With sales exceeding one million sets, what makes "Prosperous World" so successful?

Author | Lan Jie

Editor | Qiao Qian

Since its launch on September 9th, after a month of development, the live-action interactive film game "The Prosperous World - Concubine Mei's Chapter" (hereinafter referred to as "The Prosperous World") has proven its success in terms of both sales and quality.

According to DianDian Data, on the Chinese mainland iOS platform, this game still ranks first on the paid app list and the paid entertainment list to date.

On September 22nd, the production team of "The Prosperous World" officially announced that the total sales of the game across all platforms have now exceeded one million copies. The game is released in a buyout model. Calculated at a price of 39 yuan, this means that "The Prosperous World" has already achieved nearly 40 million yuan in revenue.

A live-action interactive film game refers to a game in which real people perform, and players can determine the development direction of the story and the endings of the characters through different choices provided in the game. "The Prosperous World" is based on the life experiences of Empress Wu Zetian and is divided into two parts: "Concubine Mei's Chapter" and "Empress's Chapter". The currently launched "Concubine Mei's Chapter" tells the story of how the protagonist survives in the dangerous imperial harem.

Even earlier, "The Prosperous World" had topped the paid entertainment lists in the Apple Stores of regions and countries such as Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore, and had also remained at the top of the TapTap New Games List and the WeChat Popular Mobile Games List. Remarkably, the game received a "Very Positive" rating among over 5,000 reviews on Steam, the world's largest PC game platform, and also scored 7.7 on TapTap.

Before "The Prosperous World", another live-action interactive film game that sparked such a large-scale discussion in China was "Oops! I'm Surrounded by Beauties" (hereinafter referred to as "Oops!"), which topped the best-selling list in the Chinese region of Steam in 2023.

That was an unexpected breakthrough for everyone. People rushed to analyze the reasons behind the hit. Some thought its success was due to seizing the trend of "short dramas + games", while others believed it filled the gap in male-oriented live-action interactive film games. So, after "Oops!", many similar works emerged - mainly from a male perspective, with exciting storylines surrounded by beautiful women.

In June this year, the live-action interactive film game "Emotional Anti-Fraud Simulator" was launched on Steam and became a hit. However, after breaking through the circle, it caused a lot of controversy due to its content.

Moreover, no other similar works have made much of a splash, even the sequel to "Oops!". It wasn't until the emergence of "The Prosperous World" that it provided a new breakthrough path for domestic interactive film and television works.

Make the Strengths Stronger

Although interactive film and television games have been frequently mentioned in China in the past two years, it is not a new thing.

As early as 2010, there were already mature interactive film and television game works overseas - "Heavy Rain" released by Quantic Dream Studios, which laid the basic form of current interactive movies. In 2018, "Detroit: Become Human", also produced by Quantic Dream Studios and themed on artificial intelligence, remains a masterpiece to this day. The discussion about the relationship between humans and androids still has an enduring core in the current AI era.

However, in China, no excellent interactive film and television works have emerged. The previous work of the production team "New One Studio" of "The Prosperous World", the live-action interactive film game "The Invisible Guardian" launched in 2019 and themed on espionage, to some extent, broke this deadlock and promoted the popularization of interactive film and television games in China.

During the production of "The Invisible Guardian", the team's funds were far less abundant than now. Therefore, the shooting of many scenes was more like a PPT than a video. Even so, because of the exciting plot, this work was widely loved by players and topped the best-selling list on Steam at that time.

Now, "The Prosperous World" inherits the strength of the plot and has also made a qualitative improvement in production.

Specifically, many logics and plots in the game are smooth and complete. For example, in the chapter "The Night Banquet Horror", Concubine Yin received a pair of gorgeous shoes as a reward from the emperor for a dance. This was originally an insignificant plot, but it later became the key for the female protagonist Wu Yuanzhao to survive - Wu Yuanzhao accidentally discovered Concubine Yin's secret and learned that she wanted to assassinate the emperor to avenge her dead husband. At this time, she needed to reveal Concubine Yin's true psychology to buy time to escape. The key to solving the situation lies in the fact that Concubine Yin, who seemingly misses her dead husband, is wearing the shoes rewarded by the "enemy", which shows her greedy mentality for wealth and honor. However, if players fail to notice this detail, they will inevitably encounter a death ending again.

