After hanging the appetite of investors for nearly a year with various rumors and momentum, Baidu Games' "rebirth" plan seems to have failed.
On December 23, the news that Baidu Mobile Ecological Business Group (MEG) was suddenly exposed on platforms such as Pulse and Zhihu, including live broadcasting, education and other businesses within the business group, and the proportion of layoffs in the live broadcast business was even as high as 90%. Among them, the game business is the hardest hit area - judging from the revelations of a number of MEG employees, almost all of the more than 300 people in Baidu's game department have been laid off.
Previously, a Baidu person said in an interview with the media that the company did have layoffs and only "small-scale adjustments". However, regarding the detailed layoffs circulating on major platforms, Baidu officials have not yet made a public response.
In any case, almost all of Baidu's game business was cut, even if it was put a few months ago, investors dare not think. At that time, the revival of Baidu games was booming, and the 23 game plans announced at the same time in July, as well as the joining of Wang Hui, co-co-owner of the former Babel era, and Xu Jian, the former general manager of touch games, made Baidu's determination to return to the game track seem extremely firm. But today, the online complaints of former MEG employees have turned the feast into a living farce.
Perhaps, the "Baidu game revival" drama has been a farce from the very beginning - the Internet giant has squandered the rich resources in its hands and missed the era of vigorous growth of domestic games. Nowadays, regulatory policies and consumers have put forward higher requirements for game manufacturers, even if Baidu continues to provide full support for the game business, when the industry winter comes, how many opportunities does Baidu Games born in spring have to get ahead again?
Image from Yandex
From the valley peak to the valley floor
Looking back at Baidu's exploration on the game track, "a good hand is broken" should be the best description of this business.
In January 2011, Baidu's community-based mini-game platform based on Tieba was officially launched, and the first batch of dozens of games put into operation, covering manufacturers including Lianzhong, Game China, 7K7K, etc.
At that time, Baidu Tieba was, as its slogan, "the world's largest Chinese community", and the traffic of the mini-game platform born on Tieba had a great traffic advantage, and even contributed a lot of users to Tieba in turn. Baidu data shows that the cumulative popularity of the mini game platform exceeded 70 million three days after it was launched, and the popularity of several popular games increased by more than 12,000%.
Baidu, which has tasted the sweetness of the game business, has begun to dabble in this field more frequently. In 2013, Baidu spent $1.9 billion to acquire NetDragon's mobile Internet platform "91 Wireless", which became the largest merger and acquisition in China's Internet market that year.
When it was acquired by Baidu, 91 Wireless was already one of the largest game distribution channels in the country, and its main business segments included 91 mobile assistants, panda reading books, etc., and the operation was still good. According to public data, as of September 2012, the cumulative number of users of 91 Assistant reached 127 million, the cumulative number of users in the Android market exceeded 48 million, and the cumulative number of downloads on the two major platforms exceeded 9.5 billion times.
After winning 91 Wireless, Baidu began to gradually divest the core business of 91 Wireless and further integrate it with Various Business Segments of Baidu, including game distribution, distribution, game portal and other services, and "Baidu Mobile Game" was born from this.
However, due to the chaotic management of the merged Baidu game sector, its status not only failed to surpass the traditional game giants Tencent and NetEase, but the business leaders changed stubble after stubble. As of 2017, Liao Jun, former deputy director of Baidu's game division, and Wang Zhan, vice president of the game business, had been fired for corruption in Baidu's game sector. Under a series of blows, Baidu announced in October 2017 that it would close the Fuzhou R&D Center, the former base camp of 91, and relocate its related business to Beijing.
Prior to this, baidu games have been renamed "Duoku Games" and are independently split and operated.
The image is from the official website of Duoku Games
For most viewers, the spin-off of Duoku Games in 2017 may mark the complete decline of Baidu's game business, but it is not. Based on the rich resources in its hands, Baidu at that time still had a deep obsession with games.
"Aircraft carrier plan", how cool it is to save
In mid-2015, Baidu launched the "Aircraft Carrier Plan", which plans to split many of its innovative businesses to facilitate their better development and financing, and even independently land on the capital market in the future, and the spin-off of Duoku Games is also part of the "Aircraft Carrier Plan" - according to Baidu, it will still maintain business ties with Duoku and will establish continuous in-depth cooperation.
In fact, as recently as July 2017, Duoku Games, which had just spun off the Baidu system, was also trying to compete with Tencent and NetEase for the proxy rights of PUBG (PUBG: Battle Royale) in China. Now replay this scene, it is not difficult to see the shadow of Baidu behind it - the popularity of "eating chicken" at that time is well known, if Duoku takes its agency rights, it can undoubtedly inject a shot of strength into Baidu's game business, and even hope to make it return to the table and become Baidu's second growth curve outside of search.
However, Duoku Games eventually lost to Tencent, after which it lost the favor of Baidu and gradually drifted away from it. At the brand conference in July this year, Baidu Games, which changed the new Slogan and brand image, made a brilliant appearance, and various products under the Baidu ecology, as well as partners such as Seven Cat Novels and Zulong Entertainment, all appeared, but Duoku Games did not even appear in front of the stage.
