Industry Status
In recent years, mobile games have developed vigorously. In the early years, the industry barriers created by PC chess and card game manufacturing are falling apart with the development of mobile games. Card and board games have become a must-have in the mobile game industry due to factors such as long user life cycles, considerable overall revenue, and low development costs.
Things about the operations circle
There is a phenomenon in running this circle: novices work hard but don’t understand why, and people who understand won’t tell you why. This is especially true for the chess and card industry, because if you want to operate the chess and card industry well, you have to know many secrets.
Operational stage
For people in the workplace, I believe the most terrifying thing is to be trapped in the current environment, where you cannot move forward and you cannot break away. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify what should be done at each stage, whether it can be done, and to what extent it can be achieved, which is somewhat similar to the 5W2H idea.
1) Basic operations: doing odd jobs
When you first come into contact with operations work, you have to do as many things as possible, do different things, do things you don’t know how to do, and at the same time learn more about what other colleagues are doing. In short, you have to figure out how everyone in the entire project What are you doing and how are you doing it?
2) Project Operation: Strategy
Congratulations, you are now responsible for a project. At this time, you are paying more attention to strategic issues. The art of operation begins to be initially reflected at this stage. Make a plan to achieve a goal, and the plan itself is to dismantle this big goal. , and then complete multiple small goals step by step, a bit like funnel thinking in data analysis. On the other hand, ensuring the implementation and sustainability of operations is also an important aspect.
3) Overall operations: strategy
What is strategy? Some people say that strategy is big and strategy is small. I disagree. Strategy is not just a big issue, but also a security issue. The strategy itself should be about moving from one balanced state to another balanced state, balanced state A – balanced state B. Last year, the monthly turnover was 2 million. This year I want to achieve 5 million, but it must be based on the situation that the existing 2 million will not be affected.
At this stage, you are basically a senior operations manager or operations director, and your perspective on problems is different. More of your work will be direction and economic thinking.
4) Fully operational: barriers
Many people cannot understand the strategy, but what about the barriers? The answer is: completely invisible.
This is the most mysterious operating method in this circle. It will create an invisible net in the market that you cannot cut through, see, or break out of. Once you enter, you will almost die.
Operational work ideas
How can you do the job at hand? The answer is: repetition and immediate feedback.
The basic idea of operation work is such a line: make a good work plan → implement the plan on the job → summarize after the end → summarize and then reverse the conclusion, which is deduction → adjust the plan based on the induction and deduction → repeat again.
The core of chess and card games
What is the core of chess and card games? Excluding gambling products, I think it is the following four points:
1) Product: Product is king is the constant thinking in the gaming circle
The development history of board and card games has gone through several product innovations, such as video card playing → fishing → hundred-person battle → competition → circle of acquaintances, but there are still so many ways to play. A good chess and card product should not only meet the needs of users in terms of UI interaction, product functions, art style, etc., but also meet the psychological and deep needs of users.
Psychology includes: comparison, showing off, voyeurism, social interaction, lust, etc.
Deep needs: surprise, material things, sudden wealth, etc.
2) Users: Users both generate income. Without users, there is no income.
Users have gradually become a barrier restricting the development of small teams. This situation will become increasingly cruel in the future. Factors such as the promotion of the capital market and channel user pricing will cause the user acquisition cost of this industry to become a barrier in the future.
3) Numerical values: Numerical values are the blood of chess and card games, which are reflected in the following aspects:
l Define monetary value;
l Sending and recycling: determines the economic system from a macro perspective. Inflation applies here;
l The upper and lower thresholds of the room and the circulation of a single game: affect the user's resumption of play after bankruptcy and the number of room users; at the same time, the Matthew effect applies here;
l Card type probability: Card games are essentially a series of discrete random probability events.
4) Barrier: Outside the wall, your food will be cut off; inside the wall, your people will be killed.
Why can't JJ be imitated? Why is Goose Factory not in a hurry? Because they have already formed different industry barriers.
JJ started out by using competitions. It was the first to invent the knock-out competition method. In the early days, it carried out large-cost promotion on TV stations and offline, accumulated a large number of loyal user groups, established brand barriers early, and the entire chain has long been difficult to shake.
Chess and card game operation framework
So now, let’s talk about product operations within chess and card game operations.
What is operation?
A series of efficiency-enhancing behaviors for products to maximize product goals through human intervention.
