The Scroll of Taiwu successfully established a new way to market the indie game, which has very little financial support in the Chinese game market. Game developers recommend their game to famous video makers who gain fans by telling stories through play. However, this marketing mode brings risk and influence on game development, forcing game developers to consider more about audience and performance. They failed in balancing between original game design and new content that were more entertaining in videos. Thus, they decided not to pay a lot of attention to the audience’s feedback and focusing on finished the original design. It eventually caused many video makers stopped making videos about this game. This transformation has shown that when the marketing strategy is based on videos, it is hard to balance the original plan of game development and adding content which produces entertaining performance. And it has become a common problem for marketing among Chinese indie game, due to the lack of platforms for marketing, distribution, and publishing.

The team of The Scroll of Taiwu was tiny, and they couldn’t even afford salary and rental fee. Also, there were not many platforms for them to distribute the game and advertise. Thus, they invited many very popular streamers and game video makers in China to play the game. The transition from “artist-led-marketing” to strategic alliance had taken place. “Artist-led-marketing” is a new concept based on “artist-led-distribution,” which means release games used online distribution to reach consumers directly (Broekhuizen, “New horizons or a strategic mirage? Artist-led-distribution versus alliance strategy in the video game industry”). And thus, “Artist-led-marketing” means game developers directly advertise the game to players. However, they usually don’t have enough ability and time to do it. When the team of Taiwu opened their public account on Weibo, they only gained tens of fans in the first weeks. Then they formed a strategic alliance with video makers. The strategic alliance means close, collaborative relationships with others who have competitive commercial resources. Take streamer and video maker “Wanglaoju” as an example. He has 1.9 million fans subscribing to his channel, and his videos of The Scroll of Taiwu received 9.95 million clicks in all. Besides, his videos were super funny and had exciting performances, thus provided a lot of memes. There is a fans’ work novel based on videos that received ninety thousand clicks. Even people who didn’t play indie games had heard about it. Most importantly, The Scroll of Taiwu was a complicated game that had many systems and unfriendly UI. The audience found The Scroll of Taiwu easier to understand after watching the video.

Nevertheless, this strategic alliance brings risk and influence on game development. The streamers might ask game developers to add or modify some functions to produce better streaming performance. Also, game developers would rely much on the chat and commend of the videos and might even change the whole design to cater for streamers and their audience. Some changes were good for the game, but some were not. For example, “Wanglaoju” utilized the unbalance among game mechanics to get funny performance. The memes of his videos were essentially produced from this unbalance. If the developers modified the mechanics and managed to eliminate such unbalance, that might not only cause “Wanglaoju” to cease to make videos of “The Scroll of Taiwu” series but also cause the loss of players who were attracted by the way “Wanglaoju” played the game. Besides, the majority of advice given by “Wanglaoju” ‘s audience was suggesting that the game should have better art assets and more animations. Because from the aspect of audience, the video makers already tried their best to take entertaining content of the game into videos and eliminate boring elements of the game, thus the audience cared more about visual performance. The influence could be seen in the updating log. Before “Wanglaoju” ‘s videos released (22nd September 2018), the updating log focusing on eliminating bugs and revising game mechanics. After that, game developers paid more attention to more beautiful UI, voiceover (to add immersion), more images of characters, and more animations (Qiezi, Updating log of The Scroll of Taiwu on Steam).

The lack of platforms for marketing and getting feedbacks resulted in that many indie games (especially non-mobile games) had to rely much on the strategic alliance with popular video makers and streamers. In this case, however, the identity of players become audience, who pay more attention to entertaining performance in video and tend to give feedback according to visual satisfaction. Thus, this method caused the homogenization of players and the simplification of their judgment. Although players may have various experiences of playing the game, when they learn the game from video, they don’t play with the game mechanics directly. The simplification of players means that they consider the game overall entertaining or not through videos instead of game mechanics and other complicated elements because they don’t directly play with them. The entertainment of video represents the performance of the gameplay shown in the video. In “Games, the New Lively Art,” Henry Jenkins pointed out that performance played a critical role in gameplay. He said that performance made players thought “as if they are in control of the situation at all times, even though their gameplay and emotional experience is significantly sculpted by the designer” and “making the player aware of the challenges they confront, and at the same time.” And the videos even amplify the importance of performance since the video is made based on performance. Therefore, the audience wants to see video makers showing their control over the game, how they encounter the challenge and deal with it. Then the game must give satisfying feedback when video makers overcome a challenge.

