From King of Glory, I summarized the three major operating magic weapons of Tencent Games

Two things happened recently. First, more than half of my roommates started playing Honor of Kings , and second, a former operations classmate of Honor of Kings became my new roommate.

As a person who is full of curiosity about the business world, I would chat with him whenever I had nothing to do to see how Tencent's game project went from 0 to 1. I found that there was a lot of overlap and commonality with the entrepreneurial methodology I have accumulated over the years, so I wrote the following article.

Step 1 Project Testing

Goal 1: Verify whether players are willing to play and then decide how much resources to invest.

• I have always believed that project testing is the most important step in business, because verifying product-market fit (PMF) is the prerequisite for all business activities.
• In the e-commerce industry, the core of project testing is conversion rate ; in the Internet industry, due to the addition of the concept of "user", project testing mainly focuses on retention rate . ——In essence, they all represent the market's recognition of the project.

So how does Tencent Games verify product-market fit?

Tencent Games divides projects into 6 star levels. Projects with different star levels can receive different resource support. The core indicators of the rating are as follows:

• The first-stage login ratio = login ratio to retained users / login ratio to effective users.
• Second-stage login ratio = second-stage login ratio retained users / second-stage login ratio effective users.
• Six-star standard: first-order retention>80%, second-order retention>75%
• Five-star standard: first-level registration ratio> 75%, second-level registration ratio> 60%; or first-level registration ratio> 70%, second-level registration ratio> 70%

*Note:

• Login ratio of valid users: starting from the first time the user logs in to the game (including registration), and the number of users who log in for two days or more within a week.
• Login-to-retention ratio: users who log in for three days or more within a week, starting from the first time the user logs in to the game (including registration).
• Second-stage login ratio effective users: users among new users who have logged in for at least 3 days within the first 7 days of registration (retained users defined by login ratio).
• Second-stage login ratio and retained users: Second-stage login ratio and retained users, including users who logged in between 8th and 14th days among valid users.

We can notice that although Tencent Games uses a relatively complex algorithm, its essence is still retention rate.

In fact, due to project testing reasons, Honor of Kings almost died in the womb.

Honor of Kings performed very poorly in the project test, with a first-stage retention rate of only 40%, which almost caused the Honor of Kings project to be suspended. Later, the project team re-planned the game and performed a major operation on Honor of Kings, which finally greatly improved the retention rate and allowed the game to be successfully launched.

Goal 2: Verify whether players are willing to pay, which directly affects revenue.

• While verifying the feasibility of the project, it is also necessary to verify the feasibility of the commercialization plan.
• This is just like the consumer industry verifying conversion rate while verifying price, but game revenue is more complicated because it is tied to the process of experiencing the game.

Tencent's game planning model is already relatively mature. For example, the player growth line design and commercial system design are relatively universal - it can also be said that they have been verified over a long period of time. Behind the universal model, the important factor affecting the experience of each game is the numerical design.

The root cause is that different games attract different types of gamers, whose ability to pay, willingness to pay, and the feedback they hope to get from the games are very different .

Therefore, during the testing process, it is necessary to set initial values ​​based on the psychological understanding of the target population and simulation results, and then verify from the user's behavioral data whether revenue KPIs such as penetration rate (the proportion of paying users to the total number of users) and AR PU value (average revenue per user) meet expectations.

For example, as a 5V5 mobile competitive game, the gameplay of Honor of Kings is mainly generated by users. Therefore, the operation team needs to build it into a game with a large number of users and a low ARPU value to ensure the fairness of competition and not harm the user experience. To do so, it is necessary to set up a low-threshold payment plan and a non-significant payment advantage (that is, the advantage of paying players is not obvious).

We can see that the best-selling product of Honor of Kings is the hero skin, which can not only change the hero's appearance, but also slightly improve the hero's attributes. This means:

User payment price = hero transformation value + ability improvement value

As a result, users’ expectations for improved capabilities are lowered because the value of cross-dressing makes up for some of it.

Then during the testing process, based on this strategy, an initial numerical design can be given, and then adjusted according to user behavior data and feedback until the retention rate, penetration rate, and ARPU value reach expectations.

Step 2 Market launch

Goal 1: Through testing, identify which users like this game.