Extension: There are many kinds of goals, they are all for sale, some make money, some make people. If you have good looks, I have a lot of content; if you have a lot of content, I can’t post it for nothing, it’s crazy. Give two examples:
●There is a way of thinking that a product must reach a certain level of revenue immediately after it is launched. If it doesn’t work, it will be overhauled. If it still fails, it will be killed. It is simple and crude. Domestic RPG games basically adopt this approach because the initial investment in RPG projects is huge. IP is expensive, personnel costs are high, marketing expenses are high, and user unit price is high. These factors are an inevitable result. You must make money immediately, and the price must be good.
●Another idea is to launch products with the goal of being active. Within a certain period, the number of users should be reached to a larger level, and then you can make money after the number reaches a certain level. Most of these products have strong In terms of communication capabilities, the foundation of communication has been laid as early as the initial stage of the project, and the genes of communication have been injected, such as Lianliankan, fitness APP-KEEP, Meitu Xiuxiu, etc.
●Chess and card games have some limitations: poor communication capabilities and average overall payment level. For example, the standard payment for Doudizhu is around RMB 200, and the standard payment for Texas Hold'em Poker is around -200 yuan. The payment ability of other chess and card products is in the middle (excluding YY live broadcast hall chess and card games) Users who are really rich) The retention rate is not as high as that of RPG games. For example, Doudizhu retains between 40% and 50% of new additions that meet the standard, and Texas Hold'em Poker retains between 25% and 35% of new additions that meet the standard. There are really not many products on the market that meet the standards, and it is not like everyone imagines that they can be produced one after another. Moreover, once a user of chess and card games has a familiar product, it will be very difficult to get them to play your product. The switching cost is extremely high, because chess and card games are not essentially very different. Therefore, the operation idea of chess and card games is relatively smooth. When the retention rate and payment level are enough to support the user's LTV to reach the expected level, purchases will be made through channels. But can you really make money by doing this? not necessarily. If you can make a small amount of money that is not enough, how can you make a lot of money? Gambling and banking, these two means of wandering in the gray area are where the profits of chess and card games lie. Wherever there are people, there are rivers and lakes, and where there are rivers and lakes, there are secrets you don’t know. However, the world is like the tide and people are like water. You can only sigh at the rivers and lakes. Several people replied. All I can say is that the industry is still figuring out its future.
What is product operations?
In the process of the product from 0 to 1, the operation work of ensuring the smooth operation of the product, reducing the occurrence of product risks, and continuing to provide efficiency-enhancing services to the product is directly shown in the picture above.
1. Key operational points from 0 to 1
1. The status of operations. Many chess and card games operation teams have large numbers of people and the work is complicated. Most companies get involved after the product is launched. My suggestion is to allocate 1-2 product operation personnel in the early stage of the project to handle the basic operational requirements and ensure the normal operation of the product after it goes online.
2. Market analysis
1) Market demand
Market demand in three steps:
Analyze the current market situation and find the entry point → clarify the characteristics of target users → the size and expected proportion of target users
At this stage, you need to find the entry point and target users, and have a more comprehensive understanding of the market.
2) Product positioning
After understanding the market, make targeted plans based on user needs, not what I want. What you want is not what the user wants.
3)MAP document
Writing field analysis reports
3. Assist product managers to conduct competitive product and product analysis
One thing to remember here is that as an operator, if the task is not directly ordered by the senior management, you must serve as a facilitator to cooperate with the product manager to do this work. The process of arguing with him is a process of improving him. After all, he is making the product, which does not help you at all.
1) Competitive product analysis
Understand the user groups and promotion strategies of competing products; collect operational requirements (such as whether there is an email function, whether the email function has an attachment function); what peripheral projects the competitors have, and what is the opponent's layout.
2) Product analysis
Special attention should be paid to two points in the analysis of own products: the measurement of own resources (technical resources, operational resources, channel resources, etc.); the product simulation experience report (this is a simulation experience, if your product has three A/B/C function, what will happen to you)
4. The operation plan includes the operation strategy and corresponding work content within the life cycle, what is the plan for the test period; which indicator should be optimized first during the indicator optimization period, and what specific content should be optimized, etc.
5. The implementation of general operational requirements is basically the operational requirements that every product must have. These requirements are the prerequisite for the implementation of operational work. Try to do it before the product goes online, and communicate with the development for scheduling.
6. Handling of emergencies
Chess and card games mainly have the above three major emergencies.
