"The current situation of the script is a bit like 'paste coffee' -- after becoming famous overnight, it is like a crowd of stars applauding the moon. The negative and epidemic situation have hindered the acceleration. At present, the 'money' Outlook of the industry is dim." A boss who runs script killing shops in Shanghai and Hangzhou (mainly focusing on real-life scripts and immersive theatres) told Hu Xiang that since the second half of 2021, the epidemic has superimposed changes in the environment, and there are many colleagues who have closed stores and changed careers around. In their sigh of dismal withdrawal, the prospect of script killing has become more and more uncertain.
Especially on the platform where young people gather, prejudice is accelerating the collapse of the reputation of script killing - "the chaos of script killing friends", "sleeping with new books", "teaching script killing meat books" and "training script killing pigs" have become the stream passwords of some sharp reviews of script killing videos. Even since September 2021, Xinhua news agency, people's daily and other state-run media have frequently issued articles pointing out that some scripts promote violence, supernatural and other vulgar content, causing public concern.
It can be seen that although the epidemic has affected the offline operation, the accompanying problems of soft porn, violence, supernatural and other contents (piracy and plagiarism are also faced in the distribution process) are the most difficult "disaster" for the script killing industry. The setback of the industry's acceleration may delay the rise and outbreak of the industry, but the content ecology determines the user stickiness and public praise. When the incremental weakness is superimposed on the loss of stock, the script killing may even face the outcome of sudden death.
However, wangmengchi, co-founder of the master of reasoning, and Hu olfactory, when talking about the plight of script killing, said, "more and more practitioners are pouring in with the industry, and some accompanying problems have disturbed the normal growth rate and internal growth logic of the industry. However, these local and early chaos of the industry have been amplified and reviewed repeatedly, which is very impersonal for an emerging industry."
Script killing is becoming less and less fun
During the epidemic in Shanghai, Zhang Xuan (a pseudonym, a screenplay host, commonly known as DM) especially missed "death wears white". "It is the first script for many players, and it is the first murder mystery script introduced into China."
Since 2018, when he became obsessed with script killing, Zhang Zhen has brought nearly 100 games every year. He believes that compared with werewolf killing (the experience is determined by the player's game level) and secret room (the experience comes from real scene decoration and NPC puzzle solving games), script killing is social.
"At least in terms of experience, script killing is better than werewolf killing. The former has no obvious threshold for the game, and everyone can play it immediately. A series of games have logical reasoning, strong sense of immersion, and can meet new friends, which is in line with the diversified demands of young people for offline social networking."
Comparison of game features of werewolf killing, secret room escape and script killing
However, in the past two years, Zhang Yu's frequency of going to print has greatly decreased. "Gu soul, crime and punishment and the return of a loved one can all give people the feeling of being on the scene. Now more and more stories are filling up the volume, so they miss the original intention of hard core logic, reduction, technique and narration." Zhang said.
Moreover, there are some new ideas in the techniques, mechanisms and settings of the hardcore version, which will show some differences (such as the differences in narration, including time, place and characters, misleading players through the change of narration methods, and the common techniques of reasoning Novels), while the homogenization of the contents of the emotional version, the anti drug version and the antique version is becoming more and more serious.
For example, not long after the launch of the classic "the woman by the window" (the fierce version), "goodbye firefly" (the restored version), "shangzhong'er" (the camp version), "hello" (Benge) and "soldiers under the city" (the emotional version), many "mirror" versions of tribute have emerged.
Even in the past three years, screenplay has become a new social favorite of young people. Its market size has increased from 6.53 billion yuan in 2018 to 11.74 billion yuan in 2020, far exceeding offline entertainment consumption forms such as KTV, offline cinema and secret room escape; However, while the industry has gained a lot of attention, the content ecology of the script has become more impetuous and reckless.
In terms of creation difficulty, novels, online texts and film and television IP are single C-bit linear narration. Even though butterfly cemetery, Qingnian and Chenghua fourteenth year, which are adapted into screenplays, have good market performance, screenplays have different requirements for scene, interaction and experience, and it is not easy to balance the C-bit nonlinear narration.
