Bored to play games? No problem, find someone to play with!
There are more people playing games, and the needs of users are also diverse, which has spawned many new industries, and game play is one of them.
In recent years, accompaniment platforms such as Bixin, Laoyuegou, and Companion have emerged one after another. Driven by the lonely economy, the gaming accompaniment business has continued to expand, but at the same time negative news has continued. Why is the accompaniment industry difficult to do?
Can the accompaniment industry that drives high and low can usher in its second spring? With the spread of gray trades, where is the future of the accommodating platform APP? Can the sinking market open a skylight to the accommodating platform?
Wuza Rivers and Lakes in the Play Industry
With the development of the e-sports industry and national-level mobile games, the game companion industry has also sprung up.
From the product logic point of view, the accompaniment platform is actually an intermediate linker. It has built a C2C platform for accompaniment players and customers. Among China’s 1.4 billion population, there are 580 million gamers, of which about 200 million paid game players, and the accompaniment platform Target users are targeted at high-consumption users. According to the 36kr report, 80% of GMV (total turnover within a certain period of time) comes from high-end consumption users and high-quality companions.
At present, the main monetization mode of the accompaniment platform is to collect accompaniment service fees, and the core is mainly around order consumption, item consumption, and additional service consumption. The former accompaniment platform also thought about guiding users to the platform community to socialize after the users matured, and selling advertisements is also one of the monetization modes. But it is a pity that the companion platform has not come to this point.
In addition, the platform financing situation has also shown a cliff-like decline: in 2018, more than 500 million financing flowed into the companion game industry, and the scale of the companion game market has reached about 10 billion yuan.
Bixin (formerly "Fish Bubble") completed a series A financing of tens of millions of dollars led by IDG Capital. "Bad Chicken E-sports" announced the completion of a US$15 million A+ round of financing led by Qiming Venture Capital, and "Liu Yuegou" completed a 200 million yuan Series C financing. Since 2018, financing has become colder.
However, the entire accompaniment industry is facing the dilemma of driving high and low. Taking advantage of the east wind of e-sports, why can’t the accompany market sing all the way?
The loneliness economy prevails, and accompany play becomes a new trend
Online accompany players are used to calling themselves "accompany", and the corresponding customers are called "boss." Nowadays, clicking accompany to play is just like accompany singing in KTV, it has become a trend. But most of the time, they not only provide services to accompany playing games, but also provide services for sleeping, singing, reading poems and even virtual lovers, which also gives a breeding ground for pornography.
A long time ago, People's Daily Online issued an article criticizing the companion game platform, claiming that it played pornographic sideballs and harmed the physical and mental health of minors. Subsequently, Bixin APP was removed from the shelves for rectification. Of course, this is not an exception. There are lingering yellow shadows in the entire gaming industry.
Why does technical companionship eventually degenerate into emotional companionship? In group games, calling for a player of the opposite sex has become one of the fun of group games. Gradually, the social attributes of Bixin apps have surpassed hardcore sparring, and they can even be regarded as "momo" in the vertical track.
The spread of gray transactions is actually caused by the loneliness of urbanites. While the Internet has brought strangers closer, it has also further weakened traditional intimacy. In the companion play market, the top score is no longer the only demand. Users also need companionship, social interaction and sex. The emotional demand for companionship has been infinitely amplified in the tide of the times.
But the culprit is still on the platform. In order to retain users, the platform does not stop the rubbing behavior, but instead adopts an encouraging policy. This is directly reflected in the recruitment of female companions by the game companion platform: compared to male companions, the platform plays with women The recruitment of the division does not value the level of competition of the female players, but rather the appearance and voice, and even force the female players to post some cooler photos after the game.
Under the Internet, while people enjoy the convenience brought by data, they are also put on layers of shackles. The lonely economy prevails, and the capital will be harvested. In addition to games, there are accompaniment platforms such as hunting. The content involved is more extensive, including accompany playing games, sleeping with mics, live alarm clock, emotional consultation, psychologists, watching movies with mics, etc.
The irrationality of playing with the market
In fact, this has to be attributed to the various irrationals of the entire companion market. For the companion player, this job is not as glamorous as it looks. The accompany industry has a low threshold, and the competition is fierce. There is always a confident accompany player to enter, and then to leave.
