"Legend 4" is popular in the cryptocurrency circle, but died in Korea!
On November 24, 2022, South Korea's DAXA (Digital Asset Exchange Joint Consultative Body) announced that it would no longer support transactions of Wemade's digital currency WEMIX. Several large South Korean digital currency exchanges including Bithumb and Upbit announced that they would delist WEMIX coins on December 8.
In the following week, the price of WEMIX coin dropped from $1.7 to $0.3, with the highest daily drop exceeding 80%. The stock prices of its affiliated companies Wemade, WemadeMax and WemadePlay all dropped by more than 29% in a single day.
At the same time, similar to the story of Axie and other blockchain games, "MIR4" ("Legend 4"), which became popular by making money through mining, is also being quickly abandoned by users because of the collapse of WEMIX coins. According to third-party data, as of December 5, the maximum number of concurrent online users of the international mobile version of "MIR4" decreased by about 78% compared with the same period in 2021, and the number of online users on Steam decreased by about 66% year-on-year.
Just like that, between the dismal user data and bad reviews, this "latest orthodox sequel" dealt another blow to the already aging "Legend" IP.
Why is "Legend 4" so popular?
In fact, before the collapse, WEMIX and “Legend 4” were both star projects in the Korean digital currency and blockchain game markets.
The price of WEMIX coin was often above US$5 in the first half of 2022, and once exceeded US$20 in November 2021. The project itself also received US$46 million in investment from Microsoft, Shinhan Asset Management and others.
According to Korean online information and DAXA announcements, there are three main conditions that led to this crash:
First, the WEMIX project itself does not mine or issue coins directly on the public chain, but uses tokens in game products such as "Black Iron" to convert to DRACO coins, and then converts to WEMIX coins through the WEMIX wallet. During this period, the total amount, output speed, and value of Black Iron and DRACO coins are not completely transparent and controllable. In addition, the WEMIX wallet requests too much information from users, and everything seems extremely risky.
Second, Wemade was exposed to have multiple "fraud suspicions" during the same period. The less trust there is, the greater the risk, and the lower the price of WEMIX will be.
In January 2022, multiple Korean media reported that Wemade secretly sold approximately 50 million WEMIX coins, which caused panic among retail investors. The price of WEMIX coins fell from 7,000 won to around 4,000 won that week. Korean media reported that "at least 10,000 investors' assets were damaged."
In February, Wemade's newly released 2021 financial report was questioned for fraud. Although the official refuted it, it eventually changed its revenue from 560.7 billion won to 337.3 billion won and its operating profit from 325.8 billion won to 100.9 billion won. The trust relationship in the secondary market continues to break down.
By the middle of the year, some investors began to point out that Wemade had clearly violated the promises in the WEMIX White Paper during the actual sales process of WEMIX. For example, it promised in the white paper that "1 billion WEMIX coins will be issued, 74% of which will be used to support the long-term growth of the virtual asset ecosystem." But in fact, the hundreds of billions of won earned by WEMIX coins in the early stage were used to acquire another Korean game developer, Sundaytoz.
According to public information, Sundaytoz was founded in 2009 and owns a number of classic casual game products such as "anypang". After being acquired by Wemade, the company was renamed Wemade Play at the end of 2021. Currently, no products are used for WEMIX or related blockchain projects.
Finally, in October, before the explosion, many media outlets such as forkast began to report that WEMIX had secretly increased its issuance. According to market data, in addition to the 245 million tokens that WEMIX informed Upbit, there were at least 7.2 million tokens circulating in the market. In other words, it secretly increased its issuance by nearly 30%. In the cryptocurrency industry, where total transparency is an absolute prerequisite, this is a huge mistake.
So starting from October, Upbit and other exchanges began to issue risk warnings for WEMIX and required Youmi to submit accurate issuance data. After the warnings were ineffective, the five major exchanges decided to delist WEMIX on December 8, and the crash came.
Third, after the collapse of LUNA and FIX, the South Korean government's attitude towards blockchain and digital currency projects has changed, and it has maintained an increasingly stringent regulatory trend throughout 2022. At the same time, the gameplay of blockchain games and NFT+ games is actually illegal in South Korea. Its "Game Industry Revitalization Act" stipulates that "games shall not be used to carry out gambling or encourage them to carry out other speculative behaviors or allow them to carry out such behaviors." The "Game Industry Act" explicitly prohibits "currency exchange or profit from repurchase of tangible and intangible results obtained through games."
In fact, the once popular "Legend 4" was also released in South Korea as a "green version" without coins, and the mining gameplay was mainly carried out on the international server.
Back to the "Legend 4" game itself, why does the game crash when WEMIX crashes?
The reason is not complicated. After leaving mining and online earning, as a game launched in 2021, "Legend 4" has almost no competitiveness in the game market.
From the perspective of game content, Joymade made four major changes to "Legend 4".
