Another match game hit worth over 100 million U.S. dollars, Voodoo hybrid product “Block Jam 3D” case analysis
Voodoo‘s recent transformation has attracted the attention of industry insiders at home and abroad. Like “Mod Control”, “Block Jam 3D”, which was selected from the best horse racing mechanism, also has outstanding highlights, so much so that a game with a revenue of billions of dollars has a certain degree of emphasis on it on the streaming side. reference.
“Block Jam 3D” is a very advanced match-3 game. Players click on the various colored, anthropomorphic squares in each level to place them in the slots to eliminate them. The level can be completed by eliminating them all. In terms of the overall structure of the game, it is actually lighter, simpler, and superior than “Mob Control”. As for the revenue side, compared to “Mob Control” which focuses on the iaa hybrid route, the hybrid revenue ratio of “Block Jam 3D” is completely opposite.
Simply go up and open the user portal for massive experiences.
Simply go up and open the user portal for massive experiences.
In fact, the progressive method adopted by “Block Jam 3D” is similar to that of “Garden Commando”, a domestic WeChat mini-game. The main focus of “Tonggong” is that it is easy to get started and understand the core game rules in simple steps. But its “different twists” are more present in the initial visual sensory information acquisition side. All eliminated cubes in “Block Jam 3D” adopt the design of “unified model, different colors”. The first level for beginners only has 2 rows and 2 colors; the second level has 3 rows and 3 colors. The overall level progression does not adopt the discontinuous game difficulty of “Sheep Makes a Sheep”, but adopts the soft progressive level characteristics of ultra-casual games.
Novice guide & difficulty progression standards
The second difference between “Block Jam 3D” and “Garden Commando” is the progressive side of novice guidance. The difference here lies in the step-by-step guidance. If the novice guidance of “Garden Commando” is more of a guidance type, then “Block Jam 3D” is more of a demonstration type. After the demonstration, it can be used in combination to a certain extent.
On the novice guide side, the level difficulty of “Block Jam 3D” is designed as follows: increasing color and number of cubes → progressive dislocation distribution → “open box” cube generation mechanism → combination and use → after adding pins, combine and use all the previous elements. The characteristic of this method is that users can play it as soon as they have their hands on it, and it also presents a feature that most elimination games do not have: rapid elimination.
In other words, “Block Jam 3D” does not need to consider graphic recognition issues. It uses simple models and colors to reuse materials, which not only effectively reduces the time cost of subsequent development and iteration of levels, but also allows you to obtain other similar results in just a few seconds of game experience. The game’s rapid consumption of levels without props creates a strong sense of differentiation.
Provide & Difficulty Increase
If “Block Jam 3D” had only the above-mentioned progressive method, it would be impossible for the game to achieve such a high turnover. For IAP games, long-term retention is a point that cannot be ignored in revenue. From “Block Jam 3D” to now, it has iterated more than 12,300 regular levels. When the level elements are far less rich than “Mob Control”, just one This method means that such a number of levels cannot be formed simply through the above-mentioned permutations and combinations.
The second point of difficulty progression lies in the known storage distribution of levels. For example, level 11 and level 23. In level 11, players need to store a cube of different colors to form a single elimination scene with a certain proportion. At the same time, there are also situations that can be eliminated directly without storing it. As you can see in level 23, if you want to eliminate the purple cube, you need to store two cubes of other colors in the middle.