• Tencent's social products (QQ and WeChat ) have a huge number of users, and Tencent's gaming products do have inherent advantages in terms of channel resources .
• Tencent is still very sophisticated in its game distribution. ——This tells us that resources are never enough, marketing budget is never enough, and fame is never too much.

In user operations , we have two commonly used concepts:

• User Persona : An abstract concept for a user group, such as the mainstream group of King of Glory, fifth-grade elementary school students, with 30 yuan pocket money per week (example)
• User Profile: structured labels for individual users, such as gender, age, region, XX user, etc.

Tencent has established a user profile for each social user. When promoting some games, the operation/marketing team will give priority to pushing advertisements to users who have been tagged as players of the same type of games, so as to achieve effective delivery.

Since Honor of Kings was the first mobile online competitive game at the time, it could only attract some test players by casting a wide net in a short period of time , and used active users during the testing period as samples to study the target user types.

This part of the work is carried out simultaneously with STEP 1.

Goal 2: Target the target group and acquire a large number of game users.

• The delivery work is mainly handled by the marketing colleagues in the team, including the connection of resources on various platforms and the production of marketing content.

Based on the different star ratings during the testing phase, Tencent Games will market five-star and six-star projects, and six-star projects will enjoy a higher priority in resource use: including but not limited to user number packages with different labels, advertising space in QQ and WeChat, App Store advertising space, marketing budget, etc.

Six-star projects have the right to give priority to selecting user number packages, and the number packages selected by five-star projects must deduplicate the number packages selected by six-star projects to avoid repeatedly disturbing users and affecting the social product experience. ——Products with four stars and below will not be operated or put on the market.

Of course, in addition to internal resources, Tencent Games will also carry out external investment. ——The resources are still not enough, the marketing budget is still not enough, and the visibility is still not too much.

Step 3 Commercial Operation

In the e-commerce industry, there is a basic formula:

Revenue = Traffic conversion rate per customer

In the gaming industry, there is also a similar basic formula:

Revenue = Active User Number Penetration Ratio ARPU

In fact, after completing the first two steps, we have gained a large number of users, and the commercialization system has been built. The game can now be transformed into a product independently without operational intervention.

But as a commercial project, in order to maximize commercial benefits, it is necessary

• Maintain user activity and extend the game life cycle
• Increase penetration rate and stimulate users to make their first purchase on the same day
• Increase ARPU value and guide users to pay high amounts per day

These three aspects, which are the main work contents of commercial operations, can be summarized into the following two goals:

1. Goal 1: Stimulate consumption and achieve revenue targets
2. Goal 2: Maintain user activity and extend life cycle

These two goals are similar to the pendulum theory in the consumer industry:

• There is a brand event once a month and a promotion event once a month, swinging between creating momentum and following the trend.

As for the means to achieve the above two goals, they are relatively simple in the gaming industry, mainly event operations .

Of course, this involves the establishment of a new user level. This stage is also the stage that tests "operational skills" the most, so I won't go into details here.

Summary: Three major winning strategies

1. Begin with the end in mind

From the moment the game project entered Tencent, the operations team has been involved, participating in the entire process of game planning, testing, and launch: it can be said that the entire team is burdened with the same KPI, the goal is clear, and everyone is working towards the same goal.

2. Data-driven

Verify market demand through testing, allocate market resources based on ratings based on test data, and respect facts; break down operational indicators, and conduct refined operations with the goal of improving various segmented data, so as to be targeted.

3. User-centric

"In order to set the price, we even argued over whether primary school students' weekly pocket money should be 30 yuan or 40 yuan." This is just one example. More importantly, only when product planning, market launch and commercial operations share the same values ​​and methodology can they work well together.

A little emotion

Over the past few years, I have seen and experienced many companies/projects. My biggest feeling is that the fate of too many projects has been doomed from the beginning: unclear goals, teams with different desires, unverified needs... there is no possibility of luck.

Even a game as powerful as Honor of Kings is the result of Chengdu Tianmei's continuous efforts when it was dying.

Even if the methodology is correct, you still have to work hard to achieve your goal; if the methodology is wrong, you are leaving your future to luck - but don't dream.

The author of this article @俊杰 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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