Accompanying is a very troublesome job. For most accompaniment players, the price of accompany play is low, about 10 yuan per order. Novices may even appear "white prostitution". Customers find various reasons. Escaping orders also occur from time to time. In the final analysis, accompany is a service industry, and customers always come first. But the customer's requirements do not only point to game skills and professionalism.
In the world of companion play, sound is very important for the companion player. According to the needs of users, accompany players are divided into different timbres, such as girly voice, royal sister voice, youth voice and so on. A good voice can add points to the player, and there is no market for a player with a bad voice. This logic is a bit like the "hormonal" social software in the real world, except that the indicator changes from a face to a voice.
Even at the "great god" level, the hourly wage is only about 50 yuan. The high income of the Great God mainly depends on the naming fee. The naming fee is to add the name of the boss after the ID of the player. The price is determined by the boss. Naming is divided into pure title, game title (referring to the title after the game ID), favor crown, and even supreme favor crown and buyout crown.
In terms of YY naming, the lowest price is 99. In addition, there are some "ambiguous numbers" such as 520, 1314, and 13140, which are not capped. In other words, naming is the "boss" using money to satisfy one's own "possessive" or "superiority". Looking at the industry as a whole, when escort is playing games, it can only be one-to-one, which leads to the low efficiency of the business model of the escort industry and limited imagination.
How to solve the narrow market scale and low industry ceiling of the companion play industry? The author believes that there are three solutions: one is to increase the number of companions and users, and expand the front-end market. The second is to increase the payment rate of a single user and increase the frequency of consumption. The third is to add new monetization models, such as adding a membership system and virtual gift items.
In practice, we still have to expand the front-end market first, and now that the cost of acquiring customers is getting higher and higher, it is difficult to tell the story on the companion platform without the integration of new funds.
Gray trading spreads, where is the future of the platform?
According to the "2020 Global E-sports Market Report" recently released by the professional statistics agency Newzoo, China will become the world's highest-income e-sports market in 2020 with a total revenue of US$385 million. At the same time, China will become the market with the largest number of e-sports viewers with its 163 million e-sports viewers.
As a derivative product of the game industry, accompany play, despite the chaos, still has a broad space for development. At present, accompany play is sinking. According to the "Game Play White Paper" released by Bixin in July this year, the first half of 2020 Among the newly added game sparring masters, the proportion of third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities has increased to 48%, with more than 950,000 people, and game sparring has become a new career choice for the sinking market.
However, in addition to being unable to escape the shadow of erotic trading, the small market size and low ceiling of the gaming industry itself are also flaws that must be mentioned.
At present, in order to increase revenue, the Peiwan platform is generally betting on the community, trying to keep users on the platform for a long time, seeking more commercialization opportunities. However, the escort industry has obviously touched a gray area. How to promote the healthy development of the escort industry is imminent, and how the extended community attributes can be coordinated with the escort business. The escort industry urgently needs to find a balance.
Moreover, in order to solve the problem of limited growth caused by the 1V1 model of the accompany industry, the accompany platform generally adds short videos and live broadcasts. But this also involves other people's cakes. At present, the boundaries of the Internet industry are constantly being broken. Huya and Douyu, including the closed live broadcast of Tentacle, have successively launched the accompaniment business.
Compared to these top apps that live over 100 million a month, the size of these accompany platforms is far from it. Even in terms of user stickiness and community attributes, the live broadcast platform has a deeper accumulation. Moreover, the live broadcast industry also has clear reasons to enter the accompaniment business, especially for waist anchors. The launch of the accompaniment business allows them to have more profitable channels while interacting more directly with the ordering users.
The companion play industry is still in the early stage of barbaric growth, but the competition is becoming increasingly fierce. Now this track has gathered some top players, such as Bixin, Moondog, Companion, and E-sports. In addition to the companion platform, they are also leading Taobao power leveling and power leveling work. Room competition.
In addition, there is another variable that hinders the development of the companion game industry. The current companion games are mainly Glory of the Kings and Elites of Peace. However, the official punishments and attitudes of these two game players to the leveling behavior are also increasingly severe. In addition, copyright issues may also be a stumbling block in the future. If Tencent really suppresses it, this will become a key factor in disturbing this market.
Under the big wave of game development, the demand for accompaniment will continue to expand. For the entire accompaniment industry, there is still a cake. The key is how to cut it reasonably. This requires healthy competition and refined operations in the industry.
Author: rather lack
Article source: Songguo Finance, please indicate the copyright