Image source @ vision china
Wen | Gulfstream Economic Review
In the middle of the year, all kinds of high-standard exhibitions in China are heating up.
On June 18th, the 29th Beijing International Book Fair (hereinafter referred to as the "Expo") ended at the Beijing National Convention Center.
This Expo will open an online publishing exhibition area for the first time.Let online games and online literature board the stage of international cultural exchange for the first time.
This was rare in the past.
It is reported that the exhibition also set up an "online publishing forum" for the first time. At the forum, many leaders in Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China made keynote speeches and praised the positive value of various games.
Eight global leading game and digital publishing companies, including Tencent, Sony, Netease, Ubisoft, Sanqi Entertainment, Fist Game, Reading and Supercell, were invited to attend to show related technologies, innovative practices and experience interaction.
Game manufacturers were collectively invited to participate in the exhibition and appeared in the first online publishing development forum, which was praised by the leaders of Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China.
This indicates that online publishing, represented by online literature and games, has received official attention and attention.Games, as an important part of cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries, have been given a positive attitude by the government.
Coincidentally, on June 7th, the 19th ICIF, Sanqi Entertainment, Netease and other game companies were also actively demonstrating their unique advantages of "digital technology helps cultural communication".
Game companies frequently appear in various high-standard exhibitions, with the following background:
This year, the game industry ushered in multiple positive factors and was placed in an important position as an "economic driving factor".
The game industry is on the rise:Normalization of edition number, normalization of public opinion and clarification of property rights.
Looking back on the first six months of this year, the game industry continued to usher in good news.
First of all, the version number is normalized.
Since 2023, the General Administration of Press and Publication has issued 441 domestic game editions.
The overall number of domestic version numbers has also gradually stabilized, and the number of version numbers issued in the last five months has been around 90. With the normalization of the version number, the uncertainty of the policy side of the new online tour is reduced, and the certainty of the supply side is warmer.
After that, the trend of public opinion was "positive".
On November 16th last year, People’s Daily published "Digging the value of the video game industry is now or never". On February 16th this year, WeChat official account, the "Xinhua Daily Telegraph" sponsored by Xinhua News Agency, published "Don’t ignore the scientific and technological value of the game industry". Xinhua News Agency and People’s Daily Online, two major central media, both made positive voices to the game industry from the perspective of science and technology.
Today, this positive trend continues to go deep into the deeper level of law and property rights.
Recently, some cases of head SLG game "playing infringement" and "skin-changing infringement" in the game industry have been exposed. These cases mean: the game industry, the clarity of intellectual property rights.
Normalization of version number, positive public opinion, clear property rights, and the recent wave of AI in the whole game industry.
Obviously, the game industry, being promoted by various favorable factors, is becoming one of the new engines of the domestic economy, and may even be one of the main engines.
According to the statistics of game gyro, Q1 of 40 A-share game companies has accumulated revenue of over 24.7 billion yuan and accumulated profit of 3.661 billion yuan. Among them, about 73% companies achieved profitability.
The revenues of five companies, Sanqi Entertainment, century huatong, Perfect World, Wolong Real Estate and Kunlun Wanwei, account for half of the total revenues of A-share game companies. Sanqi Entertainment, which has the highest revenue and net profit, has a Q1 revenue of 3.764 billion yuan and a net profit of 774 million yuan.
New industrial impetus to help the economy,
Why a game?
If we go back a little bit, just last year, the whole game industry was still struggling.
According to the China Game Industry Report, the actual sales revenue of the game market in China in 2022 was 265.884 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 30.629 billion yuan or 10.33%.
Among them, the actual sales revenue of self-developed games in the domestic market was 222.377 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 13.07%; The actual sales revenue of self-developed games in overseas markets was $17.346 billion, down 3.70% year-on-year.
At the same time, the game industry continues to cause controversy-doubts about the game industry will emerge every once in a while.
This year, the whole industry has made a 180-degree turn. Last year’s industry was gloomy, as if it were a lifetime ago.
