If plagiarism can’t be stopped, will WeChat mini-games still be good?

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Who doesn't have a past life?

Core Tips:

• The prices of reskinned mini-games are clearly marked, and there are already "monopolistic" copycat companies.
• The lightweight nature of mini-games makes the cost of copying very low, and with the assistance of traffic companies, a gray industrial chain has been formed.
• As product quality and volume improve, pure reproduction of small games will become increasingly difficult and costly.
• WeChat has started to clean up the chaos of plagiarism in its mini-games, but the effect is not obvious.

While you are playing mini-games, those who make mini-games are also playing another "game" full of urgency: plagiarism and anti-plagiarism - how to seize a wave of time dividends and get a lot of traffic before WeChat becomes more and more strict on plagiarism.

There are more and more games with the same name, most games have similar gameplay, and there are rumors of individual games infringing copyright. In a WeChat open class, the mini game "Pirates Are Coming" just announced that its monthly revenue exceeded 100 million yuan, and then other developers announced that they would sue "Pirates Are Coming" for copyright infringement.

Mini games are taking off, but the vortex of plagiarism is also getting bigger and bigger. Just like the early days of public accounts and Weibo, they are experiencing a wild period with all kinds of people involved.

No customization, focus on cloning

From ten thousand to thirty thousand, the cost of plagiarism is clearly marked.

A controversial price list of cloned WeChat mini-games is circulating in the circle. "Focus on cloning, no innovation; no customization." Such a direct slogan immediately aroused the anger of many users in the mini-program developer group. A game developer of a certain company directly denounced that "the most high-profile thing now is plagiarism."

Based on the QR code posted in the advertisement, the author contacted a salesperson named "Fei" on WeChat. Before he could even say hello, the other party sent a set WeChat message, "We can clone the Aladdin Index TOP 30 mini-games, and we can also clone unknown mini-games; the price is determined by the construction period. You can pay directly for the games that have been developed, and you will have to wait for about 1-2 weeks for the games that are being developed."

Perhaps because there were too many people asking for advice, he also emphasized, "No recruiting of agents, no training of laymen, no idle chat."

When the reporter asked about the similarity again, Fei emphasized again: "We sell the source code, it's exactly the same, you can just change the skin yourself." The so-called reskin means changing the game materials including page layout, art design and game name on the original basis, truly changing the soup but not the medicine.

Take "Surround the Little Puppy" and "Surround the Shocked Dog" as examples. The avatars of the two games are different, one is a cartoon dog and the other is a violent dog, but the theme and gameplay are extremely similar, with slightly different props, from meat bones to roadblocks, using props to surround the dog, and the main developers belong to two different companies in Lianyungang and Shanghai.

At the same time, the author also got a price list. Except for the top mini-games such as Jump Jump and Pirates Are Coming, which are determined not to be developed, from the 4th-ranked Happy Balls to the 30th-ranked Dai Dai Fighting Zombies, there are 18 mini-games that have been developed, except for those waiting for customers to quote or are being developed. The price range is between 25,000 and 120,000, and the advance deposit is 10%. For example, the popular mini-game "Happy Tank War" has a copy cycle of less than one month and is quoted at 120,000. "God Hand", which was shown at the WeChat Mini-Game Open Class in early July, only needs 9 days and is quoted at 40,000. Transactions can be guaranteed in person or on Taobao or a5.

When 36Kr asked again about the review and promotion of mini-programs, Fei said that these were not within his business scope. 36Kr then found a traffic company in the circle, who said, "I have thousands of mini-program groups, and they are the only one that dares to run clone ads. Other companies with similar (suspected of plagiarism) programs are probably so-called 'template copycats'."

"The quotes (for these source code clones) are probably reasonable, but the actual construction period is usually doubled. Games like Pirates Are Coming and Friends Are Not, for sure, cannot be completed in a month," said Jiang Yifei, CEO of Mobai Games, who developed the original game Dynamic Badminton. "For such larger games, the gameplay is only one part, and the surrounding commercial systems, such as various invitations, payments, and activities, are the bulk, and there will be a lot of development work."

