Game development begins with destroying Girls' Frontline.

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Now, the quality of Fate/stay night has far exceeded players' expectations.

It's like futures suddenly exceeding expectations.

Many players, after playing the Destiny Trails demo, were so excited that they couldn't express it, and all they did was brag about it on the forums.

Recharging in FGO has become the best way, especially for players who also receive rebates. Many players have been low-spending or even free-spending players for more than two years since the server opened.

At that moment, I impulsively placed an order.

The money these players spent is what drove this overall surge.

Many media outlets, upon seeing this result, exclaimed that Xinghuo is truly a marketing genius.

But in Lin Li's view...

The real reason for this is actually Xinghuo's operating model.

Chapter 80 Many hands make light work

The discussion focused on why Spark was successful.

This has become a regular topic of discussion in the industry.

Players attribute Spark's success primarily to the game's enjoyment; they believe the game's appeal led to its success.

However, among practitioners, mainly the operations team, they focus more on analyzing Spark's operations, such as the "one-shot deal" new user acquisition method, the bonuses from various offline activities, coupons, and even FGO futures.

However, in the process of "copying" homework.

Often, most companies end up copying others in vain, unwilling to allocate real resources for "one-size-fits-all" deals, and unwilling to invest in offline activities, leading to a series of problems.

This creates a situation where you're given the correct answers, but you still can't pass.

The more this is the case, the more people study the phenomenon of sparks.

Of course, not all of these companies have failed to learn it. Some games on the Spark platform have grasped the basics and have been very successful in organizing various activities.

However, despite Lin Li's repeated emphasis on the true core of Spark, no one in the industry seems to take it seriously.

The core concept is long-term operation.

The key to long-term operation is the scale of the player base.

Why does Linli insist on pursuing a service-oriented, long-term operation model? Why does it want to ensure that free-to-play and low-spending players can also have a good gaming experience?

It is precisely because of this very moment.

For Spark, player base has always been a top priority and is the core of Spark's game operation.

Don't think that spending zero or a little money is a waste of server resources.

All players are the same; as time goes on, as long as they continue to play, their willingness to spend money will increase.

Battlefront Girls and FGO are very typical examples.

This marketing concept is quite different from that of other domestic manufacturers.

Of course, everyone knows that daily active users are important, and that the more players there are, the greater the scale effect can be achieved.

However, there are very few manufacturers who truly care about their players.

Lin Li placed daily active user growth and weekly active user growth in the business analysis meeting, and even placed them in the most central position.

As long as your player base grows this month, or can maintain its current level.

Even if the fees decrease, Lin Li doesn't care.

Everyone inside Spark knows that the boss only looks at two metrics: player base and player satisfaction with the game version.

Many people don't pay much attention when Lin Li shares this point.

I felt I had said this in meetings, that I had said I valued the players, but that was definitely not the key to Spark's success. Lin Li must have something up his sleeve.

But in reality, there is a difference between saying and saying.

The importance a boss places on data can have an impact on the entire company.

The King of Chu loved slender waists, yet people in the palace still starved to death.

This is what is meant by "what the superiors do, the inferiors follow."

Nobody is a saint. What data the boss looks at in meetings, what data the boss cares about, these things will definitely affect the execution level.

The higher up a person is in Xinghuo, the more they will be influenced by Lin Li, and they will then pass on these influences to those below them.

At Xinghuo, each studio has independent finances and personnel, but the appointment and dismissal of key personnel in each team requires approval from Linli.

Logically speaking, when operating under independent financial accounting, studios should have a share of the profits, so they should definitely have a need for paid services.

However, Linli only looks at the scale and player feedback, not the amount of money paid.

This forces all studios to consider a fundamental premise: regardless of the activity, they must ensure that it does not lead to player churn or negatively impact the player experience.

Because if you don't do this, Lin Li has the power to make personnel decisions. Lin Li also made it very clear at the meeting that if there are serious errors in these two indicators that lead to serious consequences, then you should just leave.

Therefore, this system is different from performance evaluation and KPIs.

This is a matter of life and death. In addition, the boss's high regard for this also implies a hidden signal: a promotion.

The management of an organization, in essence, boils down to financial power and personnel.

Financial power determines the project team's enthusiasm, while personnel determine the organization's overall direction.

The boss looks at sales volume and paid conversion rate.

The development team will definitely consider more microtransaction systems.

In China, many game development teams start with a dream—to make fun games—but pressure from bosses and investors ultimately turns them into pay-to-win games.

Conversely, bosses look at daily active users, total number of players, and player retention rate.