Behind the normalization of edition number, the positive public opinion and the clarification of property rights is the support of "upper will" In the final analysis, it is still three points:
1, the game relationship Internet industry employment situation
The development of the game industry is related to the employment of young people. The industries closely related to the game industry, such as short video, live broadcast, sports events, game mobile phones, and game public cloud, are also important areas for young people’s employment.
Recruitment platform Hunting Big Data Research Institute’s data on recruitment specials in 25 cities shows that in March this year,Talents in IT/ Internet/game industries in Guangzhou and Shenzhen are the most active in the recruitment markets of the two cities.
Boosting the game industry will directly benefit upstream and downstream enterprises, especially the head and shoulder Internet companies that absorb employment.
For example, Android mobile phone camp, China, rice, O, V and other manufacturers, a large part of Internet revenue comes from game sales and intermodal transportation.
Taking the advertising industry, the downstream of the game industry, as an example, AppGrowing data shows that during Q1, 2023, TOP1, a hot investment industry for buying advertisements, ranked second and third (advertising accounted for 18.54%), cultural entertainment (advertising accounted for 14.01%) and social marriage (advertising accounted for 11.02%). Behind the advertising industry are advertising platforms such as Byte, Tencent, bilibili and Aauto Quicker.
It can be seen that the rise and fall of the game industry is related to the money bag of the Internet industry in China, and it is also related to the employment situation of young people.
2. Games help technological innovation.
On February 16th, WeChat official account, the "Xinhua Daily Telegraph" sponsored by Xinhua News Agency, published "Don’t Ignore the Scientific and Technological Value of the Game Industry".The article said: the game industry has been inseparable from cutting-edge technology since its birth.
From the initial invention to show and verify the performance of computers, to the experimental field of "black technology", and then to the rapid integration into the development of the real economy, games and technological innovation have always inspired each other and developed together.
With the continuous development of game technology, the application of related technologies has already broken through the game industry itself, and has also played a role in many fields such as AI and VR.
At present, the most representative direction of technological innovation is AI.Recently, with the wave of AI, the attention of game stocks continues to heat up, which also shows that the application and landing of AI in the game industry has attracted much attention.
Up to now, game manufacturers such as Tencent, Netease, Mihayou, Perfect World, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, Kunlun Wanwei, China Mobile Games, Morning Light, Lilith, Kaiying Network, Giants, Youzu, Heartbeat and Palm Fun have tried AIGC one after another.
For example, based on the decision-making intelligence Al Juewu, Tencent has reduced the numerical balance deviation of the glory of the king from 1.05% to 0.68%.
The intelligent NPC system is applied in Netease’s "Going Against the Water". Intelligent NPC can freely generate dialogues with players, and give their own logical behavior feedback based on the contents of the dialogues.
Perfect World’s end-game "Zhu Xian World" uses AI calculus technology to realize global weather control and detailed changes.
What is the specific effect of technological innovation (especially AI technology) on the game industry?Take Sanqi Entertainment as an example. The company has an intelligent delivery platform "Quantum" and an intelligent operation analysis platform "Tianji".
The "Quantum" system has been connected to more than 20 mainstream media platforms and channels in the world, and at the same time, it supports more than 300 games to be released online. More than 200,000 product launch plans have been created, and the time spent on online advertising of game products has been shortened from 6 hours to 30 minutes, and the efficiency has been improved by more than 10 times. In some areas, the proportion of intelligent delivery has exceeded 60%.
Besides the game itself,The "spillover effect" of games to help technological innovation should be paid more attention, especially in the real economy.
For example, in the field of building construction, game engines are widely used in architectural design, construction management, smart cities, ancient building restoration and so on.
3. Games help to revive traditional culture.
In the process of spreading traditional culture, games have a subtle influence and a far-reaching influence, and can show the charm of China traditional culture in the process of globalization.
At the Expo, we can see an ancient simulated business game inspired by The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival-"Call Me Big Boss" appear in a prominent position in the exhibition hall.
The artistic style of the game is unique, the background and architecture are depicted in ink painting style, and the characters are painted in a more modern style, with profound cultural heritage and unique oriental aesthetics.
