After "soft pornography" and "killing pigs", Soul, a social platform for strangers, has added a "gambling" label.
At the beginning of August, the video media @绿皮侠Bee reported that the game "Interstellar Manor" on the Soul platform is called "Farming the Land", but users recharge to plant "fruits", the platform initiates a probability draw, and the rewards can be exchanged for cash off-site. The gambling mechanism, the live broadcast room on the platform even uses "farming" as a secret to predict the result of the lottery, encouraging users to bet. According to reports, some users lost 200,000 yuan in "Star Manor" within a few months.
Since then, Soul quickly blocked various "farming" live broadcast rooms and denied any involvement in gambling. However, some media found that related live broadcasts still exist.
Soul wears the metaverse coat on the front, and started to tell AI stories again this year, and its feature of "making friends without looking at your face" has been criticized by users as a hotbed for scammers who cheat money and sex.
On March 27 this year, Soul’s parent company, Soulmate Inc, updated its prospectus on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, preparing for the third IPO. Although the loss narrowed, the MAU continued to decline. Under the urging of capital, Soul, who once occupied a place on the track with "soul socialization", gradually lost his soul.
"Gambling" incident
"The user enters the manor, chooses a fruit to plant, and increases the production by watering and fertilizing. When the fruit is purchased by the merchant, the user can get 'shards' as a reward." The gameplay of "Star Manor" in Soul App and related The live broadcast event was pointed out by the media that "there is a gambling mechanism", because in this traditional "farming" game, there is a gambling mode of "user deposits-platform opening-users withdraw money outside the venue".
According to media reports, if users want to plant “fruits”, they need to buy Soul coins with cash first, and then from planting “fruits” to being “acquired”, each game link has a clearly marked price, and users have to keep spending money. One of the reasons that attracts players to "farm the land" is the lottery game that is packaged as "acquisition of fruits".
In Interstellar Manor, the platform uses the role of a "merchant" to randomly select a fruit to "purchase" every three minutes. After the fruit of the winning user is purchased, they will receive a large number of "shards" as rewards. When the user has accumulated a sufficient number of fragments, they can enter the upgrade method of Star Manor: use the fragments to open the blind box treasure chest. These blind boxes usually contain virtual gifts such as avatar photo frames and necklaces, and are also a kind of "social currency" circulating in the Soul site.
Soul game accused of "gambling"
It should be noted that, according to Soul's platform rules, all virtual items on the site cannot be realized or traded. But outside the platform, users can trade virtual items through third-party channels such as WeChat payment, and the "backpack merchants" who appeared on the platform following the Soul virtual gift mechanism have become resellers of virtual items. They buy a large number of virtual items and then resell them. Sell at a premium to others to earn the difference. "Backpack Merchant" has gradually become one of the withdrawal channels of "Interstellar Manor".
According to reports, in order to increase the "winning rate", players generally plant a variety of fruits at the same time. A player of the Star Manor game said, "Many people will recharge thousands of Soul coins, and some people can multiply the number of fragments dozens of times in one game. Similarly, people may lose everything."
When players can only exchange game chips with cash, and the virtual items they draw can be further resold for cash, some live broadcast rooms on the Soul platform also opened for this purpose, predicting the results of the lottery and encouraging users to place bets. The live broadcast content derived from this game was named by the video media @绿皇侠Bee as "there is a gambling mechanism".
At present, the betting live broadcast room with the code of "farming the land" has been blocked by Soul, but the media who followed up the matter later said that such live broadcasts can still be found, and the gambling is still as usual. Soul also denied the gambling accusation in response to the media, saying that the platform prohibits users from trading virtual items privately.
On the black cat complaint platform, there have been a large number of related complaints, and some users have asked for refunds. Soul App refuses refunds as a merchant.
Three-year losing streak
After "soft pornography" and "killing pigs", Soul now has another label of "gambling".
