Peaking at Top 4, multiple card mini-games from Guangzhou have achieved outstanding performance. Can the AI dark style drive traditional game categories to regain strong growth momentum?
Recently, a "card game" trend has swept across the mini-game track:
Origin of Eternal Night, a product under Guangzhou Zhaozhan Information, has delivered impressive performance since it entered the ranking list, peaking at TOP4 on the WeChat Mini-Game Bestseller List.
Destiny Walker, a product of Guangzhou-based Dalan Network, has also achieved remarkable results, and now stably ranks in the TOP20 of the bestseller list.
A number of card-type mini-games have broken through the encirclement in a concentrated manner, which has aroused widespread attention in the industry. What are the content characteristics of such products? What differentiated advantages do they have in marketing?
Today, DataEye Research Institute will talk about this topic.
Market & Product Observations
(1) Market Observation
The August WeChat Mini-Game Monthly Ranking data recently released by DataEye Research Institute shows that both Origin of Eternal Night and Destiny Walker are newly listed products, ranking 11th and 12th on the monthly bestseller list respectively. For the relatively traditional card RPG category, this result is very eye-catching.
Specifically, Origin of Eternal Night first appeared on the WeChat Mini-Game Bestseller Daily List on August 15, ranking 19th. Its ranking continued to rise afterwards, and the overall trend tended to be stable. Entering September, the product's highest ranking on the daily bestseller list rushed straight to 4th.
The market trend of Destiny Walker is roughly similar to that of Origin of Eternal Night. Data shows that Destiny Walker entered the ranking list earlier. It landed on the daily bestseller list on August 8 and ranked 19th. After that, its ranking fluctuated slightly, and its highest single-day ranking successfully broke into TOP10, with the overall performance stably staying in the TOP20 range of the bestseller list.
(2) Product Observation
In terms of theme, it adopts the classic Journey to the West foundation + dark style transformation. Both Origin of Eternal Night and Destiny Walker take the classic Journey to the West as the core theme, but break away from the traditional Journey to the West framework in narrative logic and character shaping, integrating a large number of dark elements, which are mainly reflected in two dimensions: character modeling and scene art style.
Origin of Eternal Night follows the core narrative logic of "fetching scriptures from the west", but subversively reshapes the classic characters: the traditionally frail Tang Sanzang turns into a muscular man, and the simple and greasy Zhu Bajie is changed into a fierce little wild boar.
Destiny Walker, on the other hand, adopts anti-hero narrative, switching the main perspective of the story to the demon camp and reconstructing the Journey to the West worldview.
At the same time, both products use a large number of purple and dark red as the main scene tones to create a mysterious and fantasy dark atmosphere, deliberately distinguishing it from the bright and fresh classic art style of traditional Journey to the West, forming a strong visual difference.
In terms of gameplay, it features classic idle card gameplay + high-value refreshing experience. Neither of the two products has subversive innovative gameplay. The core follows the mature idle card system, combined with large value feedback to provide players with an intuitive refreshing experience of character development. The core loop of the product revolves around level progression - combat power improvement - new function unlocking - advanced level progression. The out-of-battle development covers classic card gameplay such as lineup matching, bond activation, and level breakthrough, with a mature system and low user learning threshold.
(3) Observation Summary
Both Origin of Eternal Night and Destiny Walker landed on the WeChat Mini-Game Bestseller List within the same month, with stable performance and outstanding short-term user acquisition capabilities. This means that the concentrated outbreak of dark-style Journey to the West card games is not an accidental single case, but a new opportunity for the track brought by mature gameplay superimposed with differentiated themes, and the differentiated dividend of theme and art style has a remarkable effect.
For this category outbreak, DataEye Research Institute believes that it can be viewed from two aspects:
On the one hand, Journey to the West is a national-level classic theme with high user awareness and no additional user education cost required. However, the current traditional Journey to the West theme is highly homogeneous, and the user acquisition effect of conventional materials continues to weaken. The dark-style modified reconstruction makes the well-known classic characters produce unknown contrast and novelty. Although it is not a style suitable for all users, it has extremely strong visual impact and can quickly leave a deep impression in users' memory.
On the other hand, the two products launched large-scale user acquisition campaigns in August, catching up with the nationwide popularity of Chinese dark style that month. The industry generally regards August 20 as "Black Myth Day", and the continuous exposure of related content has led to a sharp rise in the popularity of topics about Chinese dark style and Black Myth style. The simultaneous launch of game materials of the same style can obtain higher exposure and conversion efficiency with the help of the nationwide popularity.
However, it needs to be clarified that the user acquisition model relying on art style dividend and artistic freshness has obvious shortcomings: relying only on art differentiation without in-depth gameplay support will easily lead to rapid user aesthetic fatigue. Once the freshness fades, the traffic advantage of short-term user acquisition will disappear quickly.
User Acquisition & Creative Observations
(1) User Acquisition Performance
According to DataEye-ADX delivery data, Origin of Eternal Night launched performance ad delivery on August 8, and the number of daily delivery materials in the initial stage was stable at around 400 groups. After August 15, the daily delivery volume continued to rise, and the peak of daily material delivery exceeded 10,000 pieces.
