A game from a young company from Beijing called “Sheep a Sheep” went viral in China in September 2022.
Evelyn Chen | CNBC
BEIJING — A new game that has gone viral in China has hit people’s screens with surprising speed at a time when gaming giants like NetEase they have waited months for approval to release games.
That’s because the new game, called Sheep a Sheep, is housed within ByteDance’s Douyin and Ten cents WeChat messaging app as a mini-program. Users can play the game within the apps.
“WeChat and ByteDance do not currently require a gaming license to publish their HTML5 games on their platforms,” said Rich Bishop, CEO of AppInChina, which publishes international software in China.
“But this is likely to change in the coming months as enforcement of existing regulations intensifies,” he said.
HTML5 games are built with coding tools similar to those used for websites and can be easily distributed across platforms.
WeChat and ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Sheep a Sheep just went viral these last few days. Very cool for everyone, especially regulators.
brian tycangko
analyst, Stansberry Research
Game Software Approvals
Sheep a Sheep’s developer, Beijing Jianyou Technology, was founded in January 2021.
The company registered the game software in late July this year, according to the Tianyancha business database. Weeks later, in early September, Jianyou had released the sheep game, according to posts on his official Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform in China.
By contrast, NetEase’s first gaming approval in more than a year came 10 months after the company registered the software, according to data from Tianyancha.
Beijing’s increased scrutiny of the gaming industry meant the National Press and Publication Administration stopped approving new games from publishers between July 2021 and April 2022. A search for “sheep” on the approval list turned up only results for other games from the year 2018 or earlier. .
The administration and Jianyou did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
money from ads
But it’s less clear what the rules are for games like Sheep a Sheep, which are free and ad-supported.
A spike in social media attention around a long weekend in mid-September helped attract gamers, reportedly in the tens of millions, who were eager to beat the game as soon as possible, even if they had to. see what it all ended up being. hours of ads.
The impact is not that clear yet… People could lose interest in it as fast as they were attracted.
brian tycangko
analyst, Stansberry Research
The game is “completely free to play,” said Xiaofeng Wang, a senior analyst at Forrester. “The only catch is that you have to spend 30 seconds to see a commercial.”
“For a developer it’s very profitable and I think they’re already generating revenue,” he said. “Even [if] popularity can’t last long, it’s still a good thing, they have nothing to lose. They’ve already gained a lot from this.”
WeChat mini-program games are not new.
piqued curiosity
Part of the charm of Sheep a Sheep is a sense of challenge, a puzzle that the developer claims has a 0.1% success rate, and competition.
The game requires players to remove tiles of the same category in groups of three. People who are successful win a cartoon sheep which then joins a virtual herd based on the player’s region, increasing the player’s province ranking.
“A lot of people never [had] that gaming experience before,” Wang said. “From very, very easy to very, very difficult, they heard different people on social media talking about it, that sparked a lot of curiosity, ‘Why is this so difficult?’ That’s why it’s so unique.”
Anecdotally, the number of this reporter’s WeChat contacts who tried the mini-show game roughly tripled over one weekend in September to almost 300. The following weekend, two of the six people were seen at a bank in a Beijing subway car playing the game.
“Sheep to Sheep has gone viral in the last few days. Very new to everyone, especially regulators,” Brian Tycangco, an analyst at Stansberry Research, said in an email last week.
“So the impact is not that clear yet,” he said. “People could lose interest in him as fast as he was attracted.”
Source: news.google.com