Soul was launched at the end of 2016, focusing on building social relationships based on interest graphs. At that time, its slogan was "follow the soul to find you", featuring "make friends without looking at faces", and took a differentiated route on the social track of strangers. In 2021, after the concept of metaverse became popular, Soul expanded the user category to "Generation Z", proposed the concept of "social metaverse", and changed Slogan to "social metaverse for young people".
In the past two years of wearing the "cloak" of the metaverse, Soul still failed to reverse the "loss".
In March 2023, Soul's new version of the prospectus submitted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange showed that from 2020 to 2022, Soul's revenue will be 498 million yuan, 1.281 billion yuan, and 1.667 billion yuan. Although revenue is growing significantly, Soul is not profitable. In the past three years, Soul's losses during the year were 579 million yuan, 1.324 billion yuan, and 509 million yuan respectively.
Another data is that the monthly active users of Soul did not follow the increase in revenue, but decreased instead, with a year-on-year decrease of 7.3% in 2022. Soul, who chanted the slogan of "social metaverse", did not rise because of the metaverse.
Zhang Lu, CEO of Soul, once said that Soul will become the most interesting Gamified gamified social product, “We will create more tools and interesting graphics and images for users to have a more fun interactive experience in the Metaverse. "
In 2022, Soul released the Lingxi system and NAWA Engine as the basis for its realization of the "social metaverse". The Lingxi system is based on an intelligent recommendation system based on full-scene portraits in the Soul user site to improve the efficiency and quality of user-user relationship building. NAWA Engine can help users create personal images and 2D/3D virtual social scenes at low cost and in a variety of ways. 2D capabilities include portrait beautification, stickers, lens effects, stylized filters, etc.; the most important of 3D capabilities is 3D Avatar, as well as 3D stickers, AR masks, scene rendering, etc.
At first, adding gameplay to the metaverse had some effect. According to the prospectus, Soul's current main source of income is value-added services, and the largest proportion is Avatar and virtual gifts. The Avatar feature lets users wear videos of "masks," the more elaborate and rare the masks, the more expensive they are.
Avatar feature lets users wear 'mask' videos
However, in terms of identity, social interaction, immersive experience, low latency, diversity, any place, economic system, and civilization, which are the key features of social metaverse, Soul has never launched a refreshing experience for users.
By the second half of 2022, Soul has not yet waited for the social metaverse to turn losses into profits, and the concept of the metaverse has become cold. The current Soul looks more like a metaverse where only virtual assets can be traded.
Need users or capital?
Metaverse failed to turn Soul into a profit. In the new prospectus, Soul has added AI narrative: it will develop AI-assisted natural language processing, AI algorithms, and AI-assisted visual and auditory content generation technologies.
Queenie, the head of the Soul META project, once said, "AIGC is the focus of Soul this year. Next, we will continue to combine NAWA POP with AIGC capabilities and continue to launch a series of innovative products."
In the field of artificial intelligence and generated dialogue, Soul released the chat robot "AI Goudan", which can conduct multiple rounds of personalized communication with users. But this robot is very embarrassing in social platforms like Soul: users who want to come here to find Soulmate with interests and hobbies, why should they chat with robots?
Data from Qimai shows that with the addition of AIGC, the number of downloads of Soul has not increased but decreased, and the growth of users has been weak. Compared with similar "stranger social" platforms like Tantan and Momo, it has no advantage at all.
Soul downloads are gradually declining
On Black Cat, complaints about Soul’s “reckless deduction”, “misleading recharge”, and “no refunds” flooded the screen. "And so on, the old problems still exist.
The "soul social" Soul is out of shape, and the continuous loss, the social metaverse is cold, and the lack of motivation for AIGC's new narrative also makes Soul's IPO road bumpy.
The dilemma facing Soul is also very obvious: Do you want users or capital? The two are not in an antagonistic relationship at all. On the contrary, a rising tide should have raised all boats. The problem that Soul needs to solve is to find its own position on the social track, plug the existing loopholes, regain the trust of users, and find a benign and innovative commercialization path.