Li Qing, product director of WeChat mini-games, once told the media, "At the beginning, the mentality of all developers was very simple: give it a try at the lowest cost." Moreover, compared with mobile games and PC games, mini-games do not need to apply for a game license, and the threshold is relatively low.

The lightweight nature of mini-games also makes the cost of copying very low. On Taobao, hundreds of mini-game source codes are sold in packages for 6 to 10 yuan, and they are automatically shipped after being purchased.

Perhaps because he has seen a lot of plagiarism in the game industry, Jiang Yifei's attitude is very calm. "This is normal from a business perspective. In a profitable new market, everyone finds that the threshold for making money is not high, so they chase it. It's normal. (Copied mini-games) disappeared in two months." However, in this process of rapid birth and death, plagiarists may still benefit. "There are not many mini-games at present, and cloned mini-games can still make money by relying on product fission."

Buying volume will make you popular?

The spread of cloned games has proven the rising demand from all parties, and such an arrogant clone business cannot be separated from the assistance of the traffic chain. The way these small games with different skins make money is no different from the original small games: one is advertising, and the other is in-app purchases. Among them, traffic companies provide a shortcut for the promotion and future monetization of small games.

Traffic companies on the market are divided into two categories. The first category is pure promotion, that is, sharing, without registered users, and no guarantee of clicks. This is called CPC mode. The main methods are: social group delivery (ordinary group chat), precision delivery (target group chat, such as student group, mother group, first-tier city group, etc.), circle of friends delivery and box entry. The price depends on the specific number of shares, and the unit price is different for different methods.

"If we have demand, we accept it," said Xiao Chen from a traffic company. "But the conversion rate depends on the product. Just because we can promote any product doesn't mean that all products will be successful."

According to data from a traffic company, after pure sharing-based promotion, games with a DAU of less than 100 can increase their DAU by 700-1200 per day. Now the threshold for mini-programs to apply for traffic masters has been lowered, and mini-programs with a cumulative number of independent visitors of no less than 1,000 and no serious violation records can be opened. With the massive assistance of traffic companies, mini-program games can meet the basic traffic master requirements in a few days and thus have the right to insert advertisements.

In addition to promotion companies that calculate costs based on the number of shares, there is another type of promotion company that counts users based on user behavior, specifically entering the game through authorization, which belongs to the CPA user promotion model.

Under the CPA model, the channels mainly include sharing in the traffic company’s own WeChat group and mini program, jumping from the App to the mini program, and linking to the public Wifi to the mini program. The total price is calculated based on the unit price of each new user, and it is guaranteed that they are real users.

But when the reporter asked how to achieve DAU growth, Xiao Cai from a traffic company said: "We can't guarantee DAU growth, nor can we estimate the approximate DAU growth, but we can continue to promote it.

According to Aladdin's "Mini Program Ecosystem White Paper for the First Half of 2018", "Sharing" ranked first among user scenario entrances with 34.6%, an increase of 8.4% from 2017, and has also greatly exceeded the 25.9% of "Quick Entry" and the 14.1% of "Official Account".

Just holding the entrance of sharing means holding nearly 1/3 of the traffic, which is also the key to the continuous increase in demand for traffic companies. With the backing of traffic, plus the benefits of banners and rewarded video ads, monetization is just around the corner. It is not difficult to obtain temporary traffic, but whether it can generate stickiness with users still depends on the mini program itself.

If the promotion and operation are done properly, it is not uncommon for clones to surpass the originals in terms of revenue or customer base. For example, Tiaoyitiao, which copied Ketchapp's "Bottle Flip", won NIKE's 20 million advertising fee. Ketchapp, which was "copied by Tencent", copied "Threes!" and launched "2048", which was much more popular than the former, so much so that "Threes" used "2048" as the search keyword in the Google Store.

After "2048" became popular, hundreds of similar "2048" games were spawned in the Google Play Store.

Category determines fate, are small games destined to be copied?