The third difficulty is to generate cube pipes and wooden boxes. These generating mechanisms are random from the user’s perspective, which means that it is impossible to know the color of the newly appeared cube, which is to show randomness with unpredictability. As the level progresses, more than 2 of the 7 storage spaces below are occupied, and the player cannot eliminate them through the pipeline cubes generated 2-3 times. In combination with difficulty 2, the player needs to use props or gold coins to achieve this. After passing the level, players who lack these two qualities will directly fail the challenge, and the level will restart every time the challenge fails. Therefore, when faced with the situation in the picture below, it will strongly stimulate the player’s desire to use props
Each time the challenge fails, the difficulty of the level will be significantly reduced. Mainly reflected in the color distribution of the initial starting position of the level and key terrain during the second challenge. The current setting of the game is: players have a total of 5 health points. Each time they fail a challenge and do not use props, 1 life will be deducted if they choose to challenge again. On the life recovery side, the recovery time for each life in “Block Jam 3D” is half an hour, which looks similar to most elimination games, but combined with the usual time required to play a single level, it is actually relatively long. Once the user fails the challenge and has to wait for a long time without lives, the game flow will directly return to zero.
The operation method of “Block Jam 3D” is relatively close to that of “Mob Control”. They both use multiple activities to maintain activity, such as piggy banks, turntables and other activities, which are the same as “Mob Control”. Among them, the bus timetable gameplay implements secondary sorting management based on the original main gameplay of the game. This gameplay was even used by Voodoo in the launch promotional video of “Block Jam 3D” and became a hit.
How to make Voodoo-style revenue (key points)
If you use one word to describe the revenue logic of “Block Jam 3D”, it would be “brilliant”. Although the entire game is very simple and easy to play, the commercial logic behind it is very rigorous. We talked about the game level mechanism of “Block Jam 3D” in the previous article, but at this time, the public can’t help but think about a few questions:
Why are so many people willing to pay continuously for this game?
Other games also use similar gameplay/mechanics, why are the effects so different?
Here we call it “Voodoo revenue”. The commercialization logic behind it is mainly divided into the following six steps.
First of all, maximizing user experience willingness is formed through the shortest gameplay chain. This is easy to understand. The animation effect of the “Block Jam 3D” game is attractive, and the process of players interacting with the gameplay is very real-time and smooth. These two parts allow players to be “desensitized” to the level difficulty design while playing the game, and at the same time, use the method of “making mistakes while busy” to make the difficulty of the entire level clearance process more or less uncontrollable.
Secondly, commercialize within the entire game, yielding << (much less than) paid acquisition. In the game, both the gold coins and the props required to pass levels have been set by rarity. Due to the gentle progression of level difficulty and the development of a habit of rapid elimination in the early stage, as the scale of elimination presented in a single level increases, the elimination of props has changed from a “need” to a “must”.
Finally, when the elimination of props changed from a demand item to a necessity, the entire game showed in the later stage that “levels clearance = number of elimination props + number of player mistakes”. In other words, even if the player makes 0 mistakes in the entire single level, due to the unpredictability of new elimination cubes in the core, the number of player mistakes is only based on the known information about the level, making it impossible to bypass the use of elimination props throughout the level. The formation of such a positive cycle is based on sunk costs. The sunk cost of “Block Jam 3D” includes not only the consumption of the number of props for a single challenge, but also the long wait for players to break the flow of re-challenge, and the cumulative consumption before completing the level.
The business logic behind the entire “Block Jam 3d” is actually similar to “Garden Commando”. But the difference is: in the entire commercialization process of “Garden Commando”, player exploration and discovery are key nodes of the entire business chain, while in “Block Jam 3d”, the control of sunk costs is a key node of the entire business chain. We might as well conduct the following scenario simulation: When you are in a certain level, holding 3 elimination props, the gold coins are not enough to buy additional elimination props. It takes half an hour to recover one challenge each time you fail to pass the level. Will you choose to buy the props to pass the level, or half an hour? Challenge again after hours? Although this method presents a certain negative feedback on the player side, the market flow of “Block Jam 3D” shows that most users recognize the commercial form of this series.
Issuance results are also traceable
As for the IAA part, the game advertising scenes mainly include the bottom banner that will be available when the level is opened later, the full-screen mandatory advertisement regardless of the level’s victory or defeat, and the incentive video position. As mentioned above, “Block Jam 3D” uses a sunk cost method to open the payment drive. When players fail to pass the level and lack gold coins, the battle pass becomes their primary payment point. Therefore, although “Block Jam 3D” is a hyper-casual game, it has successfully achieved annual sales of over 100 million US dollars through a high proportion of IAP.
