Clearing the charts six times throughout the year is useless. How are you, App Store?
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Although the App Store has always been a battleground, this year's competition may have gone a bit too far. On the one hand, new products that attack the charts head-on are coming in with great momentum, and new products with excellent features and quality have also brought a lot of shock to the industry. On the other hand, the covert struggle for the App Store, the most valuable channel , has intensified, even making Apple overwhelmed and unable to deal with it. Let us analyze them one by one. 39 new products added to Q4 Top 20, with more than 100 new products hitting the top of the list throughout the year From a relatively normal perspective, 39 new products were added to the Top 20 best-selling products in Q4 this year. Together with the products previously counted in the first half of the year and Q3, in the past 2016, there have been 110 new games that have visited the Top 20 of the App Store best-selling list. Classifying these new products by category, we can see that MMO is still the largest mainstream category this year, with a total of 38 new MMO mobile games entering the top 20. In particular, products such as "Swordsman Love", "Asking the Way" and "Swordsman World" have the most stable performance. In addition, a large number of new products in the RPG, AR PG, and ACT categories have also entered the market. In particular, a number of popular masterpieces have been born in the ACT field, such as "Honkai Impact 3" and "Shadow Blade 2", which not only have high visual expressiveness, but also have been valued and recommended by Apple. There are not many new products shortlisted in the card field, but this year's biggest hit "Onmyoji" has emerged. A careful comparison reveals that this product has abandoned many of the common card production routines in the past. At the same time, it has made attempts to adopt Japanese dramas and domestic fan artists. The marketing model is also completely different from the traditional one. Another area that is still worthy of attention this year is the e-sports field. However, as of press time (December 28), there are not many new products in the sports competitive game category. Since the MOBA field was monopolized last year, since the beginning of this year, manufacturers have rushed into the fields of naval warfare, tank land warfare, streetball, etc. to divide the market. Overall, there are only 13 new products shortlisted in other categories such as sports, competition, and leisure. A simple calculation shows that a new product launches an attack on the top of the App Store best-selling list every three days. Among them, many products remain in the Top 20 for a long time, especially games with backgrounds from large companies and excellent quality, which can stay at the top of the list for more than a month or even longer. It is clear that the competition for the list is still fierce this year. But it is worth mentioning that the above picture only counts 34 games, and the other five new products on the list have been removed from the shelves in several Apple cleanups. Coincidentally, as early as the first three quarters, several products at the top of the best-selling list were removed from the shelves. The landscape of Tencent and NetEase has begun to change, and "Honor of Kings" and "Onmyoji" are competing head-on The most interesting events this year are still focused on Tencent and NetEase. In the first three quarters, Tencent, a giant known for its methodology, has left a deep impression of monopoly in the industry by relying on its platform advantages, in-depth product matrix and year-by-year iteration strategy. But in mid-to-late September, NetEase's third largest MMO brand, "A Chinese Ghost Story" mobile game, topped the list thanks to deeply embedded marketing. At the same time, the blockbuster "Onmyoji", which was beyond the expectations of the entire industry, also gradually entered the top five best-selling products, forming a barrier to Tencent's products and occupying four of the top five best-selling positions. In fact, iOS’s ranking performance is only part of the market. In the domestic market where Android channels are larger and more complex, Tencent’s products’ in-depth use of them will inevitably bring about a larger market scale and value. This also has a profound impact on Tencent's products other than its flagship products. But it has to be said that NetEase’s strong performance this year does reflect that the two major companies are undergoing a transformation. As far as the iOS market is concerned, Tencent had always maintained a leading position in the iOS global revenue list before the emergence of "Onmyoji". In October, with the explosion of this game, NetEase took the top spot on the list for the first time, followed by Tencent. But just last month, the situation reversed. With continuous accumulation and deep user cultivation, "Honor of Kings" returned to the top of the domestic iOS revenue list, "Onmyoji" fell to second place, and at the same time, games such as "Fantasy Zhu Xian", "Swordsman Love", and "Naruto" also returned to the top of the list. At this point, Tencent has regained the first place in global iOS revenue. The rankings on November 16 It is worth mentioning that due to its active overseas expansion strategy, "Onmyoji" quickly opened up the Chinese overseas market in the United States, so globally, its iOS revenue still leads "Honor of Kings". It can be seen that for Tencent, the addition of "Onmyoji" has brought the market share between Tencent and NetEase closer, and the product production and marketing methods it represents are an impact that cannot be ignored. For NetEase, even if it bets on the annual hit "Onmyoji", even if we put aside the Android market , the user base built by Tencent will be difficult to shake. It can be seen that the confrontation between the two in terms of methodology and word-of-mouth brand actually comes down to the two products "Honor of Kings" and "Onmyoji". To date, the rankings of these two products have been constantly alternating on the iOS best-selling list. Ranking list is worthless. Throughout the year, in addition to these head-on competitions based on hard power, there have also been a large number of covert fights that are unscrupulous, and these behaviors have become increasingly intense, causing the paid list, free list, and best-selling list to lose their original reference value. The most common is counterfeit products. It is no longer a new thing to piggyback on IP. Nowadays, it is difficult to protect overseas IP rights in China, and this phenomenon has already become rampant. Many games even appear on the list blatantly under the banner of many blockbuster games. It is worth noting that among the products that were launched in Q4 and even made it into the top 20 best-selling list, there were several products that looked very similar to knockoffs, and these products have all been removed from the App Store. At the same time, after searching, Grape Jun also found that most of these products changed their developer accounts and uploaded the packages with the same names, and are now operating safely. Changing the package is a method that many developers have used in recent times in response to App Store removal measures. Some manufacturers have confirmed that the products that have been removed were caused by accident, but after the method was exposed, similar operations have become common and increasingly "popular." Equally despicable are products that blatantly use pornographic elements in their promotions. For example, the game shown below directly displays relevant pictures in the display screenshot and uses tempting words in the title to attract attention. Although this game has been removed from the shelves, the emergence of such products has undoubtedly lowered the bottom line of the industry once again. This situation also occurs in the top 20 best-selling games. What’s more interesting is that these two products include the above-mentioned two behaviors of selling two products in one package and relying on pornographic temptation to sell offline, and also bring discredit to the newly emerging two-dimensional games. It can be seen that the promotional images and in-game screenshots of these two products are the same, but the game names are not the same as the previously mentioned sequel products. These two products have different names. According to statistics, these two products were both near the top 20 of the best-selling list within a few days, which shows that their purpose is more likely to attract more players to join. However, this is obviously an act intended to launder the rankings, and I don’t think any player will buy into it easily. The authenticity of the Top 20 results also needs to be questioned. All signs have exposed the chaos in the list. What is even more embarrassing is that this year, incidents of self-charging and manipulating the list have been constantly exposed in the industry, and even many large publishers are among them. For example, behind the seemingly glamorous performance of the best-selling list is a profit cycle built by each product using money to make money. It is hard to say that such self-charging products can represent the players' choice, and it is even harder to say that they are worthy of being chosen by players. Also becoming more and more common along with self-charging is the practice of tampering with the rankings, which makes it possible for some of the products mentioned above to be blatantly indistinguishable from the real thing and to be displayed in front of players in a blatant and unscrupulous manner. At the beginning of this year, the industry exposed the data of Brushbang, which showed that for a product to enter the top 10 of the best-selling list, it only costs 100,000 yuan, and the cost of maintaining the top 10 for a week is less than 700,000 yuan. The quotes for brushing the charts are becoming more and more accurate these days. Not only can they brush all the charts, but also they can brush from the top 10 to the top 200 best-selling products. Different positions can be brushed in as needed, and the specific time on the charts can be accurate. Moreover, the companies that manipulate the charts also have peak seasons. For example, recently Apple took a holiday for Christmas , and many companies that manipulate the charts began to do so. Naturally, the competition was fierce. At this time, the prices for entering and maintaining specific charts will continue to rise. For example, the cost of entering the top ten best-selling charts is about 1 million per week or even more. The App Store has cleaned up its charts six times, but to no avail Such chaos in the rankings is becoming more and more serious, which may be a consequence that Apple did not expect at the beginning. Since the launch of the one-yuan payment method in November 2014, the App Store has paid a painful price for two years. Since then, in addition to regular monitoring of the keyword hot search rankings, the App Store has also continuously increased