Currently, the game copyright infringement does not protect the gameplay. It is understandable that if the gameplay is protected and the reference and use of the existing gameplay by later players is restricted, it will hinder the innovation and spread of games to a certain extent.

Generally, mini-games only focus on one or two core gameplays. With limited creativity in the industry, constantly "paying tribute" to classics has become the norm.

A veteran who has been in the game industry for more than ten years pointed out that most of the application games on Facebook are not original. "They are just products that we have seen before, with a new skin."

"The genre dictates that these games are all just rip-offs of each other," he said.

However, the view of WeChat mini-game product developers and many mini-game entrepreneurs is that the industry is still in the stage of rapid growth and will only enter a qualitative maturity stage after the explosion.

The gray chain of cloned mini-games has been growing under Tencent's nose. At the end of July, WeChat opened a channel for mini-game infringement complaints, currently focusing on the rectification of name plagiarism. Practitioners said that WeChat's review of mini-games has become increasingly strict, and mini-games with highly similar codes are difficult to pass the review. However, WeChat has not yet made clear regulations on code review.

Mini games are still small. In early July, WeChat announced that it had launched more than 2,000 mini games in the past six months. However, this number is still far from the scale required by WeChat Mini Games Product Director Li Qing to match and recommend thousands of games to thousands of people.

Heavy-duty mini-games have not yet entered the market. Currently, most developers are just trying to spend a little money to test the waters, and light casual mini-games are the mainstream. However, WeChat hopes that in the later stage, heavy-duty mini-games will complement light-duty games. In addition, the size of mini-games has been expanded from 4M to 20M, providing space for the development of heavier mini-games.

The entry of heavy-duty games has confirmed Jiang Yifei's judgment that "with the improvement of product quality and volume, pure reproduction of small games will become more and more difficult and costly."

What did WeChat do?

In June this year, WeChat completed the upgrade of name protection. According to official data, WeChat has dealt with more than 100 games with confusing names and more than 200 games with malicious infringement. For online games that have received complaints from rights holders, if they are found to have infringed, they have been required to make rectifications or remove them from the shelves within a limited time according to the degree of infringement.

But when the reporter entered the keywords of two popular games in the WeChat search bar, there were so many similar games that they could not be loaded all at once.

In addition, WeChat has launched a mechanism to protect mini-program and mini-game content from infringement. Legal rights and interests include the misuse of names, avatars, and trademarks, and infringement of reputation, goodwill, privacy, portraits, and copyrights. The infringing rights holders can submit complaints through the public platform's infringement complaint process. WeChat said it will handle the matter within 7 working days.

In early July, the WeChat team issued a statement saying, "The team has been cracking down on infringements, and will crack down on mini-games that infringe on the legitimate rights and interests of others according to the rules. It has also officially released mini-game original protection measures, including the establishment of a name protection library to protect well-known game IP names in advance to avoid malicious registration and confusion; provide an infringement complaint portal; discover and deal with malicious infringements through technical comparison; establish a blacklist, etc."

But within a month of this statement being released, industry insiders said that the plagiarism and even cloning of mini-games had not been effectively curbed, and arrogant advertisements about cloning appeared in group chats of hundreds of mini-programs.

WeChat seems to have a tough attitude and punishes severely, but the trend of plagiarism is only increasing. I am afraid that this is because small games are still in the gestational stage of the industry, and Tencent is relatively tolerant of chaos. Because whether it is cloning or buying traffic, they all contribute to the overall traffic of large and small games. This situation is just like the early days of the WeChat public account boom, when buying traffic and plagiarism were all the rage, and WeChat has condoned this phenomenon to a certain extent, because gray industries such as brushing traffic are also an important force in expanding the ecosystem.

WeChat's attitude towards mini-games also implements Zhang Xiaolong's "ecological theory". It can be predicted that when mini-games attract enough entrants and completely crush mini-games on platforms such as Baidu, Xiaomi, Alipay, and Weibo, Tencent will have the greatest say in the regulation of mini-games.