1. The picture was changed from 2.5D to 3D, and a face-pinching system was added;
2. The core experience of the game has changed from the original no hard goals, users explore and upgrade on their own to a large number of stage tasks and plot goals;
3. The operation is changed from manual operation and exploration to a large number of automatic attacks and path finding;
4. The equipment system is centered on materials and is hatched by treasure chests dropped by BOSS, which greatly reduces the rarity of high-level equipment.
For fans of old IP, this game is too "new".
Due to the disappearance of many classic experiences and the addition of online earning through mining, the social system originally used to serve the game has been almost completely taken over by studios and middlemen. They can neither play nor chat. All they can do is quit the game or give a bad review to vent their anger.
For the new generation of players, this game is too old.
On the one hand, the new batch of players do not recognize this IP. Since 2003, Wemade has slowed down the operation of "MIR2" in the Korean server and has instead used "copyright operation" as its main source of income. The "MIR" series was kicked out of the top market of Korean online games long before the mobile game era. At the same time, because of the constant disputes over the "Legend" IP in the next decade or so, hundreds of companies and hundreds of products were not allowed to develop or operate. "Legend" also missed many opportunities in the large market dominated by China and failed to continue its IP influence in the mobile game era.
On the other hand, judging from the Chinese market, which represents the highest level of MMORPG at present, a competitive MMORPG must have at least four elements: strong expressiveness, open world, weak goal guidance but strong experience, and small groups or interest-based social interaction. As for related attempts, there was "Against the Water" in 2018 and "Fantasy Westward Journey 3D" in 2019.
Even compared with these two products that were launched several years ago and now seem to have a bad ending, "Legend 4" does not have any advantages. According to a producer of a leading MMORPG brand, the design concept and level of "Legend 4" with 3D + a large number of idle experience was more common in China around 2016, and most of those products were approved around 2014.
"Changing "Legend" into a routine fairy-tale product in 2021 can be said to be removing its essence and taking in the dregs."
Therefore, loss has become inevitable, and the consumption of the "Legend" IP has become inevitable.
The future of the Legend IP is still in China
"Legend 4" failed overseas, but the story of the "Legend" IP is not over yet.
According to Shanda Games and a leading hardware channel practitioner, as of December 2022, the core user scale, online time and payment status of "Legend"-type products in the MMORPG market are still in a relatively stable state. During 2020 and 2021, the monthly revenue of some products in the domestic and Southeast Asian markets has increased by more than 10% many times.
Many practitioners believe that the failure of "Legend 4" in the cryptocurrency circle and South Korea will indeed have a certain impact on the development of the "Legend" IP, but it is not fatal. Mao Lin (pseudonym), a practitioner in Kaiying Network who has participated in the development and operation of many legendary products such as "Legend of the King", believes that there are four main reasons why legendary games and "Legend" IP have failed to maximize their value in the mobile game era:
1. Continuous copyright disputes have resulted in IP being unable to launch new products in a timely and large number of products to maintain user retention;
2. The content supply cannot keep up, resulting in the company's inability to obtain sufficient user data to guide content updates in a few years;
3. IP users do have a certain gap. Currently, they are mainly male users aged 30-45. The number and game time are small, and their acceptance of mobile games is not high;
4. The relatively old-fashioned art style and the mechanism that emphasizes numerical competition of legendary games are difficult to attract the so-called "Generation Z" users, and may even cause them to dislike them.
Another MMORPG product producer of a listed company believes that legendary games do have problems, but they also have advantages in some aspects.
First, the domestic “Legend” IP dispute is coming to an end. According to announcements from Century Huatong and Kaiying, Joymade and its subsidiary Legend IP Co., Ltd. have lost many lawsuits in China.
Secondly, rivals that used to be entangled in copyright disputes, such as Kaiying, Shengqu, Tanwan, and Coconut, have also established joint ventures in the past two years to focus on cooperation. Most of the companies and products related to "Legend" are also supported by local governments and policies. The National Legend Industrial Park has opened in Yichun, Jiangxi in 2019. The unity of multiple companies and government support are very valuable in the current gaming industry.
Third, in terms of content, the core experience of ancient legendary games has always included "free exploration", "weak goals", and "strong and weak competition". These elements are in line with the general direction of current MMORPG development.
If the R&D team is able to make changes in art that are close to current aesthetic trends, and at the same time try new content updates and payment methods, with Legend's 20 years of accumulation in plot, game systems, and gameplay values, it is entirely possible to create a product with gameplay that is above the passing line and has a relatively mature derivative culture.
More importantly, since Shanda obtained the agency rights for "MIR2", the largest and highest-quality users of "Legend" games are concentrated in China. When an IP with a long history is held by the world's best people in making online and mobile games, there are always opportunities.
Chen Tianqiao, who created the "Legend" IP, once said in an interview in 2003 that "raising is worse than giving birth". It was Shanda that turned a Korean online game called "Mir 2" into "Legend". And Wemade also admitted in an interview that Shanda knows more about the current "Legend" than Wemade. Perhaps, today's version has become: when Wemade uses "Legend", a well-known IP in China, to harvest global users, only Chinese companies are still thinking about how to write the next legend of the "Legend" IP.