The production team will definitely pay more attention to content and service.

This is a very real situation.

Moreover, from a practical standpoint, maintaining daily active users and ensuring player base size is actually more difficult than maintaining revenue from in-game purchases.

If Lin Li hadn't valued it so much, and the studio had been left to do it themselves, the development team would eventually only focus on monetization and ignore the player experience.

This is why it's so difficult to operate a service-based game in the long run.

Humans are inherently lazy, and the more successful a project team is, the faster this laziness accumulates. Genshin Impact is a typical example, and this may be partly due to personnel changes.

But fundamentally, it's because the top level doesn't care, the upper levels only focus on revenue, the middle and lower levels are lazy, and there's also miHoYo's so-called industrialization.

Everyone here is a factory worker, and since we're all workers, no one is responsible to the players.

No one is responsible to the players, and no one is responsible for the project; as long as the revenue is decent, that's all that matters.

With such management, the fairy naturally emerged, and characters like the perfumer and a bunch of outrageous storylines appeared openly in the game.

If you don't take possession of something, someone else will.

This problem exists in everything from indefinite detours to returning to 1999. Long-term operations only care about money; as long as the money is enough, everything else will be fine.

This idea worked in the past; many domestically produced pay-to-win games followed this approach.

But nowadays, this path is becoming increasingly impassable.

If you only care about money, all you'll end up with is fleeting pleasures.

Lin Li is very clear-headed about this matter.

That's why Lin Licai values ​​daily active users, scale, and various methods that can engage players. Players like events? Then give them events.

Even gaming platforms aim to bring more players into their own circles.

The long-term operational approach is completely different from the short-term, quick-profit-driven approach of squeezing money out of customers.

The core of the long-term operation strategy is that the longer players play, the more likely they are to pay.

This applies not only to free-to-play and low-spending players, but also to heavy spenders.

Furthermore, players paying for in-game purchases doesn't necessarily mean making direct in-game purchases.

Perhaps players saw Xinghuo's merchandise when they wanted to buy a water bottle.

Perhaps it was when I was looking to buy a phone that I saw that Spark had launched a co-branded phone that I was playing a game with.

Of course, this also includes, for example, being attracted by large discounts during major events.

Were there any successful examples of this marketing method in the past?

Chapter 81 Traffic Import Teaching

In fact, there are.

Although it's not entirely accurate, the reason why Honor of Kings' 6-yuan skins are able to make a fortune is because Honor of Kings is a large game.

Of course, the scale of Honor of Kings is not entirely due to the quality of the game, but rather the qualitative change that arose from the continuous accumulation of quantity by Tencent.

However the reason may be.

The reason why 6-yuan skins can make money is that users who usually play for free are likely to buy 6-yuan skins as long as they are still playing.

Of course, Honor of Kings did this passively.

Moreover, they did this in order to exploit free-to-play players.

Their approaches are different from those of Xinghuo.

This merely indirectly proves that the Spark path is viable.

these messages.

Lin Li has actually shared this before.

Some people understood, but they felt that Spark was only able to do this because Spark was already very large.

Many more people simply don't understand.

Therefore, in their eyes, Xinghuo's success was like magic.

How can anyone earn money while standing up?

How can he make money again and still have players praising him?

I don’t understand, I don’t understand at all.

~~~

Of course, whether they understand it or not, it doesn't affect the further spread of the Destiny Trails demo's influence.

Thanks to the IP bonus of FATE and the groundwork laid by FGO.

Also because "Destiny's Path" is in open beta.

The popularity of "The Trajectory of Destiny" has surpassed that of "Galaxy Paradise".

Moreover, due to the success of Heroes of Might and Magic III, the popularity of Destiny has also attracted the attention of some casual viewers.

As the saying goes, many hands make light work.

With the influence of "The Fate Track".

A whole bunch of people came to ride the wave.

The first to jump out was a manufacturer that was quite unexpected, but upon closer inspection, quite normal.

Look, it's Nvidia's Nvidia card.

On the morning of the third day, Lao Huang posted a message on Twitter.

The message included a poster and several game screenshots.

A poster celebrating the number of online users of Destiny's Path.

Then there is a passage.

[We will be working with Spark to achieve ray tracing effects on the trajectory of fate, and a co-branded 2080TI is also in preparation. We hope you will like it.]

These are screenshots of the game, showing the ray tracing effects of the game's trajectory.

Starting with the GeForce RTX 20 series released in 2018, all NVIDIA graphics cards support hardware ray tracing.