This 3D virtual social app from China has shined in the Southeast Asian market, successfully attracting a large number of young users with personalized social gameplay such as 3D avatars, home construction, pet breeding, and deep localization strategies, and climbed to 15th place in the Indonesian social list, demonstrating the strong competitiveness of Chinese social products going overseas.
On the overseas social track, Southeast Asia is becoming a new incubator for explosive models.
There are many young users, high Internet penetration, and strong acceptance of new thingsIndonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and other markets are attracting more and more Chinese teams to lay out social products. Many overseas teams try to create a more immersive and interactive social experience with the help of local cultural integration and differentiated gameplay. Recently, a 3D virtual social app from China has gradually climbed the rankings, reaching the highest place in the Indonesian social list.
According to Diandian data, Mass will be launched in 2023 and its developer is Shanghai Xuanji Network Technology Co., Ltd. Despite the early launch of Mass, early growth mainly came from Thailand, the Philippines and other regions, and it was not until August 2024 that Indonesia ushered in the first significant growth peak. As of June 7 this year, Mass’s downloads in Indonesia have reached a new peak, with the highest daily downloads exceeding 13,000.
Since the launch of Mass, the number of downloads in Indonesia, source: Diandian Data
How does it play? What do you rely on to win young users? How to localize and cut into the local cultural market? We dismantled its product mechanism and market strategy to explore the logic behind this “virtual social going overseas”.
What social scenes can I create? Meet personalized virtual socialization
The first step for users to enter Mass is to create their own avatar.
B-end product manager’s ability model and learning improvement
The first challenge faced by B-end product managers is how to correctly analyze and diagnose business problems. This is also the most difficult part, product design knowledge is basically not helpful for this part of the work, if you want to do a good job in business analysis and diagnosis, you must have a solid …
View details >
There are a variety of templates for users to choose from, such as hairstyles, hair colors, and face pinching. Among them, for the choice of pinching faces, Mass has also opened five different styles of face pinching types: “comic” face, baby face, popular face, classic face, and special face, fully considering the user group with different aesthetic styles, reflecting the inclusiveness of multiple aesthetic systems and cultures.
Next, users can continue to dress up their avatars, and it is worth noting that this virtual dress-up social gameplay is similar to the early QQ show in China. In addition to the basic clothing decorations, there are also back accessories such as angel wings and demon wings popular in Generation Z, as well as tail accessories such as animal tails and demon tails, and the back decoration design is similar to the wing decorations of the ancient QQ show, which fully reflects Mass’s echo of young users and dimensional culture.
Mass character back decoration wings VS ancient QQ show network map
After completing the creation of the personal image, users can participate in the construction of Mass’s home and pet development gameplay. The home supports personalized decoration and layout, and pets can be fed, interacted with, and other operations, enriching the virtual life of users in the platform.
In the exploration of 3D virtual social gameplay, Mass has introduced a special “player-made” content ecosystem. Mass has set up a special UGC creation area to support users to independently design clothing and space scenes based on official templates, and put these contents on the official mall for other users to purchase.
Mass’s creator promotional image
Most of the goods in the mall need to be purchased with virtual currency, and ordinary clothing can usually be unlocked with “purple diamonds”, while more exquisite high-end costumes or UGC works require rarer “colored diamonds” to obtain. In-depth experience of the product, we found that Mass’s virtual economy system consists of four currencies: purple diamonds, colored diamonds, coins and gold coins.
Among them, purple diamonds and coins are the two most widely circulated in daily circulation, and users can obtain them by watching advertisements, completing tasks, signing in daily, inviting friends, etc.; Coins can only be obtained through creative content (UGC) or by accepting gifts from other users. Each user can exchange gold coins for colored diamonds once a month; In addition, colored diamonds can only be obtained through recharge and are the core paid currency in the entire virtual economic system.
In terms of scene construction, Mass has created a variety of life-oriented virtual social spaces including campsites, cafes, playgrounds, concerts, and shopping malls based on the concept of “immersive reality mapping”, with an overall style that is modern and realistic. Official scenes, user-created scenes, and purchasable UGC scenes together form one of the core parts of the Mass social experience.
Some of the scenarios launched by Mass
Based on these scenarios, each user can create a room for free once a day, and can choose the room type according to personal preferences, such as music, entertainment, sports, chat, etc., and each category is subdivided into multiple interest tags. The combination of multi-dimensional tags and rich scenes matches users with social spaces that are more in line with their own interests, which strengthens Mass’s core capabilities in “personalized social scene construction” and is also conducive to establishing emotional bonds between similar users.