Moreover, the script creation group itself is unstable. According to the data of the script distribution platform "black detective has products", by the end of 2020, there were 4000 ~ 5000 script creators in China, mainly composed of advanced players, online career transfer, film and television screenwriters, and most of the authors were part-time.
On the other hand, the basic attribute of script killing is not literature or story but play. Gameplay pays attention to two points: first, the sense of balance. The script should not only ensure the integrity and readability of the story, but also find ways to set up interactive nodes and repair God's perspective bugs; The second is the sense of mission. Players have task clues. The plot cannot be driven without each participant. Anyone who plays badly will affect the experience of others. At present, strangers are common in the playbook group killing game, making the whole experience uncontrollable.
Data source: China script market analysis report in 2021
In this regard, yinpai, the founder of yinpai culture, believes that this can be achieved by decoupling everyone's action story line from the plot. Game interaction does not depend on a specific object, and different clues can push the plot downward. "At present, many book creations have open endings, and there are even 72 endings at most. Players can take different roles to promote them. Open endings can also avoid routinization."
From this perspective, script killing is more like a kind of characteristic interactive literature, and the plot should also serve the experience. DM, who is responsible for explaining, distributing clues and visiting the scene, is particularly important for the whole experience. For example, Zhang Yu believes that the update speed of DM and books in offline stores must be positively correlated with the customer flow, "repeat customers should either go to the exclusive book or go to DM. The book with low price drainage has a very low number of repeat customers." He thinks that in general, the reasons for the high re purchase rate of the script industry should be DM, script, experience and others.
However, DM is also faced with the dilemma of "making bricks without straw", especially in content industries such as script killing. Screenwriter of Chinatown detective & He Beichen, the publisher of the script, believes that the market regulation fails due to the blind pursuit of the general volume.
"The best stores to open are those after 2018 and 2019, such as women by the window, Gu Hunling in 2018, new year rings and school rules in 2019 Both are very classic. At that time, the book would not blindly pursue volume. Now stores are not willing to buy small volume books. Only those books with tens of thousands of words can have a sense of cost. It is more and more common to buy emotional books to catch up with large volume books, which means that the more lengthy time cost will undoubtedly dissuade some players. "
Why is it that the general volume book is becoming more and more popular? Hu olfactory communicated with digital reasoning enthusiasts and found that they have a simple consensus that the core of script killing lies in "killing". "Any book with experience, balance and sense of experience should be interpreted through 'killing'."
Following this logic, players' pursuit of deduction and immersion will force stores to purchase larger and more complex narrative scripts. This trend is fed back from the market side to the supply side. Script writers will create more large-scale scripts to adapt to market changes, and their creative talents are limited. Authors can only support the number of words with water. As a result, players' time cost is getting higher and higher, and their readability is getting worse and worse. Finally, they are fed back to single store operation, and the turnover rate is reduced, Broken stems and overturned cars further affect the player's repurchase rate.
In view of this, many first - and second tier cities are still at the stage of losing money and making money, not to mention second - and third tier cities. Therefore, it is always difficult to form a trend of penetration from high-level cities to low-level cities. According to Baidu search index, the popularity of high-level screenplay search is mainly concentrated in coastal and first tier cities in the central and western regions where young people are the majority.
Even from the distribution of stores in various cities, script stores in China are mainly concentrated in first tier and new first tier cities - the data show that in May 2021, the number of "script stores" in Beijing, Wuhan and Shanghai was 663, 634 and 551 respectively.
Data source: China script market analysis report in 2021
Investor Li Qiang (a pseudonym, mainly focusing on consumer racing tracks) investigated first tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou and found that "many stores in Beijing and Shanghai have invested hundreds of thousands or nearly millions in the early stage. Under the low price strategy, the profit of rent, script purchase, manpower, operation and other expenses in a single month is less than 50%, and the profit can only be made for a year or more (but it also depends on the operating ability). How many people can last so long?"