Flipping through the official website of Duoku Games, it can also be found that in addition to Baidu's logo, it is difficult to see its "deep connection" with Baidu, and none of the more than twenty games launched at this year's conference have been promoted on the official website. The "hot game" that Duoku put on the homepage and boasted about it was the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms Wars M" released in 2018 in cooperation with Sega - as can be seen from the statistical report of Qimai Data, it has not been on the list since it fell out of the iOS free game list earlier this year, and in the list of free strategy games, it is only ranked 300, far less than the peer Ali's "Three Kingdoms: Strategy Edition".
Another game of Duoku Agent, "Zero Reversal", has a rating of only 5.2 (total score of 10) on TapTap, and in the comment area, "rough picture", "insufficient operation", "poor gameplay" and other reviews account for the majority. Looking at Duoku's games, only "The Town on the Tip of the Tongue", which was launched in April, maintained a high degree of popularity, and it is still a casual game cloaked in simulated business skins.
In addition, other resources held by Baidu Games have not been fully utilized in these years. Whether it is the "film-game linkage" strategy implemented by iQIYI, or the small game platform with a thin sense of existence (formerly the Tieba mini game platform), it has not been able to bring due traffic and income to Baidu, but has burned money year after year. If we follow the "heavy game-based" strategy proposed by New Baidu Games at the press conference, it is bound to continue to burn more funds in the future in terms of game self-development.
This is not in line with Baidu's recent overall strategy of focusing on AI and car manufacturing. More importantly, even if it continues to exert its power on games, Baidu may not be able to get much increment in the domestic game market that has changed dramatically in recent years.
Does Baidu Games need an "heir"?
While Baidu Games is still plagued by a highly uncertain future, many players in the domestic game track are rushing forward, especially the content platforms led by Tencent, NetEase, and ByteDance. Among them, Tencent invested in a total of 26 game companies in 2020, accounting for almost one-third of the total number of investments in the entire game circle.
"Rookie" ByteDance is also not far behind, it first created Pixmain for indie games last year, then launched the cloud game platform Mili Games, and this year acquired game developer Mu Hitomi Technology. At present, ByteDance's game business has formed three major brands of Ohayoo, Sunrise Lightyear and Pixmain, with a team size of more than 2,000 people.
At the same time, the domestic game market environment has also undergone considerable changes.
With the passage of time, the era when traditional game manufacturers can harvest a large amount of water by changing skins has passed, and the mainstream voice of the market has become the Z generation that has been influenced by excellent foreign games for many years, and the requirements of this consumer group for domestic games will only become higher and higher. In addition, the recent introduction of the "Game Review Scoring Rules", as well as the selection of games such as "Original God" and "Ark of Tomorrow" as key projects for national cultural export, all reflect the regulatory authorities' views on the game industry - skinning and shoddy production will never become the future of domestic games, and the boutique games that really cost cost and painstakingly develop are the best games.
Driven by this trend, self-developed heavy games have become the focus of many manufacturers, while casual games with little depth have gradually been snubbed. Taking ByteDance as an example, it also exposed similar layoffs to Baidu in October this year, but this layoff seems to be only for its casual game business Ohayoo, and the light years responsible for medium and heavy game research and development have not been affected. Not only that, ButteDance CEO Liang Rubo also upgraded Daytime Lightyear to one of the company's six major business segments in early November.
ByteDance has always adopted a high-flying, all-track strategy in medium- and heavy-gaming, with games including MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), ARPG (Action Role-Playing Games), as well as SLG (Strategy Simulation Games) and Otome Games. In a sense, ByteDance seems to want to use multi-category, multi-theme game matrix to "test" the game market, and finally deepen the field of greater response.
Although it is also an Internet giant, Baidu may have a hard time replicating ByteDance's strategy.
ByteDance has a huge traffic pool composed of today's headlines, vibrato and other applications, and its ability to generate revenue is not small. In the case of the main business without worry, it can naturally provide enough capital for slow trial and error in the light of day and night. Judging from Baidu's latest financial report, the continued downturn in its old bank's advertising business has become a fact, and the year-on-year growth in the third quarter of this year was only 5.4%, which has shown a downward trend since the first quarter; on the other hand, the innovative business that is still growing (AI intelligent cloud, automatic driving), and the increasing cost for customer acquisition, have limited the pace of Baidu's heavy gaming.
In fact, Baidu may have found the "successor" of the game business - that is, the metacosm. In November this year, Baidu quietly launched a social app called "Xi'an" and officially opened its internal beta on December 21. Judging from Baidu's introduction, Greem will provide users with a virtual identity and then interact with friends in the virtual world.
As far as the feedback of users who currently experience Xi'an is concerned, Xi'an is more like an online game with only voice communication functions, but it is currently poorly experienced due to the lack of gameplay. However, Baidu also mentioned that it will introduce more developers and users to improve the ecosystem in the future. It is conceivable that if Greece really becomes what Baidu calls a "permanent multiplayer interactive virtual world", then its ability to improve user stickiness is undoubtedly stronger than Baidu's long-term unreleased game business, and the revenue opportunities brought by it will be countless.
Xi'an publicity map, picture from Baidu VR official website
Of course, the risk of the meta-universe business will also not be less: at this moment when the concept has just been hyped up, who can guarantee that its mainstream form in the future is like Baidu's bet? When Baidu is complacent in the virtual world created by "Xi'an", it may also be worth thinking about the cool fate of a few years ago - after all, no one wants the series of tragedies after the "aircraft carrier plan" to repeat itself.