactive film and television games and short dramas also have many similarities in mass production methods and business models that "stimulate" users' emotions to make them pay once. However, short dramas are already a red ocean, while "film and television + games" has a certain threshold and is not yet so popular.

At this moment, the "finished ones" are still waiting to enter the market in large numbers. Many people regard it as the "next skit" or even a new track that can make them rich overnight.

01 Spend 36 yuan and "date 6 girls"

"With the price of a movie ticket, I can have six girls flirt with me. It feels so good. Moreover, each of the girls is very proactive, which makes me doubt whether I am so good. It's incredible." Recently, the player Ke Ke has become obsessed with the game "Beauty, Please Don't Affect My Studies".

The general setting of this game is that the player, as a male protagonist, enters a girls' school and is the only boy in the school. What he has to do is to resist the temptation of six beauties with different personalities and complete his studies. The game is a one-time fee of 36 yuan.

One player said that he had been having fun in this game for three hours and was very addicted to it.

The popularity of this type of game is closely related to the "temptation of beautiful women".

On major social media platforms, whenever there are promotional materials for such games, photos of the beautiful women in the games that arouse people’s imagination are indispensable.

For example, the real-life love interactive video game "Please Be the Coser's Master", which was hailed as the most talked-about one a while ago, was removed from Steam, which is known for its tolerance, because of the scale issue. The beauties are wearing cool clothes and white lace stockings, and there are also provocative options such as "targeting chest and legs".

A practitioner told "Dingjiao" that when setting up female characters in this type of game, there will basically be one who goes for the sexy route.

This type of game is also very good at creating dreams for players, bringing the sense of excitement to the extreme. Players can also feel it intuitively from the big story framework of each game.

The story of "Finished" is that six beauties are vying to date the player, who is the male protagonist. The setting of "Beauty, Please Don't Affect My Studies" is that the male protagonist enters a girls' school and six beauties of different types also launch an offensive against him.

Kachi and his team are about to release Crazy About Love, which takes the background and character settings to a new level. The male protagonist, who was drunk before the wedding, lost his wedding ring at the bachelor party. In order to remember what happened that night, he opened the chat history on his phone and started looking for it, and the game began.

Throughout the game, in addition to the sweet and generous fiancée, there are the beautiful football commentator, the domineering junior sister, the caring pet doctor, the rich second-generation white moonlight, the female idol, the traditional Chinese style beauty, and the shrewd and capable female boss, seven beauties with different personalities, all fell in love with the hero without hesitation.

Kachi believes that this type of game satisfies the emotional values ​​of men. The beauties unconditionally understand and like the male protagonist, which makes players immersed in fantasy and difficult to get out of. He introduced that the film and television drama market has verified the consumption power of women's emotional values, but whether men's emotional values ​​have a relatively large market value has not been confirmed. After the popularity of "The End", more and more practitioners realized that this may be a potential point.

Liu Huiyan, producer of Guangshu Pictures, told "Dingjiao" that of the two types of live-action interactive film and games currently on the market, plot immersion games are mostly based on the third perspective, while love experience simulation games are mostly based on the first perspective. The male protagonist does not appear in the picture, and the player's sense of immersion and love will be stronger.

In addition, this type of game is very simple to play . Players do not need to use their brains throughout the process. After entering the game, they only need to make choices based on prompts to enter different plots.

The currently popular live-action interactive film and games cannot be considered high-quality works whether viewed in the film and television category or the game category. Even the popular "Endgame" was pointed out by practitioners to have basic problems such as poor picture quality, poor acting skills of the actors, and simple gameplay. Even so, it still cannot stop players from paying for it.

02 Is interactive film and game the next short drama?

The format of live-action interactive film and games is not new, but the popularity of "Wan Dan" is due to its "short drama as game" approach, which has brought a lot of new topics to this type of game. The secondary market has also added a new concept index called "short drama game".

It does have a lot of similarities with the skit.