In another word, the audience wants to see interesting challenges, interactions, and feedbacks, all of which should be visually satisfying and entertaining. In game channel of Bilibili (the biggest video website in China), in the top ten game videos, two are videos similar to “Wanglaoju” ‘s videos of Taiwu. Three are highlights in League of Legends matches. Two are famous e-sport professional player Faker’s funny operations in League of Legends. Others are trailers and criticism of new games. That means seventy percent of the top ten game videos are based on performance. In the top fifty game videos, twenty-six videos focus on performance. In addition, the games among the most popular online game in China in the first quarter of 2019 in a report and Steam’s rank of most popular games in this week didn’t appear in the Bilibili rank, such as Dota2. By contrast, there are a lot of videos of indie games that are fun to watch, such as Human: Fall Flat appear on the Bilibili rank. These data show that the audience prefer games that are more fun and easier to watch, instead of games require audience to digest complicated mechanics. When they give feedbacks, they are from the aspect of the audience of entertaining videos and tend to give feedbacks based on whether the game is entertaining and easy to understand through video. And because game developers lack other sources of feedback, they probably tend to revise the game so that it can have more entertaining performance.

The lack of the platforms also caused the lack of the source of players. The aimed players transfer from the players who are interested to game’s genre to video makers’ fan group. Take The Scroll of Taiwu as an example, the originally aimed players, as the game developer said in an interview, were those who like Civ games or D&D (Qiezi, After Reading Evaluation on The Scroll of Taiwu). But the identity of players who are attracted by videos is fan more than players who like strategy games. The game indirectly attracts players by video makers’ interpretation of the game. In other word, they cannot directly attract the originally aimed players by strategic game mechanics through videos. And since videos appeal most of the players, the originally targeted players transfer to video makers’ fans. To keep appealing new players, indie games have to depend on the strategic alliance with streamers. And they would even modify the game to cater to streamers and audiences to maintain a high clicking rate. Take another game, “Amazing Cultivation Simulator” as an example. When the players create the character, if they use the name of a famous video maker, they probably get very good characters with high strength, intelligence, money, etc. It satisfies some fans of those video makers but is apparently unfair to ordinary players who want to use the name they like. Also, as mentioned before, some video makers may utilize the unbalance in game mechanic and audience learn it and love to play the game in this way. Game developers are expected not to revise such unbalance in the game mechanic. In addition, game developers are expected not to update the game too frequently so that video makers and the audience don’t have to learn how to play the game every time the developers make big changes. In fact, another famous video maker, “Nifengxiao” complaint about the high frequency of The Scroll of Taiwu’s updating in his streaming. His strategy was cultivating a character who was good at using poison. But the mechanic of poison in game was frequently adjusted and thus he and his audience had to adapt to the new mechanic frequently. In this case, the game’s development schedule is also influenced by video maker and fans. Eventually, the team of The Scroll of Taiwu decided to modify the unbalanced mechanics and banned some operations that “Wanglaoju” used in the videos. Besides, they updated the game twice a month. Streamers and video makers like “Wanglaoju” stopped to make videos or no longer streamed the game. It caused a great loss of players and audience. During the time when video makers like “Wanglaoju” were updating The Scroll of Taiwu series, the updating log in Steam received more than 200 thumbs up in average. But several weeks after “Wanglaoju” ceased updating videos (25th, October, 2018), the updating log received about 30 thumbs up in average(Updating log of The Scroll of Taiwu on Steam).

The Scroll of Taiwu totally gave up the strategic alliance with video makers and determined to focus on finishing the original designing plan instead of catering for audience and doing visual stuff at first. They lost a great number of players. It seems that it was the wrong decision. But really? On 24th April 2019, the game designer of The Scroll of Taiwu posted an article on Zhihu. He said that before entering the video game industry, he was an architect. He compared making the game to building a house. If they decorate a kitchen without having laid down water and electricity pipes because they want to attract residents, this house would be hard to live in, and they would eventually break down the kitchen (Qiezi, After Reading Evaluation on The Scroll of Taiwu). What the designer said means that they think pursuing entertaining performance in the video might gain short-term popularity, but it does no good for long-term game development, and that game maker should build the foundation of the game at first. For the games like The Scroll of Taiwu that are still in the process of development, I agree that the videos could get temporary popularity, but the game developers shouldn’t stop at this point. In addition, it would be much better for the development of Chinese indie game if there are more platforms for advertising and getting feedback with low entry.

###Citation

Thijs L.J.Broekhuizen, Joseph Lampel, Joost Rietveld, New horizons or a strategic mirage, Artist-led-distribution versus alliance strategy in the video game industry, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2012.12.007

Henry Jenkins, GAMES, THE NEW LIVELY ART http://web.mit.edu/~21fms/People/henry3/GamesNewLively.html

Updating log of The Scroll of Taiwu on Steam https://steamcommunity.com/games/838350/announcements?p=3

STEAM & GAME STATS UPDATED: MAY 18, 2019 @ 3:18AM https://store.steampowered.com/stats

Qiezi, After Reading Evaluation on The Scroll of Taiwu, 2019.04.24 https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/63555406?utm_source=qq&utm_medium=social&utm_oi=598175107252883456

The Channel of Wanglaoju https://space.bilibili.com/423895/video?keyword=%E5%A4%AA%E5%90%BE%E7%BB%98%E5%8D%B7

Game Video Rank in this month of Bilibili https://www.bilibili.com/ranking/all/4/0/30

Top 50 popular online games in China in 2019 https://www.sohu.com/a/296150708_120099902