In an interview with the game vertical media "Game Grape", the game producer Demi said that the game's script was completed by "me, four screenwriters, and later the director joined. It took about a year to finish the scripts for the two parts." The total script is more than 300,000 words long and lasts for 1,200 minutes.

Moreover, the director of this work is Zhi Zhu, who has experience in many ancient costume dramas. He has directed works such as "Ancient Melody of Love" with an 8.6 rating on Douban and "Snow at the Eastern Fence" with a 7.3 rating. He is good at shooting beautiful film and television pictures.

Therefore, this also contributes to the excellent audio-visual performance of "The Prosperous World" to some extent.

A representative scene in the game is when the monk Bian Ji strides out of the raging fire with Princess Gaoyang in a fluttering red dress in his arms. The background is a sky full of fire and billowing smoke at night. This scene probably meets all players' imaginations of a hero saving a beauty. Even though everything is expected, because it is beautiful enough, no one criticizes it for not being original enough.

Not to mention, the costumes, props, and actors in "The Prosperous World" are also approaching those of S-level long dramas.

However, for interactive film and television game works, the freedom and extensibility of user choices are as important as the plot. But "The Prosperous World" is still controversial in this aspect. This is why some players complain that except for one or two established plot directions, the endings of other plot branches are all deaths. "The advertised ten thousand endings are more like a hundred ways to die."

This may also be due to the high cost of this type of game. Different from the shooting of traditional TV dramas, in order to allow players to unlock different plots, interactive film and television game works usually need to shoot multiple versions of a scene, and the performances and makeup of the characters also need to be coordinated, which greatly increases the cost. According to industry insiders' estimates, the cost of "The Prosperous World" is probably in the tens of millions of yuan.

More Mature Commercial Operation

In addition to leveraging the team's existing strengths, "The Prosperous World" also demonstrated a more mature commercial operation during the promotion process.

Now, the promotion content of "The Prosperous World" can be seen on platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Weibo, WeChat Moments, Tencent Video, and Bilibili. After searching for or clicking on relevant content on these platforms once, it's hard to avoid the push of "One-Life Quick Pass Version of The Prosperous World".

Under the official Weibo account of "The Prosperous World", the operation is no different from that of traditional TV drama promotions - the leading actors often appear to interact with fans. Since its launch, "The Prosperous World" has also reached cooperation agreements with Luoyang Cultural Tourism, Lenovo Xiaoxin Tablets, etc.

Moreover, it's not hard to find that Tencent's platforms account for a large proportion among all the promotion channels. In fact, the game production team New One Studio itself is one of the studios supported by Tencent TiMi Studios.

Since the game was launched, many large DAU games under TiMi Studios, such as "Honor of Kings", "Delta Force: Operators", "Meta Dream Star", and "Happy Elimination", have all launched joint promotion activities with "The Prosperous World". The promotional content of "The Prosperous World" is still displayed in the focus carousel area on the homepage of Tencent Video.

The large-scale marketing campaign and multi-channel efforts have led "The Prosperous World" to top the hot search list many times. The topic popularity across the entire network has exceeded 1.2 billion, making it a real breakthrough.

Good content combined with mature commercial operation has created today's "The Prosperous World". However, the elaborate production and full-channel promotion are extremely costly. This not only provides a breakthrough path for interactive film and television games other than achieving great results with limited resources (like "Oops!"), but also makes it difficult to replicate its success model.

As a representative work of live-action interactive film games, "The Prosperous World" is also given more commercial expectations. According to the game producer Demi, "The Prosperous World" has not yet achieved profitability, and the sales of one million copies have not yet broken through the industry's perception of the revenue scale of this track. As Demi said, "This track has just started, and we've just stepped out of the novice village."

It's certain that interactive film and television games are becoming more and more popular in China. According to a report by Shangguan News, four of the top 15 best-selling domestic games on Steam in the first half of the year were interactive film and television games. With the emergence of "The Prosperous World", it provides more room for imagination for this track.