its efforts to clean up the three major lists. Since the beginning of 2016, since Apple implemented a dozens-hour lock on the hot searches and keywords on March 5, it has been increasing its efforts to regulate the rankings. Grape Jun observed and recorded six major clearing lists in early May, late May, early August, late October, early November, and mid-December. By mid-March, the phenomenon of chart manipulation had already affected the best-selling list, with a large number of products rapidly launched at the top of the list, and the trend clearly showed a short-term strong outbreak. However, in fact, most products did not have a lot of market promotion and product strength. This situation intensified on the free list on March 24, when two "Golden Flower" games were added to the free list. The trend of manipulating the list continued to ferment over the next two months, and eventually the App Store had to clean it up. On May 4, the App Store carried out a major cleanup of the free and paid lists. The rankings of a large number of products dropped rapidly, and some products were directly eliminated from the two lists. Of course, the chaos on the two lists later returned to "normal." So the App Store started to clean up the list again on May 25, and stepped up monitoring and cleaning efforts multiple times, and the cleaning frequency was changed from the normal three hours of App Store updates to two hours. Unfortunately, such efforts have not brought about any substantial changes. So on August 5, the App Store carried out a large-scale cleaning operation, focusing on cracking down on zombie apps, copycat apps, and non-compliant apps. According to statistics, more than 11,000 applications were removed from the shelves in one day during that period. However, such a large-scale rectification has only brought about a stronger backlash. Just on October 19, a game called "Assembly Number Fighting Bulls" was directly ranked third on the best-selling list, on par with annual blockbusters such as "Onmyoji", "Fantasy Westward Journey", "A Chinese Ghost Story" and "Honor of Kings", which seems to be an invisible mockery of the App Store. Faced with this dire situation, the App Store could no longer tolerate it, so in the last few days of October, its efforts to regulate applications were the greatest in history. In the four days from October 24 to 27, an average of more than 20,000 applications were removed from the shelves every day. As of October 28, more than half of the top 50 paid games had been removed from the App Store, but as soon as the App Store cleaned up the list, the bots pushed a large number of one-dollar games to the top of the list. The chaos has become a chronic problem and there is no sign of change. Apple finally couldn't tolerate it anymore, and within a week or so of entering November, it carried out a thorough cleanup operation from reorganizing the rankings to resetting the algorithms. First, the paid list was cleaned up, allowing a large number of high-quality stand-alone games to return to the top of the paid list. Then the free list was also cleared up, and the product rankings returned to normal. Finally, the best-selling list also fluctuated. This time, many top products also saw their rankings drop due to algorithm changes. For example, "Swordsman Love" was only ranked 45th at the time, far beyond the normal ranking fluctuation range. Of course, not long afterwards, the charts returned to their previous state. This makes the App Store's list clearing on December 14 more like a weak daily groan. After clearing the paid list, there are no further actions. Unfortunately, with Apple taking a holiday, the chart manipulation phenomenon has become extremely chaotic in recent days. Except for the top 10 best-selling lists, all parts of the list have been manipulated to varying degrees. App Store, are you okay? The fierce competition at the top of the list forms a sharp contrast with the chaos downstream. The App Store, which has been continuously increasing its rectification efforts, has also lost the value of its list amid repeated rebounds. When communicating with many senior industry insiders, everyone had this view: "Who among experts still looks at the rankings? Don't they know the performance of their products themselves?" Indeed, we have all kinds of ways to make the rankings look good, glorious, or even stabilize in a commendable position for a long time, but the rankings will not make our product quality better or stronger. Nowadays, the chaos in the rankings has intensified. In such an environment, competing to brush up the rankings may not bring more benefits than investing time and energy into the product. In fact, judging from the profits from some self-charging and ranking manipulation, the investment cost and maintenance cost are far higher than the actual income (for example, 80 million yuan in self-charging, but the actual turnover is less than 6 million yuan). Also in such chaos, we still see many products being made and even becoming popular, which is a good way forward. Perhaps expecting the list to become benign is itself a luxury. However, we still have the best intentions and hope that there will still be a list in the industry that truly reflects players' preferences and choices. Its significance lies in the health of the entire market and its long-term value to the structure of game companies. Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising The author of this article @依光流 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! |
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