Less than half a year from the last round of financing, the murder mystery game platform “LARP Master” recently received their series A strategic funding of tens of millions of yuan from NetEase Group. This round of financing will be used for script R&D, script purchase, marketing, investment team recruitment, online platform iteration and so forth.
At the same time, NetEase Group will use its games, media and other resources to comprehensively empower “LARP Master”. It aims to build a closed loop of the industrial chain and explore the integration of different content formats.
Murder mystery game (also known as script murder) is a role-playing murder mystery activity, which has strong social attributes and is favored by young generations in China. According to published statistics, among the popular offline entertainment favored by Chinese consumers in the first half of 2021, script murder ranked third with 36.1 %, followed by movies with 38.3 % and fitness with 36.4 %.
Founded at the end of 2017 through WeChat official account, “LARP Master” has gradually built a stable business model, from online distribution of scripts without moderators to offline organization, and has obtained early users through their promotion.
In February 2020, the first “LARP Master” retail store landed in Beijing, and in April, the “LARP Master” mini-program was launched on WeChat. As of 2021, there are 13 million+ online users of “LARP Master”, 100k daily active users, and the highest daily active users in a single day can reach 500k.
At present, there are more than 10k enterprises related to “script murder” in China. With more capital and players joining, this industry has also been frequently negative in recent months due to violence, blood and other issues. In order to further standardize the creation of ” script murder”, the Shanghai government has issued relevant regulations, requiring operators to strictly review the content, scenes setting, costumes and props provided by the murder mystery game providers.