First of all, both of them are about using small costs to gain high returns.

For example, the representative hits of these two categories, the short drama "Wushuang" created a record of over 100 million in 8 days of investment, and the live-action interactive film game "Wandan" also used 5 million in cost and leveraged sales of over 80 million to date.

It is understood that the production costs of most live-action interactive film and television games on the market range from hundreds of thousands to millions, which is similar to the investment in each drama in the early stages of the development of the short drama industry. Of course, there are also some that are willing to spend tens of millions.

They all rely on appealing to emotions to make players want to pay, creating the possibility of "getting rich overnight."

In terms of payment methods, short dramas are charged in segments by setting up exciting points. It costs about 100 yuan to watch a whole drama. Live-action interactive movie games also rely on exciting content to make players pay, but it is a one-time payment. After purchase, you can play it an unlimited number of times. The price ranges from 30 to 50 yuan.

From this point of view, its earning power seems to be inferior to that of short dramas, but it should be noted that unlike short dramas, which are pirated everywhere, current live-action interactive film and television games rely on official software, mainly on the Steam platform, and generally have anti-piracy measures. This also means that as long as players want to play, they have to spend money.

Looking at the number of users, according to several practitioners, the main players of this type of game are currently divided into two categories: one is single men aged 18-25, and the other is those over 35 years old, which covers a wider age range than short dramas.

In Liu Huiyan's opinion, compared with a short drama, it is more like a long-selling product. If a game is favored by players, someone will pay for it in a few years.

In other words, live-action interactive video games have a longer tail effect than short dramas. The popularity of "Wushuang" has passed, but "Wandan" is still making money quietly.

"After the producer uploads the game to Steam, the platform adopts a commission model, generally taking 30% of the game sales. If the sales reach 10 million US dollars, the commission rate will be reduced to 25%. If the sales exceed 50 million US dollars, the commission rate will be further reduced to 20%." Liu Huiyan said.

In other words, the higher the sales, the higher the profit the producer can get.

Secondly, in the eyes of many practitioners, it is not a work of art, but an industrialized product . At its initial stage, it can rely on quantity to become a hit, which is similar to the "similar plot" and "volume-based model" of short dramas.

Zhan Zhikun, who has worked on more than one live-action interactive film and game, believes that "you can never bet everything on making a high-quality product. No matter how good it is, it may still fail. In addition, the industry is currently in its early stages of development and needs to constantly try and fail and accumulate experience. So if you want to make money, you have to go for mass production on an industrial assembly line."

The model also allows the development team to do so. It is understood that the current film and television and game teams are mostly produced separately. Zhan Zhikun said that the script development usually takes about one to two months, and the shooting takes about 25 days, which is a few days longer than a short drama. Then it is handed over to the game team, and the post-production takes about two to three months. A live-action interactive film and game can be completed in five to six months.

Some practitioners even said that from writing the script to launching the game, a fast team would probably only need two or three months.

There is also a copycat production model in the industry, such as shooting a live-action interactive video game based on a movie. Zhan Zhikun recently finished shooting a movie that adopted this model. He told "Dingjiao" that it is basically equivalent to a guaranteed profit.

In addition, similar to short dramas, live-action interactive film and television games also attach great importance to publicity and promotion. They will use more famous actors in the game for publicity, and will also use some large-scale photos of beautiful women to attract players. Many users often see such advertisements on short videos and major information websites.

Ah Yan, a senior game practitioner, discovered that in the entire game category, since interactive film games involve real-life actors, their promotion and marketing methods have some similarities with film and television. They need to increase exposure on social media and film and television platforms as much as possible, as well as the popularity of games on the Internet.

However, unlike short dramas that are highly dependent on investment, live-action interactive film and games are mainly launched on Steam, so word-of-mouth fermentation is more effective than buying traffic. "No matter how aggressive the promotion is, if players don't buy it, the game sales may drop sharply in a week." Liu Huiyan told "Dingjiao".

