Access to the game engine, Taobao has worked hard for traffic

Earlier this year, the news that QQ was equipped with the Unreal 4 game engine had sparked extensive discussions, and many friends lamented that they had found the "culprit" for the growing APP. But just recently, Taobao also announced the access to the domestic game engine Cocos, and Cocos announced that it will cooperate with Taobao to launch a "community version" engine. Content developers and merchants can use the community version of Cocos Creator to easily publish games to Taobao.

Today, you can collect cats and cats in Didi, fight hamsters in Meituan, grow fruits in Tmall/JD.com/Pinduoduo, dress yourself in Taobao Life, raise pets in JD. The game engine is directly built into the APP, and more and more games are appearing in non-game products. From simply introducing games into APPs to further building game engines, behind all this is the concept of "gamification marketing" that is increasingly favored by Internet manufacturers.

Gamification marketing, as the name suggests, is to use the thinking of games to do marketing. This is a methodology that infiltrates the underlying logic of the game, such as rules, interactions, goals, and feedback, into marketing activities, allowing consumers to voluntarily participate in related activities. . In traditional marketing, such as the Double 11 promotion, platforms and merchants have to pay real money to subsidize users in exchange for user participation and order conversion, but the price is that the profit in the unit price of customers will continue to be compressed in the long run.

The gamification marketing is similar to Haidilao's previous sign-in activity of "gathering firewood to cook hot pot" after "Synthetic Big Watermelon" came out of the circle.

The reason why gamification marketing is so popular, regardless of external factors such as graphics, gameplay, and content, is that the most attractive key lies in the in-depth exploration of the "addiction" mechanism in the game industry. The addictive model of triggers, behavior, uncertain rewards, and commitment has undoubtedly been steeped in the game industry for a long time. If not, why would games become a classic monetization model in the Internet industry alongside advertising and e-commerce?

With the passage of time, gamification marketing has been used by more and more Internet companies, but well-informed consumers have gradually become desensitized to gamification marketing. Therefore, the marketing departments of Internet manufacturers will naturally keep pace with the times, choosing to directly move the game itself to the APP, and normalize the originally sporadic gamification marketing, such as Alipay's Ant Forest and Pinduoduo's Duoduo Orchard. They are all products of this idea.

As an iterative version of gamified marketing, e-commerce platforms such as Taobao do not actually target users’ wallets with games embedded in their APPs, but rather have a certain welfare nature.

In fact, in the final analysis, gamification marketing is to attract traffic from outside the platform. With the disappearance of traffic dividends in the Internet industry and the emergence of the "traffic black hole" of short videos, it is clear that Taobao's purchase costs have risen. In addition, asking for help is not as good as asking for yourself, and embedding the game solves the problem of traffic, not consumption or transactions. So this is why traditional gamification marketing is to ask users, but now the games embedded in the e-commerce platform are basically giving benefits.

The biggest function of embedded games is not to facilitate transactions, but to significantly increase the user's dwell time. Through the way of giving benefits, users can be trained to log in to the APP every day in a "check-in style", and the longer the user stays, the potential transaction opportunities will naturally increase simultaneously. The more complete the gameplay system of the platform and the more benefits users can obtain through various tasks, the stronger the motivation to place orders will be. Not only that, the gameplay of the game will also bring new shopping scenes and shopping methods.

Embedding games in the APP is actually an overt conspiracy by the e-commerce platform to exchange certain rewards for the user's time and energy, thereby generating traffic. Therefore, for a long time, the games on the e-commerce platform have basically been light casual games, which are often "insufficient in gameplay and perfect in sociality", so they will not overwhelm the guests. And aiming at the needs of users to find common topics in the Internet era, on the one hand, it meets the social needs of users, and on the other hand, it can also let them taste the sweetness.

It is true that this model is good enough to use, but it cannot withstand the crazy involution among Internet manufacturers. In the past two years, Pinduoduo, Taobao, JD.com, and even QQ Music have all started to have built-in games, which has gradually increased the threshold of consumers and brought a new round of "desensitization" again. This time Taobao chose to build the Cocos game engine into the APP, which is actually delegating the authority of gamification marketing to developers and merchants.

Being able to do and being able to do it is obviously not the same thing, and Taobao also has its own considerations in choosing Cocos. Unlike QQ's built-in Unreal 4, the Cocos engine does not focus on comprehensiveness and performance.

As a cross-platform engine, Cocos has the advantage of being free, open source, and lightweight. It is mainly oriented to 2D game development, rather than the more popular 3D games. To some extent, free, open source, and light weight make Cocos far less difficult to learn than Unreal 4. For example, the recently popular "Sheep a Sheep" is actually developed based on the Cocos engine.

The low barrier to entry means that even developers who have never had game development experience before can use the resources and materials provided by Cocos to build games, so that every business has the opportunity to use Cocos to develop games to assist in marketing. Of course, all this is not without cost. On the other hand, Taobao’s access to the game engine also puts forward higher requirements for the optimization of Taobao itself. If the game cannot be pushed to users on the basis of ensuring smoothness, the final result may be counterproductive.