The landing of e-sports into Asia and the anti-addiction policies for minors has helped the e-sports industry enter a new process of planned development.
Recently, Gamma Data released the "2021 China Game Industry Report" (hereinafter referred to as the report), which reviews and interprets the development status of China's e-sports industry through a number of different sectors such as "industry overview, industry development analysis, user attribute analysis, local industry analysis and industry development trend analysis" of games and e-sports, and predicts several major development trends in the future period of the industry.
What deserves special attention in this report is that the e-sports industry has made breakthroughs at the user level, market size, and the development of the local e-sports industry:
In 2021, the number of e-sports game users in China will reach 489 million
In 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's e-sports game market was 140.181 billion yuan
E-sports has officially become a sports competition project, and standardized management has become the focus of industry development
Major cities are actively building e-sports industry centers
The scale of e-sports users in China has reached 489 million, and e-sports in Asia may become a new growth point
According to the data in the report, in 2021, the scale of e-sports game users in China has reached 489 million, an increase of 0.27% over last year. Compared with previous years, the growth rate has dropped significantly.
Source: Gamma data
This is not the words of Gamma Data, including the "2021 China E-sports Industry Development Report Released by Tencent E-sports and Penguin Think Tank", which intuitively reflects that China's e-sports user growth has entered a flat stage.
So whether the scale of Chinese e-sports users has entered the "stock" period, the report mentioned that although the growth rate of e-sports game user scale will gradually slow down in 2021, it may bring a new round of growth next year in the context of e-sports entering the Asian and League of Legends finals.
Gyro esports more agrees with the view of gamma data, and as esports officially becomes an official competition event of the Asian Games, esports will be more recognized at the social level. Under this opportunity, the user's acceptance of e-sports will increase, breaking the bottleneck of e-sports user growth.
In addition, according to the data released by Weibo and Station B, during this year's League of Legends Global Finals, including user viewing, the popularity of user discussion has increased significantly.
According to the data of Station B, the peak popularity of this year's League of Legends S Game was close to 500 million, while the number of viewers increased by 150% year-on-year, and the number of video contributions related to "League of Legends" exceeded 2.8 billion. Weibo data shows that during the League of Legends S tournament, there were 419 hot searches on the list, and the total number of topics read exceeded 107.7 billion.
It can be seen from the event data that although the user increase is flat, the stickiness and attention of users to e-sports are gradually increasing. Combined with the gradual development of e-sports towards standardized management, e-sports will give a good result in user growth and user retention in the future.
The sales revenue of China's e-sports game market reached 140.181 billion yuan, and the growth rate has slowed down
At the level of e-sports market size, the report shows that in 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's e-sports game market will reach 140.181 billion yuan, an increase of 3.624 billion yuan over 2020, an increase of 2.65% year-on-year, and the growth rate will be about 42% smaller than last year, and the growth rate will also slow down.
The report pointed out that e-sports game sales revenue is the main source of revenue for the e-sports industry's hundreds of billions of revenue, and a large part of the slowdown in growth is due to the decline in the growth rate of e-sports market revenue due to the impact of the overall game market
Specific to the intuitive income of the e-sports industry, because of the continuous impact of the epidemic, offline e-sports events and e-sports activities have been more or less affected, and some have changed to online models and some are directly cancelled. In the revenue mode of e-sports, "brand sponsorship" is still the foundation of the e-sports industry. Although e-sports has an "online" nature, it has formed a test for other revenue methods, whether it is tickets or peripheral goods, sales revenue has been reduced to a certain extent.
The "2021 China E-sports Industry Development Report Released" released by Tencent E-sports mentioned that due to the impact of the epidemic, revenue methods including live broadcasting and virtual goods have increased, but this part does not account for a high proportion of revenue in the e-sports industry.
Three parts: borrowing from Yadongfeng, e-sports has entered the era of standardized development
In 2021, the society's attention to e-sports has increased significantly, which is evident in the two important events of e-sports entering Asia and winning the League of Legends Finals.
In addition, with the landing of the anti-addiction policy for minors, the e-sports industry has begun to develop in the direction of standardization. Gyro esports reported earlier that because of the anti-addiction of minors, most e-sports events have to limit the age of participants, and e-sports teams with underage players have to make some changes and adjustments to adapt to the new policy measures. At the same time, the youth training system, including the club, will also be frustrated.
