The behind-the-scenes story of "A Sheep and a Sheep" revealed: the main planner was originally the front desk administrator, and the staff once collapsed and asked to be dismissed

If you want to say that the most impressive game in 2022, it must be "Sheep and Sheep". This phenomenon-level mini-game, with its clearance rate of less than 0.1%, blows up the entire social network. When it was the hottest, 7 of the top 50 Weibo searches were related to it, and the traffic was so large that the server crashed three times in two days.

All of a sudden, almost all Internet users are playing this universal game, eliminating overlapping blocks over and over again, day and night.

On February 14th, at the 2022 Game Industry Annual Conference hosted by the Game Working Committee, Zhang Jiaxu, the developer behind "The Sheep" and the founder of Beijing Jianyou Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Beijing Jianyou"), was the last A guest came on stage to share. At that time, many participants had already left, and the applause at the scene seemed a little sparse. But from Zhang Jiaxu's mouth, we can get a glimpse of the story behind the birth of this explosive game.

There are only 3 people in the development team, and the main strategy is the company's front office
From every point of view, "The Sheep and the Sheep" at the beginning of the project was not a key project.

At the meeting, Zhang Jiaxu pointed out that apart from him, there are 3 people in the team, none of whom are industry elites. Except for the art staff who have worked on independent games, the other 2 people have no experience in the game industry. One of them is the chief planner with a background in front desk administration, and the other is a girl born in 1998. The other is a software development engineer who has never made a game, and has never even used the Cocos Creator development engine commonly used in small games.

The reason for such staffing is mainly due to cost considerations.

In 2021, Zhang Jiaxu left Haoteng Jiake, where he had worked for 5 years, to start his own business. Previously, he had created the first WeChat mini-game product "The Pirates Are Coming" with a monthly turnover of over 100 million. Even so, Zhang Jiaxu's entrepreneurial journey was not smooth, and it was difficult to support at one time. In the middle of 2022, Beijing Jianyou was on the verge of death, relying on a casual shooting game "Moon Village" to accept investment from Thunder Games to survive.

However, in the process, Zhang Jiaxu discovered that the elimination game is brilliant overseas. At the same time, there is no benchmark product for this game in China. But at that time, most of the company's employees were busy with the main product and had no time to spare.

It is precisely because of this that Zhang Jiaxu positioned "Sheep a Sheep" as a very lightweight game from the very beginning, and they wanted to complete the development with the lowest cost in just three months. And his expectation for this game is that it can reach 200,000 yuan in revenue every quarter.

After the first launch, the performance was extremely poor, and the team once cried in the conference room
Just like an ordinary match-3 game, there are hundreds of levels in the original "Sheep and Sheep", from easy to difficult, with rankings and check-ins. It supports currency to buy props, continue to get props after clearing the level, and props The development and improvement of the game and so on.

There is no shortage of such games on the market, so its performance is very mediocre. Zhang Jiaxu revealed that after the actual launch, the performance of the game was very poor, and the retention rate was only about 20%, which did not even reach the standard for release.

At the beginning, Zhang Jiaxu was unwilling to admit that there was a problem with the game. Considering that the poor performance of the game might be due to the fact that domestic gamers did not accept the elimination method very well, he turned around to prepare for the overseas market. At this time, the project team also changed the painting style according to the preferences of overseas users, and prepared to invest in overseas testing.

However, the results after a week or two surprised him. Zhang Jiaxu bluntly said that he has never seen such poor data. "We felt that there was no need to make any excuses. It wasn't a distribution problem, it wasn't a market problem, it was our problem. We were too bad. What's the point of making this game?"

Such a result also made the whole team disheartened. At the replay meeting after the release evaluation, all 4 members of the "Sheep and Sheep" team cried. Some people even directly told Zhang Jiaxu that he felt that he was the company's oil bottle, which added a lot of burden to him, and he didn't want to waste any more costs. If things are so bad, there is no chance anyway, or they should disband.

If Zhang Jiaxu hadn't made the final insistence at this time, then this project might really be disbanded. Fortunately, none of this happened. Based on his trust in the team and his optimism about the elimination gameplay, Zhang Jiaxu finally persuaded the team to break the routine, abandon the framework of traditional games, and try one last time with the idea of ​​"not playing games".

After strengthening the social design, it finally detonated the social network
Since the popular WeChat mini-game "The Pirates Are Coming" in 2018, Zhang Jiaxu has been making social mini-games. This time, he poured all his thinking into "The Sheep and the Sheep".

The first is the ultimate pursuit of social efficiency. Unlike "Jump", which was an early social game through the leaderboard, in Zhang Jiaxu's view, only the top-ranked players will take the initiative to share. On the contrary, "Sheep a Sheep" will stratify and label all users, think about whether they will socialize, and increase the efficiency of social interaction as much as possible

Let users who play well post their Moments to show off, and those who play badly will complain on social platforms. "When a game can give you any emotional feedback, I think it is successful, even if it is scolded," Zhang Jiaxu said.

Secondly, "A Sheep and a Sheep" has provided ordinary people with the feeling of "all attention" through extremely high difficulty; in order to maintain the cool tonality of the product, Zhang Jiaxu has always refused to add more advertising spaces. At the same time, the absolute randomness of props is also used to ensure the fairness of the game. "What we want is a social game that treats everyone fairly."

After the revision, "The Sheep and the Sheep" finally became what it is now. According to factual reports, on the first day of WeChat’s launch, it naturally attracted more than 100 players, with an average usage time of 70 minutes, 55% of them were retained the next day, and the fission coefficient was 0.7-1.

The so-called fission coefficient refers to how many players are willing to share the game. A fission coefficient of 0.7-1 means that 70 of the 100 users are less, and more than 100 users have shared and diffused. In the game industry, usually the fission coefficient reaches above 0.5, and the product can achieve a big explosion by virtue of fission.

In the next few days, Zhang Jiaxu watched the DAU data rise from more than 100 to 500, 1,000, and 2,000. It continued to increase naturally, and the team did nothing. In less than two weeks, the daily activity of "A Sheep and a Sheep" has reached one million.

The final pusher of the game's explosion came from a player who said in the Weibo EDG (E-sports Team) Chaohua, "I don't allow anyone not to know "Sheep a Sheep". When the players of EDG Chaochao were stumped, they went to capture another e-sports team RNG Chaohua. They joked: "We can't sleep, and RNG can't sleep either."

This kind of story was gradually copied in several major super talk contents, and finally "The Sheep Got a Sheep" was completely exploded.