He further said, "on the surface, script killing is becoming more and more popular with media reports, but by investigating the proportion of newly opened / dead stores in major cities, we can see that going out of the circle is just to meet the novelty of the public. The industry is still in the pioneer stage, and there are no rules or entry barriers. The fire has been 'false fire' for three years."
Even so, he Beichen is optimistic that any emerging industry is bound to go through a stage when everything is ready to go down. Although the system construction from single store profit model, creation ecology to distribution platform and combating piracy is at an early stage, the epidemic is helping the market gradually eliminate many small-scale shops with poor business ability, thus promoting the whole industry to carry out a content "cleaning".
"A large number of low-cost leading stores have closed down, and the core user group of script killing is constant in the market. These target users will be diverted to more classic books and boutique stores to complete a benign content upgrade. Therefore, many active stores are still buying books during the epidemic, and their beliefs are supporting the evolution of script killing ecology to the better."
Is the exhibition alienated into the source of "inferior currency"
When communicating with digital script killers about script flooding, plagiarism and other chaos, Hu olfactory found that "exhibition flooding" was causing more and more serious damage to the ecology of script killers, and even aggravated the phenomenon of "bad money driving out good money".
Taking the data of the whole year's script reasoning exhibition in 2021 as an example, a total of 72 script killing exhibitions were held nationwide; From the number of exhibitions held / planned in a single month, the number of exhibitions held in the first half of the year showed a gradual upward trend, with 13 held in July as the peak, and the number of exhibitions held in the second half of the year showed a gradual downward trend.
According to the current exhibition scale, the largest exhibition is 3000 shop tickets. According to the normal ratio of 1:10, the upper limit should be 300 works (the new edition of the exhibition accounts for about 40%); Even for medium-sized regional exhibitions, there are more than 1000 people and at least 100 works. The inference master of the comprehensive online distribution platform gave a preliminary estimate: in the whole script industry, more than 6000 new scripts will be launched in 2021 alone.
Source: script reasoning exhibition applet | sorted out by forward looking Industry Research Institute
"The proliferation of exhibitions has led to uneven content supply. No matter what degree of completion the book pays, you can participate in the exhibition. As a result, the online speed of the new book is much faster than the market digestion speed. Some stores have not opened a few cars of the script after buying it. Players are attracted by the new book marketing, forcing the stores to speed up the frequency of buying the book, and even skip the test link of 'blind buying'. It is easy to overturn the car, and the reputation will become worse." Yinpai said that at present, the most serious damage to the content ecology caused by various chaos is the proliferation of exhibitions.
Even, the proliferation of exhibitions will lead to a surge in demand for scripts, thus compressing the creation cycle, and more and more scripts will become mass-produced rather than created.
"There is a model from 2018 to 2019. Some studios will first find a classic story outline on the Internet, and then distribute it to several part-time writers for crazy output. This book seems to have good settings and themes at a glance, but it is too routine, three knives and two poisons, and it is easy to break the stem and overturn the car." He Beichen said.
He further added that such works are not only routine, but also can realize assembly line operation. "Generally, the creation cycle of high-quality works is as long as several months or half a year, but this kind of works can be written four or five times a month, and each book will earn 100 sets of money. When the reputation of the studio deteriorates, it will immediately change its name to continue assembly line operation. Even if the shopkeepers and consumers are cheated, the studio can return the capital and even earn some money."
In addition, some head issues rely on the exhibition to increase the brand effect, which has led to the repeated compression of the creation cycle of the book, from half a year to three months to one month. The creation of such a hasty story is naturally routine, and the playability is not strong.
Moreover, with the development of the script industry so far, the selection of stores at many exhibitions is not only affected by the content, but also by the circle, the relationship between exhibitors and marketing. Yinpai said that as a distributor, it has seen some top players who are very good at marketing at the exhibition. "If the distributor has a good relationship with the exhibition organizer, it can get the c-position exposure of the exhibition. The store should also have a good relationship with the distributor and have strong business ability to compete for the exclusive and City limited editions."