But from the perspective of the long-term development of the esports industry, this is not a bad thing. Through more standardized management of players, e-sports is more conducive to the standardized, healthy and sustainable development of the industry. In addition, at the level of e-sports education, in addition to the level of "e-sports education", the introduction of new anti-addiction regulations will dissuade some third-party e-sports educational institutions that do not regulate and do not have teaching qualifications, thereby promoting a more official and professional e-sports education path.
At the same time, combined with the official entry of e-sports into the Asian Games, it will bring a corrected benign public opinion orientation to the emerging sport of e-sports, which is conducive to e-sports getting rid of the negative impact of "spiritual opium" and being recognized and promoted by the mainstream of society. On the other hand, combined with the grand traditional sports events, it will become an important force to help the rapid development of e-sports, and e-sports will derive more value around the dimension of sports events and break through the existing boundaries of e-sports.
Major cities are actively building e-sports industry centers
Finally, the report points out that e-sports has developed rapidly in recent years, has become a remarkable economic, social and cultural phenomenon, and is regarded by local governments as an important starting point for the development of the digital economy. At present, China's e-sports industry has gradually developed, forming a more scientific ecological closed loop, and enhancing the core competitiveness of the industry through event operation and content deep cultivation.
At this stage, China's e-sports industry has formed a Chengdu-Chongqing cultural circle, the Yangtze River Delta, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao e-sports industry layout circle, created a number of industrial agglomeration development new highlands, and promoted the multi-dimensional development of Chinese game enterprises in agglomeration, differentiation and characteristics.
Gyro E-sports believes that as cities begin to create "urban e-sports business cards", the e-sports events and head clubs that originally focused on Shanghai have begun to migrate to other cities. For example, in Wuhan, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Chongqing and other cities, the number of e-sports events is increasing, whether it is the number of e-sports users or related enterprises, there has been a significant increase.
Secondly, different regions have also built a distinctive e-sports industry chain because of different resources. For example, in the Nanjing area, as a city with rich resources for colleges and universities, the trend of rejuvenation in Nanjing is obvious. As one of the cities with the largest number of colleges and universities in China, Nanjing has 53 colleges and universities with nearly 800,000 college students. Rich university resources, combined with a mature education system, "e-sports education" has become the key to the development of e-sports in Nanjing.
The county-level city small city such as Taicang City has gradually enhanced the brand awareness of urban e-sports by introducing the QQ Speed car mobile game S League and joining hands with Tencent to land the Tencent Tianmei E-sports Taicang Base, continuously attracting more e-sports events and e-sports companies to the city's e-sports industry chain.
In terms of "e-sports + cultural tourism", it is not a new concept. Hainan, which announced the creation of an "international e-sports port", has carried out many in-depth integration with the e-sports industry through its local cultural tourism industry ecology and resources. Last year, Hainan introduced Tencent's "TGC Tencent Digital Cultural and Creative Festival", which includes more than 60 high-quality digital cultural and creative content for games and e-sports. It attracted more than 120,000 participants and more than 30 million online live stream views.
Tencent has brought more than 60 high-quality digital cultural and creative content by gathering its most influential and popular ips such as games and e-sports, helping the innovative development of local culture, tourism and surrounding industries in Hainan. According to the data, TGC attracted more than 120,000 participants in 6 days, and the online live broadcast viewed more than 30 million, and quickly became a popular "youth culture punch point" in Hainan.
In addition, in the recent "Peace Elite E-sports Island" activity, guangzhou area through the linkage of peace elite events, and relying on the existing scenes of Guangzhou University Town, the e-sports IP elements were restored offline, and a more immersive e-sports cultural and creative journey was constructed.
As an emerging industry with traffic and a large industrial scale, e-sports is becoming an important engine for the economic development of more cities, and different cities can also rely on local characteristic resources to integrate with e-sports to create an "e-sports brand" that is more in line with urban culture.
In the report released by Gamma Data, it is mentioned that the e-sports industry is also expecting government departments to increase industrial support, improve the industry management standard mechanism, and strengthen the reserve of young e-sports talents, so as to guide the e-sports industry to embark on a professional, standardized and professional development path, further enhance the international competitiveness of the e-sports industry, and thus promote the rapid development of the e-sports industry.