Destiny Walker started to gain traffic earlier. It launched large-scale delivery on August 1, and the number of materials delivered on the first day exceeded 3000 pieces. After that, the delivery scale declined slightly, but remained stable without a significant increase.
Overall, Origin of Eternal Night has a larger delivery scale and higher growth momentum than Destiny Walker, and the delivery scale of the two products in the past 30 days is at the upper-middle level of the entire mini-game market. DataEye Research Institute believes that the project team accurately seized the theme trend and nationwide popularity, and achieved short-term traffic outbreak through large-scale material coverage.
(2) Material Disassembly
Taking the popular delivery materials of Origin of Eternal Night in the past 30 days as an example, its core creativity revolves around the dark Journey to the West characters and art style characteristics, relying on visual differentiation to attract users, which is mainly divided into three categories:
Category 1: Scene entry + character close-up display. Some materials start with creative scenes such as "Journey to the West character concert", focus on classic characters such as Zhu Bajie and Chang'e, finely display character modeling, costume details, and facial expressions, and quickly pan the camera across a number of classic Journey to the West characters. Through the exquisite dark realistic art style, it is completely different from the flooded Q-version Journey to the West materials in the market, which strengthens users' visual memory and quickly establishes differentiated cognition.
Category 2: Characters perform interesting online jokes. This type of material continues the core of dark-style character display, and innovatively adopts the performance form of online funny jokes, using down-to-earth content to narrow the distance with ordinary users. In the mysterious and dark theme tone, relaxed and humorous interesting content is integrated, and some materials add cross-border elements such as "Lord Guan" to form a contrast between seriousness and humor, improving the click-through rate of materials.
Category 3: Narrative materials of dark Journey to the West worldview. This type of material tends to be brand-oriented, with the core of expanding around the new worldview of dark Journey to the West. The overall rhythm is slow and the picture tone is dark. Compared with the short and fast drainage materials, this kind of content can show the game worldview and core features more three-dimensionally, improve the product texture and brand tone, accurately reach the core target users, and strengthen user recognition.
Overall, the delivery materials of Origin of Eternal Night take differentiated art style as the core hook, create visual contrast through unique character modeling, dark scenes and mysterious atmosphere, and the dense characteristic content quickly deepens user impression. At the same time, most of the delivery materials of this product are AI-generated, which can quickly accumulate a huge inventory of materials to support large-scale delivery. Relying on massive material tests, the project team can quickly screen high-conversion materials and continuously amplify the user acquisition effect.
Conclusion
At present, competition in the mini-game track is becoming increasingly fierce. Due to excessive homogenization, the growth space of traditional IP and classic gameplay continues to narrow. Large manufacturers can break through the track bottleneck through innovative gameplay, while small and medium-sized manufacturers rely more on low-risk, highly implementable differentiated strategies.
The simultaneous breakthrough of Origin of Eternal Night and Destiny Walker not only confirms the super user acquisition ability of scarce differentiated art style themes, but also proves that emotional and contrastive reconstruction of classic themes is an effective way for small and medium-sized manufacturers to achieve breakthroughs: on the basis of a mature and stable gameplay system, seize user attention through content and art style differentiation to achieve traffic siphon and short-term explosive growth.
At the same time, DataEye Research Institute believes that themes and gameplay are the surface advantages for products to break through, and AI material capability is the core growth lever behind the scenes. The popularity of the dark Journey to the West category is essentially a concentrated manifestation of AIGC industrialization capability. This kind of contrastive and novel theme content just fits the core advantages of AI materials: modified character illustrations, dark Chinese-style scenes, and fragmented plot clips can all be efficiently produced in large quantities by AI to create differentiated content that is thrilling, novel and mysterious.
AI tools enable the project team to have the ability to produce massive materials and quickly follow up on national hot topics, complete large-scale material A/B tests in a short period of time, and quickly lock in the optimal delivery creativity. This is also the core reason why the two hit dark Journey to the West card games are both developed by Guangzhou manufacturers: Guangzhou's user acquisition teams are deeply rooted in the industry with mature experience, superimposed with AI industrialized material capabilities, to achieve low-cost, high-efficiency large-scale traffic operations. So far, AI has completely got rid of the attribute of a simple auxiliary tool, and upgraded to the core competitiveness of mini-game user acquisition.
Looking into the future of the industry, the success of the two products will inevitably trigger a new wave of following trends of dark Journey to the West and Chinese Black Myth card games, replicating the track following trend of the slightly horror theme last year. Subsequent entrants need to recognize the key to core competition: the industrial mass production capability of AI materials has become the core barrier of this type of track. The outbreak of dark Journey to the West card games is only a concentrated trial of AI empowering mini-game user acquisition.
In the foreseeable future, more classic categories with reconstructed themes will be influenced by AI materials and brought to the forefront. A new round of user acquisition wars may have already begun.
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "DataEye" (ID: DataEye), written by ohzyh, and authorized for release by 36Kr.