Script type sales scope script sales price creation cycle box sales to offline stores, unlimited quantity, 300 ~ 600 yuan, about 30 days, city limit, only authorized 3~5 stores in the city, 1000 ~ 3000 yuan, about 90 days, exclusive authorization, only authorized one store in one city, more than 3000 yuan, about 180 days comparison of three sales methods of script killing**
On the one hand, the exhibition provides content supply for the whole industry. Without the content threshold, it will undoubtedly accelerate the low-quality books to occupy the content market, which not only makes it more difficult for stores to select books, but also increases the content cost; On the other hand, compared with film and television creation, script creation has a great degree of freedom. There are few creative bottlenecks that need to be reviewed and controlled with a strong sense, which naturally makes the ecology of script content difficult.
It is true that the tide washes out the sand is a normal law of market replacement. However, at present, both upstream and downstream players of the ecology have entered the market, but the script killing industry has begun to decline, which means that the content ecology of the script killing has reached the point where it needs to be regulated.
It is worth mentioning that on April 1, 2022, the Ministry of culture and tourism issued the notice of the Ministry of culture and tourism, the Ministry of public security, the Ministry of housing and urban rural development, the Ministry of emergency management, and the State Administration of market supervision on regulating script entertainment business activities (draft for comments). The notice is the first national standard for the management of script killing and secret room escape, indicating that the country has begun to include script killing as an emerging industry.
Of course, the impact of the exhibition on the ecology of script killing content has always been apparent, and the piracy governance, which has a more far-reaching impact on the whole industry, is the "focus" that must be heavily medicated at present.
The reason why script piracy is so rampant is that there is no obvious difference in experience between pirated and genuine scripts.
On the one hand, as an addictive game, the script has higher and higher requirements for DM, deduction and even lighting, music and decoration. Behind it is the pursuit of atmosphere and immersion. However, players simply don't know whether the store is infringing. Even if they file a lawsuit, most of the books in the market are not regular publications (script killers will frequently change the books according to the needs of the store). The corresponding laws and regulations have not kept up with them, so it is difficult to provide evidence for rights protection.
On the other hand, the industry has been in a state of "liking the new and hating the old" for a long time. Stores must keep buying scripts to attract new players. Some offline stores take the initiative to send money to pirates' pockets in order to reduce the repeat purchase cost of regular customers. QQ group and free fish are still full of script sales information at very low prices, including famous scripts such as scabbard, ancient wood chant, and the 22nd school regulation.
Even, according to he Beichen, last year, there was a reverse storm in Changchun. "A script was brilliant in decoration. It invited the best local DM. There were fountains in the store, which grabbed a lot of customers by virtue of the atmosphere of the environment, making it difficult for local stores to compete with it. However, they bought stolen versions and used PVC and tin foil for printing. The texture was better than the original version. Then they forcibly explained, 'we can only develop our own products without authorization'."
In this regard, wangmengchi believes that the best solution is to be online and digital like film and television. However, after decades of exploration and underlying construction, film and television have entered online digitalization. As a new thing, script killing is still immature, so it still maintains the distribution method of paper box as the carrier.
"The vast majority of studios do not have the capital to establish digital copyright. For example, they give content online to offline stores, which can not be solved by intermediate copyright protection and revenue monitoring. In this case, traditional boxed packaging is the mainstream, at least ensuring upstream revenue."
In other words, as an industrial chain composed of creators, publishers, platforms, physical stores and consumers, script killing has not yet formed a benign feedback between upstream and downstream, and even the underlying system (systems, regulations, industry conventions, etc.) and benefit distribution are still in the exploration stage.
However, wangmengchi believes that with the improvement of practitioners' awareness of copyright and the increase of piracy risk, industry consensus and systems will be slowly established. "It is said that there is a high-level meeting of meituan to start a business. The project is to make scripts to kill the bottom box office billing system and platform. The reasoning masters are also pushing similar projects. Only when this infrastructure is established can transparent revenue monitoring be realized and a distribution method that is more in line with the logic of the market appear."
Note: at the request of the interviewer, Zhang Zhen and Li Qiang are pseudonyms.
Author / Huang Qingchun