Overall, many people see interactive film and games as the next "short drama" market, hoping to gain a share of the pie by making a small investment in big returns.

03 Are those who made short plays now making interactive film and games?

Nowadays, there are many familiar faces in the field of live-action interactive film and games, who have switched from online movies and short dramas.

Liu Huiyan and Zhan Zhikun are both film and television practitioners. Liu Huiyan's company is a film and television company that produces and invests in some film and television projects. At the end of last year, it added live-action interactive film and game business. It is understood that there are more film and television teams than game teams doing such projects, and most of them are led by film and television teams and look for game companies to cooperate.

On the one hand, the film and television industry has not been very ideal in the past two years, and everyone is looking for new outlets. On the other hand, the short drama track is also very competitive, and live-action interactive film and games are still in the early stages of development.

A group of film and television and short drama investors have also found new opportunities here. The two interactive film games that Kachi has recently been working on cost around 10 million yuan each, which is relatively high in the industry. Investors are very optimistic about this market, and he revealed that they are not short of investment at present.

“As long as the quality is good and the subject matter is right, live-action interactive film and games don’t have such great risks. I can’t say that it will definitely make money, but it won’t lose everything like film and television projects.” This is the experience summed up by Zhan Zhikun.

"Crazy for Love" produced by Kachi's team is about to be released. He introduced that the heroine is a very famous overseas actor and the scenes in the play are also very luxurious. Kachi revealed that there is a scene in a landmark building in Guiyang known as the "White House", and the venue rental is hundreds of thousands a day.

Some people are already planning to further combine the plot of the short play with the gameplay of real-life interactive film and television games.

Kachi's next game is currently in the script stage, and he plans to design the game to match the excitement of the short play. For example, one way to play is to let the protagonist counterattack and force the people around him to insult the protagonist. When the emotions reach a certain level, the excitement plot is immediately released. He feels that this type of game is beginning to change from a simple "male love science fiction film" to a more complex track.

Many practitioners are also trying to expand the target audience of live-action interactive film and games, extending from Steam to the short drama level, and choosing to launch them in APP or mini-program formats.

They believe that there is huge market potential for live-action interactive film and television games. Similar to short dramas, they use strong emotions and exciting images to attract players to pay.

However, this type of game also has certain problems.

The most obvious thing is that homogeneity and shoddy production have ruined this category.

Since the popularity of "Endgame", there are not many live-action interactive video games (not limited to love experience games) that have good reputation and can make money in China.

"Most of them are losing a lot of money. Some games with very high game costs have very unsatisfactory sales." This is Liu Huiyan's personal experience. She even found that as soon as such games are released, netizens will criticize them. "It's good enough. If you want to make it, you should have some originality. The name is not original at all." Such comments are everywhere.

This is mainly because of serious homogeneity and mass copying that hurts players' hearts.

Once a project is successful, many companies follow suit, but without improving the plot and production, the connection between film and television and game play is not smooth enough, and the sense of immersion is insufficient. "Many producers make it very crudely in order to speed up and control costs, which makes this type of game directly equated with bad. " Liu Huiyan said.

In addition, both short dramas and live-action interactive film and games face potential regulatory risks due to issues such as content scale.

At present, the market has not given an accurate definition of whether live-action interactive film and games are considered movies or games. The common practice in the industry is that if it is launched on the Steam platform, it only needs to comply with the rules of the platform. If it is launched in China, it will go through film and television review rather than game review.

Nowadays, the supervision of short dramas is becoming increasingly strict. Practitioners believe that as the categories of live-action interactive film and games become clearer in the future, it is possible that they will face stricter supervision.

However, even though there are many problems, practitioners remain optimistic and believe that as long as users have demand, investors will be optimistic. In addition, it is still a blue ocean market and is worth a try.

Author: Wang Lu, Editor: Wei Jia

WeChat public account: Dingjiao (ID: dingjiaoone)