1) Users brush gold coins
If users are not randomly matched, but can choose room matching by themselves, then it is very common to use game loopholes and activity loopholes to earn gold coins, and then go back and forth. You must have a psychological expectation for this matter, and note down under what circumstances. As a user, when it comes to brushing gold coins, 3 numbers count as gold coins or 10 numbers count as gold coins, 100,000 counts as gold coins or 1 million counts as gold coins. In most cases, users’ petty gold coins brushing behavior is ignored and it breaks through our hearts. When expected, you need to communicate via email as soon as possible, limit the number of accounts under the IP, ban accounts, etc. The most terrifying thing is those who professionally dump coins. They use multiple IPs and multiple accounts. At this time, you may have to do something to obtain gold coins. limit.
2) Server problem
For chess and card games, server problems may be the most serious problem leading to user loss, so early warning must be made and if problems occur, repairs must be made as soon as possible.
3) Robot problem
Robots can do many things. Robots are equivalent to your users, users you can manage and control. There are two types of problems with robots.
Category 1: hang up (paralysis)
Whether the game has just been launched, the opening of new functional modules, or the control of card games for novice users, etc., the robot is required to participate. It can accompany your real users to play cards. If something goes wrong with the robot, it could be a fatal problem.
Category 2: Wins and losses exceed expectations
Let's imagine, assuming that our currency value is: 1 yuan = 10,000 gold coins, and then we have a large enough number of users, what will be the result if a robot loses 1 billion or wins 1 billion? Lose 1 billion = Inject 100,000 yuan of game currency into the game's economic system. You lose 100,000 yuan. In this case, it is a free gift. In the end, your economic system will inflate, so you must control it; Win 1 billion = Winning 100,000 yuan in game currency from players will earn you 10,000 more yuan. But the condition is that you sacrifice users, which will hurt users very much.
Therefore, the robot must set a threshold limit for winning or losing. Once the threshold is exceeded, it must either lower the limit or change to a new set of AI.
7. Provide product optimization suggestions
In the process of product operation, after discovering problems, conduct internal discussions in a timely manner, and provide product optimization suggestions to department managers or product managers after drawing conclusions.
2. Product operation core: operation-driven product optimization
1. active
1) Active composition
active
active composition
I think this is very simple. Let’s talk about two models.
First: DAU model
DAU = the sum of the daily new users multiplied by the corresponding retention rate. That is to say, knowing the daily new users and retention rate, you can roughly infer DAU.
Here we first fit a retention rate curve based on the known retention rate (at least we know the retention situation on the next day, 3rd day, and 7th day), and then use the retention rate curve to create a DAU prediction model.
Second: Prediction of user life cycle
This model also works backwards based on the user’s retention rate. It can also be extended to LTV prediction models.
2) Active improvement – increase revenue and reduce expenditure
A. Open source strategy
There is not much to talk about open source strategy here. Most of it is about business and market. There are two main things to talk about.
First: If there is an abnormality in the daily increase, it should be observed in time (excluding derivatives)
Second: Provide product LTV predictions and ROI predictions to purchasers.
B. Throttling strategy
Optimize product process and improve retention
I won’t explain bugs and the like in this article, but I’ll mention two points:
First, from the product structure level, we must pay attention to the transformation of users in each stage and step. As shown in the picture: The new user conversion funnel includes outside the APP and inside the APP. This is a well-known model that analyzes the user's losses in each step from channel to download to playing cards. It should be noted that you must understand the meaning of each step. What the process is like, don’t miss any step, and then look at the conversion of each step, and start optimizing from the link with the greatest impact.
Second, the establishment of the novice closed loop is to ensure that users have an ideal (higher winning rate, more exciting) card game experience in the early stage of entering the game, and to increase the user's next-day retention by increasing the user's time cost and excitement. This is very effective in improving retention.
User growth incentive system
This is an important link throughout the operation of chess and card products, and defines how we motivate users in the operation process to achieve our goals. For example: for example, if you meet certain conditions, you can exchange for physical objects, you can exchange for gold coins, you can participate in a lottery, etc. These are all setting goals for users.
The user growth incentive system should be established from top to bottom.
Control churn
Churn warning and user activation
1. Establish a sample model of lost users: conduct feature analysis and clustering of lost users through data analysis and mining to find each lost node.
2. Establish a churn prevention model. If a user reaches a certain attribute or a certain status, it is determined that the user may churn, and throttling measures are taken for users who may churn.Commonly used models: :LR regression, decision tree
Recalling lost users
Recall methods: emails, text messages, carrier pigeons, etc.
All experts are welcome to complain, and newbies are also welcome to ask questions.If you have any questions, please leave a message in the message area