Short Essay 1_Wang Ziling(1155222157)

 Blue Ocean Strategy of Love and Deep Ocean(恋与深空）

With the gradual awakening of women's consciousness in recent times, more and more excellent female-oriented games have come into the public's view in the game market. Otome games are one of the most popular and popular female-oriented games. Otome game refers to the general term for romance video games with female protagonists (players). Players usually get a lot of emotional value from games and build deep emotional links with the male protagonists in the games. Chinese Otome game market develops rapidly, and the most developed of them, ‘Love and Maker’, ‘Light and Night Love’, ‘Time and Space Painted Traveller’ and ‘Undecided Event Book’ are known as the four major national Otome games, which can be used as a benchmark for Otome games.

As more and more well-made Otome games enter the market, each game company becomes less and less competitive in this market. At this time, PaperGames company stood out from the crowd of competitors with its new Otome game ‘Love and Deep Space’. This is mainly due to the blue ocean strategy.

 

I created a comparison chart between other Otome games and Love and Deep Space based on five characteristics. As the first Chinese Otome game with 3D modelling, Love and Deep Space breaks the barrier of 2D technology that was widely used. However, the technical maturity of Deep Space and Love is much lower than that of other games which are already very sophisticated in 2D technology. But otherwise, the 3D modeling of protagonists and the construction of the scene make the player's sense of immersion significantly improved. Moreover, each player can customize their own modeling images and voices when creating account, allowing each player's virtual character to more closely resemble themselves, thus enhancing the game experience and the realism of interacting with the male protagonists. In addition, while other Otome games usually focus on art and plot, with gameplay favouring card turn-based numerical gameplay, Love and Deep Space is paired with more hardcore action gameplay, which enhances the playability for the players when passing the game.

Next I will discuss the ERRC to further analyze the blue ocean strategy of Love and Deep Space. The competitive factors that should be eliminated from the Otome game market are technical barriers (basically based on Live2D technology) and repetitive over-the-top mechanics. The factors that should be raised are the personalization features for the master players themselves, such as customized appearance and voice lines. On the contrary, what should be reduced is shaping irrelevant branches that may affect player’s overall game experience. Instead, more forms of Otome games should be created to integrate with the new technologies of the times (e.g. VR's AR), one successful example of this is Love and Deep Space. As far as I know, Love and Deep Space announced soon after its release that it would develop a version that could be experienced through VR gaming glasses, which gives it more potential for development afterwards than other Otome games that still rely on Live2D technology.