When we looked at the related videos of “Block Jam 3D”, we found that the videos of “Block Jam 3D” on multiple social media are actually not outstanding. Only the Tik Tok platform has the official video playback volume in late February this year. Up to 16m, and most of the other videos are between 4-5 digits.
Where do users come from?
According to AppGrowing data, the peak delivery of “Block Jam 3D” coincides with the time node of the above-mentioned video upload, and the number of “Block Jam 3D” game videos is around 84. On the whole, it can be understood that “Block Jam 3D” opened the traffic entrance with only one video from the official output with a playback volume of 16m.
Judging from the video content, the video content of “Block Jam 3D” is in the form of “opening the blind box”, and then allowing the cube to achieve the correct “getting on the car”, attracting the user’s attention with its challenge. The keywords presented to the user in the entire video are: secondary classification, blind box generation, and challenge. The key question here is, why does “Block Jam 3D” use the same method as the public, but achieve very good results? Overseas analysts pointed out that the official advertisement of “Block Jam 3D” displays the difficulty level (bus gameplay) as an activity from the beginning, which effectively solves the problem of “falseness” on the advertising side, and they can use this method to , running puzzle games of different categories, thus converting them into in-game activities.
What is the overall effect?
As for the effects, the revenue success of “Block Jam 3D” has attracted the attention of many overseas publishers. For example, Tencent has invested overseas in Miniclip, and Supercent, the publisher of the simulation business game “Buger, Please!” which is famous for its “viral” gameplay, etc.
Not only that, Take-Two’s Peak Game also uses this kind of gameplay for marketing and gameplay reference in “Toy Blast”, which has a cumulative revenue of 1 billion US dollars. “Toy Blast” was launched in 2014 and has been downloaded more than 100 million times worldwide, with cumulative revenue exceeding US$1.1 billion. According to our comparison of relevant time nodes, “Toy Blast” has indeed brought about a certain IAP increase after this time node by referring to the “double classification management” gameplay of “Block Jam 3D” – the bus gameplay. Many overseas game experts pointed out that the dual classification gameplay of “Block Jam 3D” will be a new trend in elimination games in the future, both on the gameplay side and on the delivery side.
The performance side of the game has also been proven. The entire game release of “Block Jam 3D” is divided into four stages: market testing, soft launch (release in some regions), full release, and scale testing (or scale acquisition) stage. From the perspective of revenue, after the release video of “Block Jam 3D”, the revenue of the entire game has increased.
Another overseas game analysis expert pointed out that the IAP of “Block Jam 3D” can reach 70,000 US dollars per day, and this figure is compared to its “Mob Control”, which also has an annual revenue of over 100 million US dollars. The DAU side of “Block Jam 3D” “Only 160,000 users can be achieved, while “Mob Control” requires 1 million. At the same time, the entire IAP of “Block Jam 3D” accounts for as much as 70% of the game revenue. According to a comparison of the SKUs of the “Remove Ads” gift pack of “Mob Control” and “Block Jam 3D”, “Mob Control” ranks 3rd in this category, while “Block Jam 3D” ranks only 7th in this category.
Summary: From the perspective of the entire commercialization, “Block Jam 3D” not only uses a very clever way to achieve the revenue effect of heavy IAP for the hybrid super-rest game, but what is even more “miraculous” is that the in-game through limited, A simple commercial payment point has achieved annual revenue of over 100 million U.S. dollars, thus proving the actual revenue situation of “it is not just multiple content and multiple payment points that can achieve high game turnover”. At the same time, secondary space management and gameplay that emphasizes the sequence of steps have become gameplay and methods that many overseas manufacturers are exploring in depth.