After the Mid-Autumn Festival, a small game called “Sheep and Sheep” became popular on the Internet. How to pass the second level to make players across the country scratch their heads? With the unreasonable difficulty, this game has been landing on WeChat continuously. Boresearch, after earning enough share of players’ clicks on advertisements, also allowed Gigabit, the company behind it, to gain official attention from the market.
Because of the explosion of “Sheep, A Sheep”, Gigabit’s stock price also began to rise in response to the market, and once won the nickname of “Game Mao”. Two months later, on the evening of October 26, Gigabit disclosed its third quarterly report, and while disclosing its performance, it also announced a very arrogant dividend plan, indicating that the company intends to distribute cash dividends to all shareholders for every 10 shares. 140.00 yuan (tax included), this move will distribute a total cash dividend of 1.006 billion yuan, accounting for 99.45% of the net profit attributable to the parent in the first three quarters. It is worth noting that the company’s actual controller, chairman and general manager Lu Yanyan , will take away more than 300 million dividends at one time.
With the help of a small game, Gigabit made a profit of 1 billion yuan in two months, and then used an almost “clearance-style dividend” model to cut off all the profits. This operation of Gigabit immediately caused the whole network discussion. Some people think that the operation of gigabit is undoubtedly sucking the blood of all shareholders, saying that “after the dividends are distributed, the rights will be excised, and ordinary investors will not only get no benefits but also pay taxes, and only the original shareholders will receive real money.” , “Major shareholders have put the money of listed companies into their personal pockets.”
Others said that game products are heavy assets that attach importance to investment, and it takes years of research and development to build an explosive product, and Gigabit’s method of directly splitting all profits is obviously contrary to sustainable operations conceptual. Even unwilling players complained, “A game with a simple screen and a plagiarism that only focuses on marketing gimmicks can make so much money! To what extent does the mobile game world have to degenerate, so that such a bad game can be played by so many people! It’s really amazing! It’s hard to imagine!” Because of dissatisfaction with the company’s behavior, “The Sheep” was also boycotted by the entire network of Oh Oh.
The players’ complaints also intuitively show the “weird phenomenon” in the game market today. Once upon a time, client-side online games were still the absolute kings in the game market. Hundreds of game manufacturers, big and small, competed to launch and make online games, such as Gigabit, which was also known to players by the client game “Ask”. However, with the rise of mobile games, PC games have suffered a severe impact, new games have almost disappeared, and most old games have stopped updating. Many game makers have chosen to “lay flat”. Instead of spending a lot of money to develop a standard end game, it is better to develop more mobile games in a shorter period of time.
However, it is precisely because of the large amount of money invested that end game products are superior to mobile game products in terms of playability and content. Creating an excellent end game is also a sure-fire way for game companies to make money. ——The last end game product on the market that can be called a masterpiece is NetEase’s ancient online game “Reverse Water Cold”. When this game was launched in 2018, it took NetEase 5 years of research and development time and spent hundreds of millions of dollars. R & D funds, such a huge investment in human and material resources, the return is also quite rich. In just over four years after its listing, “Reverse Water Cold” has grown into NetEase’s flagship martial arts game IP, and has attracted tens of millions of players to register for the experience.
After the launch of “Reverse Water Cold”, NetEase also maintained a large-scale team of more than 200 people to upgrade and iterate the game, in order to improve the game’s attractiveness, and even turned the game into a “test base”, using “Reverse Water Cold” 》It owns the advantages of the screen and the number of players, to try the most popular and popular gameplay on the market. In just four years, 15 expansion packs have been continuously updated, and the update frequency is the highest among online games… And it is precisely because of such “saturated” update iterations that “Adverse Water Cold” has always maintained its strong appeal. In the fourth anniversary celebration of the game this year, it also reached a record of 490,000 players online at the same time.
Compared with “Reverse Water Cold”, which has been conscientiously updating and iterating content, the popularity of games like “Sheep and Sheep” is undoubtedly the biggest irony to the game market. So what do you think of this game making 1 billion in 2 months, and then being boycotted by the whole network? Say what you think.