How to create a mobile game in Japan that generates over 100 million yuan in monthly revenue?

At the Gamer 2015 Mobile Game Developer Conference held by GameGrape yesterday, Kazuyuki Hagiwara, COO of Japanese game company Aiming, explained to everyone how they successfully created the hit game "Logres" from aspects such as the Japanese game market and the production and promotion of "Logress".

What is the Japanese gaming market like?

Kazuyuki Hagiwara said that the main way to promote games in Japan is through the App Store and Google Play. In addition, recommendations from friends are also a very effective way to promote games. There are not many platforms like WeChat, and they will not occupy the top few places on the best-selling list. To promote games in Japan, you can only use local methods.

Below is a user survey on Logress game promotion presented by Hagiwara Kazuyuki . The Aiming team asked users where they knew about the game Logress. 30-40% of players knew about it from Google and iOs rankings, and the other 30% were introduced by friends.

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The overall scale of the Japanese mobile game market is about 15 billion RMB. This market is the scale of monthly revenue, and the annual scale is about 300 billion yen. This is the average store bestseller ranking and the approximate revenue scale, calculated in US dollars. Hagiwara Kazuyuki told everyone that in Japan, there are relatively few games with monthly sales of 100 million yen, which is about 5 million RMB. As long as you can enter the top 50 of the Japanese game bestseller list, the monthly revenue can reach 100 million yen. For Japanese game developers, entering the top 50 of the game ranking is a very important indicator.

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The themes of the top 100 games in Japan in 2014 are mainly the transfer of animation, home games, and non-smartphone games. Anime games only account for about 10 of the top 100 games in Japan, and about 80 of the other 100 games are self-developed games. In Japan, you don't need a lot of IP to be successful, as long as the game is fun, it is very likely to be successful.

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How does Logres make money?

Kazuyuki Hagiwara believes that the first thing to do is to make the game good. As an MMO game on mobile phones, "Logress" pays great attention to subtraction. There are basically no numbers on the game screen of "Logress", such as offensive games, character names, and all kinds of things are eliminated on the screen. From the perspective of web games, it is surprising that MMO has no numbers, and everyone thinks it is not an MMO. Why remove MMO? Because it allows some users who don't know MMO to enter the game.

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The second point is that Logress pays great attention to organizing game union activities. This is because Aiming's philosophy is that games can get boring, but social interaction will never get boring. In Japan, other games require both parties to recognize each other before becoming friends. In the game Logress, as long as one party recognizes each other, they can become friends. In Logress, it is very easy to establish friendships, allowing users to find friends more easily and play games easily.

In the MMO genre, the more users there are, the more fun the game is. Aiming is to deliberately do various activities in the game to get users to enter the game at a certain time. Basically, there are various limited-time activities between 8-9 am, 12-13 pm, 6-7 pm after get off work, and after 11 pm before going to bed.

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After doing all the above work, making money is a matter of minutes. In Japan, the charging point for making games is lottery. "Logress" uses a lot of free currency lottery. "Logress" has a monthly income of about 100 million yuan, and about 300 million free currency is given to users every month. According to the 3-fold rule, the income will increase as much as the number of free currency given to users.

"First let users know the successful experience after paying, and then let users pay, this is the core concept of Aiming's profit model." Hagiwara Kazuyuki said that if users save a certain amount of currency, the game will become easier to pass. When users have currency, they will buy various equipment or buy capsule toys. Aiming deliberately does not let users spend it. After saving to a certain point, they will be given a certain reward. If you have 30 currency, your experience value will be doubled. If the currency is less than 30, the experience value will be reduced by half. The user's account must store a certain amount of currency.