High Interaction + High Entertainment: The “Icebreaker” in the Room
Although Mass provides a high degree of freedom in choosing the type and label of the house, it only allows users to create rooms for free once a day, and is more inclined to encourage users to join other people’s rooms to participate in interaction.
Users enter the room with an avatar and can interact with other users in real time, such as adding friends, interacting with each other, text chat, and voice communication. However, what follows is that although the avatar improves social interactivity and does not have entertainment mechanisms and other content to break the ice for users’ social interactions, it is still difficult to establish stable social connections between users in a short period of time.
In order to help users quickly break the ice, Mass has made many designs in the room gameplay – not only providing type tags and interactive functions, but also improving the frequency of interaction and social stickiness between users through mini-games, chat boxes and other mechanisms.
The game room channel launched by Mass allows users to socialize through games and promote interaction between users. For example, the “Shining Stars” game room integrates the dress-up PK mini-game into the social scene. Players can click on the costume pictures on the display board to change clothes in the room, and start the catwalk PK after the countdown ends, and finally the ranking is determined by the votes of the users present. This interactive method of “high participation + high entertainment” is similar to the early QQ show PK in China, which shows that there is still a market for QQ show gameplay overseas to a certain extent.
In addition, Mass’s game room also involves a variety of gameplay such as jumping, parkour, karaoke, etc., and players are highly involved in various scenes with 3D avatars. In the karaoke room, the scene largely restores the pattern of the karaoke karaoke hall, and users can not only immerse themselves in it with avatars, but also participate in singing, chatting and interaction with real voices, integrating karaoke, scenes, and interactions, and enhancing the immersion of users’ social + entertainment.
Karaoke room scene
Under the social system with avatars as the core, users often pay attention to dressing up and beautifying in order to better display their social image. In addition to appearing in various scenarios, users’ avatars also run through social homepages and dynamic content, becoming an important way of personal expression.
In Mass, the user homepage supports displaying personalized images, hobby tags, gift receipt records and binding relationships, and can publish graphic or video content to continuously expand social expression around avatars. The platform also has a multi-dimensional ranking and guild ranking system, covering indicators such as wealth value, gift value, intimacy, number of fans, UGC content, and activity, to stimulate users’ sense of participation and desire to compete, and further enhance the activity of the platform.
Bring in localized details to take advantage of local content
According to Diandian data, Mass had 360,000 downloads worldwide in May, of which the Philippines and Indonesia contributed 140,000 and 100,000 downloads respectively, accounting for 75.8% of its global total, becoming the two core markets at present. The reason why Mass can impress Southeast Asian users such as the Philippines and Indonesia is not only the gameplay of 3D virtual social networking, but also its in-depth preparation at the localization level.
Currently, Mass is only available in eight countries, including Indonesia and Saudi Arabia – two Muslim-majority countries. Mass was clearly aimed at the local cultural market at the beginning of its launch, and the word “Mass” not only means “mass” and “group”, but also represents “Mass” in a religious context. Product naming itself implies cultural strategic considerations to enhance local user identity and emotional connection.
In addition, considering the prevalent tattoo culture in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, Mass has also localized the functional experience, such as opening up the “tattoo” function for avatars and providing tattoo patterns with multiple elements such as animals, flowers, and gothic style. Users can freely drag and drop the pattern to various parts of the virtual body to achieve “painless tattoos” and meet the aesthetic needs and personalized needs of users.
In the many scenes created by Mass, tropical elements such as waves, beaches, and coconut groves are frequently presented. Through the in-depth restoration of the geographical and cultural characteristics of Southeast Asia, Mass is close to the daily experience of local users in terms of visuals and atmosphere, enhancing their cultural identity and sense of belonging to the platform.
One of the Mass scenarios
In terms of advertising, Mass is currently mainly marketing in the Philippines and Indonesia. Based on product features such as custom 3D images, realistic scenes, and virtual social networking, the recording of “catching horses” plots attracts users.
Source: Guangda
It is worth noting that the 3D virtual social system used by Mass, as well as the gameplay such as voice rooms and game rooms, are not “new species” in the industry. However, in Southeast Asia, a social market that is still in its growth stage, Mass still finds a breakthrough in the fierce competition with its accurate understanding of user psychology and deep localization adaptation.
epilogue
At present, Southeast Asia is still an important incremental market for social overseas expansion, and in this blue ocean, there is no shortage of Chinese teams. Even in the face of the continuous emergence of new features and new products, old products still have the possibility of “turning around”. By strengthening personalized customization, improving immersive experience, and digging deep into local cultural elements, there is still a chance to run out of the “breakout” and add key puzzles to China’s social overseas territory.
