According to the research from Newzoo, there would have 2.3 billion gamers in the world, contributing 137.9 billion dollars on gaming industry in 2018, which is a 13.3% increase by comparing to the figure in 2017. Moreover, this figure is expected to keep increasing in the coming several years and reach 180.1 billion dollars in 2021.
The uprising market, of course, brings opportunities to game companies; but on the other hand, with the rapid increase in number of gaming companies, the opportunities also bring threats to them due to the strong competition.
So, how to stand head and shoulders above the other rivals has become an important issue among the industry. And one of the most popular and effective solutions, is to collaborate with animations.
There are a lot of collaborations between games and animation, I would like to introduce three of them, which would be great representatives of these kind of collaborations, including ‘KNIVES OUT X Attack On Titan’, ‘FIGHTING CLIMAX IGNITION’ and ‘Onmyoji’.
‘KNIVES OUT X Attack On Titan’
KNIVES OUT is an online multiplayer battle royale game, requiring players parachute onto an island and survive until the last. To attract players, KNIVES OUT collaborates with Attack On Titan (AOT) and put the character designs into the game. Players would be available to put on costumes with the designs of AOT characters and fight against the titans in the game. The first collaboration was in August, 2018 and gained supports from many players. Due to the success of the project, they carried out the collaboration again last month.
‘FIGHTING CLIMAX IGNITION’
‘FIGHTING CLIMAX IGNITION’ is a role play game by using many famous characters from the publisher KADOKAWA. The game gathered the fans from different animation and created a very broad base of players. Even though it was just in the pre-heat period, there were more than 3 million players joined the beta test. After the official release of the game, it soon got the 1st place in the AppStore ranking.
‘Onmyoji’
‘Onmyoji’ is a game developed by Netease in China by using Japanese style and applying Japanese traditional stories, and most importantly, invited more than 30 famous voice actors and actresses as the voices of the game characters. The game was so successful that they have their own animation and musical stage shows.
The above examples perfectly show that there are more and more game companies seeking for gimmicks to attract target players by collaborating with anime IPs. The good results started from Japan, to China, Korea, Taiwan, and also spreading to many Asian countries. According to the current market and trend, it is foreseeable that in the near future, there would have even more collaboration, or even some new kinds of collaborations, which may create the next boom of the game industry.
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