In the "Digitization of Traditional Instrumental Music" applet experience area of tencent games Exhibition Area, participants can choose their favorite songs or play freely, or touch the screen with the music score to complete the exclusive chime movement.
The chime is based on the high-precision digital sampling and restoration of the 1:1 copy of Zeng Houyi’s chime.
Go to sea in groups:The game industry is mature "cluster effect+spillover effect".
As we all know, the game industry, if you don’t go out to sea, you will be out.
In recent years, a major trend of the game industry going out to sea is from "single-handedly fighting" to "group cooperation".
Typically, Tencent has deployed a large number of game companies around the world through capital operation and strong alliance on the other hand, and frequently ran out of explosions.
Behind the successful launch of Nikke in Japan and South Korea, its developer Shift Up and Tencent hold 20% of the shares, which is the case of Tencent’s capital operation; The success of "Fantasy Tower" going to sea is a case of perfect R&D+Tencent’s strong combination model.
Another game manufacturer that has made great achievements in the sea is the mutual entertainment of Sanqi. Sanqi’s mutual entertainment business went to sea very early, but compared with China, it was only in the past two or three years that overseas made a breakthrough.
According to the financial report, in 2022, Sanqi Entertainment achieved overseas revenue of 5.994 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 40% of the total revenue. In the statistics of a number of third-party organizations, Sanqi Entertainment seems to have secured the top three in the revenue list of China’s game-going enterprises.
Different from Tencent’s capital operation and strong alliance, small and medium-sized game manufacturers who cooperate with Sanqi Entertainment often have no capital exchanges.
In recent years, the overseas "explosive" games of Sanqi Entertainment mostly distribute the products of small and medium-sized manufacturers for companies. Among them, the developer of "Puzzles & Survival" is Easy Entertainment Network; The developer of "Song of the City on the Cloud" is Shiyue Network; The developer of "Call Me Big Boss" is a fun game.
According to official website, an entertainment network, as of May, 2023, the highest monthly flow of Puzzles & Survival exceeded 350 million, with a cumulative flow of 7.8 billion.
From the performance of the above products, we can find that the success rate of commercialization of Sanqi mutual entertainment products has been greatly improved through in-depth cooperation and communication with small and medium-sized R&D parties in the early stage to select excellent games and jointly decide the direction of play and development strategy.
According to the relevant person in charge of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, in the early stage of this sea game project, the overseas operation team of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment will enter the R&D team and give specific suggestions.
During the operation, it will follow up the user feedback in time, adopt the user’s opinions in the game iteration, and feed back the R&D optimization.
This mode of relying on the understanding of overseas markets at the distribution and operation level and feeding back to game research and development and decision-making has become one of the core competitiveness of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment.
This is why Sanqi Entertainment and small and medium-sized game manufacturers are willing to achieve mutual success in overseas markets and join hands with john young.
In this paper, Gulfstream Economic Review observed that:The "Online Publishing Forum" was set up for the first time at the Expo, and eight top-level game companies participated.
It is of great significance for the Expo to open an online publishing exhibition area for the first time, so that online games and online literature can be on the stage of international cultural exchange for the first time.
Behind this is: the game industry is booming, the version number is normalized, the public opinion is positive, and the property rights are clear-the game industry is being promoted by various favorable factors and is becoming one of the new engines of the domestic economy.
The core of the game’s contribution to the economy lies in: the game is related to the employment situation of the Internet industry, and at the same time, the game contributes to technological innovation and the revival of traditional culture.
In terms of games going out to sea, we find that the game industry has moved from "single-handedness" to "group cooperation", which is the embodiment of "cluster effect+spillover effect" after the game industry matures.
Of course, there are still some problems in the whole game industry that need to be solved urgently.
For example, the impact of AI technology on the entire game industry will inevitably have advantages and disadvantages, among which the more prominent disadvantages include: replacing some low-end repeatable jobs and affecting employment; As well as the use of AIGC hype concept by individual listed companies, it has attracted regulatory attention.
All the above progress and problems are the result of the common development of the internal and external environment of the industry. Problems in development still need to be solved by development.
There is not a winter that is insurmountable, and there is not a spring that will not come.
