To be honest, when I was looking for games recently, I happened to see this advertisement for a 0.05% discount on "Samurai Ninja", and I was really confused. As an old player who has played since the Symbian era, I have to say with emotion: The way the mobile game industry is now is getting more and more wild.
A permanent 0.05% discount sounds like pie in the sky, but I always feel that there is a kind of helplessness in it. This kind of 0.1% off and 0.05% off games is actually nothing new in the industry. They essentially use extremely low thresholds to attract free users and survive on advertising and first deposit gift packages. If you think about it carefully, what does a 0.05% discount mean? The original 648 gift package can now be obtained for less than three yuan. This is no longer selling game content, but the pleasure of "picking up bargains".
Not to brag, I don't have any prejudice against this type of game itself. After all, judging from the configuration and card surface, "Samurai Ninja" is indeed somewhat sincere - Team 7, Tsunade, Uchiha Itachi, and Susano Kakashi are given away for free, and you can also get a thousand draws when you sign in. This kind of stacking of benefits would have been unimaginable ten years ago. When we played Symbian games, we could get excited for a long time just by buying a piece of Tetris for five yuan. How had we ever seen such a battle?
But judging from industry trends, can this model really last long? My personal feeling is that it reflects a deeper problem: users in the mobile game market are becoming more and more "sophisticated", while manufacturers are becoming more and more "panic".
In the early years, when playing mobile games, everyone had to look at ratings, word-of-mouth, and picture quality. What now? Users have been washed away by various krypton gold models for a round, and they have become numb to the numerical expansion. If you offer me a 648 gift package, I will turn around and leave; but if you tell me a 0.05% discount, I will take another look. This is actually a cliff-like drop in the cost of user trust. In order to retain people, manufacturers have to lower the price of the game content itself to almost free, and then monetize it through other methods.
To be honest, this trend is not a good thing for the industry ecology. It makes high-quality products and long-term operations very difficult - you have worked hard for three years, and if you are blocked by "Shuangyou" with a 0.05% discount on the first day it goes online, who will seriously make games? In the long run, everyone will fall into a vicious cycle: the screen will become more and more convoluted, the values will become more and more collapsed, the discounts will become lower and lower, and players will become more and more impatient.
But having said that, as an old player, I occasionally miss the days of simply playing games. No discounts, no first charge, just for fun. But now that the environment is like this, occasionally playing this kind of "welfare-filled" game can satisfy your craving.
One final reminder: 0.05% off for fun, don't get ahead of yourself. After all, the value of the game content itself has nothing to do with discounts. In today's games, everything is discounted, except sincerity, which sometimes really can't be discounted. 😔