On December 26th, under the guidance of Hunan Provincial Sports Bureau and sponsored by Tencent Chess and Cards, the 2021 Tencent Chess and Card Series Finals was successfully held, and more than 100 finalists from the four products of "Happy Fighting Landlord", "Happy Mahjong", "Tencent Wild Fox Go" and "Tiantian Chess" on six major tracks brought a wonderful intellectual sports event to hundreds of millions of chess and card enthusiasts across the country after many days of competition.
This is the seventh year of Tencent's chess and card tournament. Looking back on the past, chess and cards have grown from the niche to the public, from offline to online, from games to e-sports, chess and card games have experienced decades of ups and downs, and finally returned to the public with a new look.
Beginnings: The Past and Present Lives of Chess and Card Esports
Since 1988, Lianzhong moved chess and cards from offline to online, and Chinese electronic board games have a long history of decades. Since then, the game tea garden, China game center, winger chess and cards, QQ games, etc. have successively appeared in everyone's field of vision. After 2003, the board game industry ushered in rapid development, with the influx of capital from all sides and the self-improvement of the industry, games gradually became more than games.
In 2007, the "JJ Competition" turned out to be the first product, JJ Fighting Landlord, and opened the chess and card competition mode. In 2011, the JJ Competition cooperated with the State General Administration of Sport and the Social Sports Guidance Center to discuss the rules of the landlord competition and invited many well-known domestic experts to participate in the conference. In the same year, the "Rules for China's Two-Hit-One Poker Competition" was compiled and published, and it strived to put the landlord competition on the road of standardized management and competitive development.
But the development of an industry will never be smooth. Since 2016, more and more game companies have entered the market and divided up this market through acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions. As the industry grew bigger, some companies began to be blinded by interests. In order to increase competitiveness, some game operators have launched a "coin merchant" model to provide monetization services for virtual currency in board games - however, the state stipulates that game virtual currency cannot be realized, otherwise it is gambling. The gambling model has brought huge profits to unscrupulous businesses, so that the bad atmosphere quickly spread to the entire industry, and the entertainment function of electronic board games in this period weakened, and the gambling function occupied a dominant position. This has also become a stumbling block on the road to the development of chess and card e-sports in the future.
In 2017, the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Public Security and other eight ministries and commissions jointly issued the "Opinions on Strictly Regulating the Online Game Market", and gambling-related chess and card games became the focus of rectification and supervision. In 2018, the "coin merchants" and the platforms involved were severely cracked down by law enforcement departments. Board games ushered in the "industry winter".
In the days when the board game industry continued to be sluggish, the e-sports industry flourished. As more and more e-sports players in Our country have achieved honors in the international arena, domestic society has gradually begun to realize that games are no longer the "electronic heroin" in the eyes of people in the past, and through e-sports, games have gradually justified their own name.
The rapid growth of the e-sports market, the influx of a large number of investors and brands, the state has begun to support the development of the industry, and board games have also seized this opportunity. Many professionals in the industry believe that through the combination of chess and e-sports, chess and cards can get out of the original predicament and exert positive energy, so that the entire industry tends to develop benignly.
Status: chess and cards + e-sports, back to the origin of entertainment competition
E-sports originates from games and is higher than games, and can set rules and correct bad gaming behaviors, such as "game addiction" and "gambling". E-sports has the same self-transcendent competitive spirit as traditional sports, which can guide the positive development of the game industry. As a long-established entertainment activity in China, chess and card have the advantages of low threshold, no gender barrier, and a wide public base compared with general e-sports projects. From the age of fifty or sixty to the children of eleven or twelve, almost everyone can master a chess and card game.
Nowadays, the model of chess and card + e-sports has become more and more the mainstream of the development mode of board games, and people's attention to chess and cards is also increasing. The guiding role of e-sports on games, the boundaries between competition and gambling, etc. have gradually become hot topics in the industry, can the national e-sports lack chess and cards? | The impression of e-sports world board games in the minds of the public has gradually changed. The big hit brand in the board game, Happy Fighting Landlord, has become a must-have entertainment program for major game anchors, and "losing beans" and "doing charity" have even become the terrier culture of the e-sports circle. According to Qimai data, in the iOS free list - desktop game, the ranking of happy landlords in the past year has been ranked first for most of the time. With the traffic out of the circle, the happy bucket landlord cooperated with the well-known e-sports player uzi, and also sent a billion happy beans to uzi, and the program effect was bursting for a while.
The finals of the tencent chess and card tournaments such as "Happy Fighting Landlord", "Daily Chess", and "Happy Mahjong" have reached more than 2 million on major live broadcast platforms. The two-track mode gives both professional masters and folk gods the opportunity to compete on stage, and the suspenseful situation also improves the viewing of the game a lot. At the same time, the competition also invited Deng Yaping, Li Xiaofeng and Xu Mengjie from the fields of sports, e-sports and entertainment to play the landlord exhibition competition, as well as the "next meal champion" entertainment competition of various anchors, and strive to cross-border linkage and "go out of the circle".
It can be seen that the current chess and card events fully integrate entertainment attributes and competitive attributes, and the advantages of chess and cards themselves are making "e-sports for all" possible.
The Future: Realizing "E-sports for All"
From the operation and optimization of game products, to the incubation of live broadcast platforms and anchors, to the design of large-scale events, the ecological content of chess and card e-sports has gradually become perfect and mature. While e-sports has helped board games break through growth, board games are also feeding back the esports industry itself. Esports has long been considered one of the few extremely talented sports. "There is only one Uzi out of 10 million people." Board games can break this e-sports boundary, enrich the content of e-sports events, make e-sports known to more people, and then improve the image of e-sports in the minds of the public.
This event is a brave attempt by Tencent through board games on the "National E-sports", in the field of board games, there is no so-called threshold, talent restrictions, you can see people of various occupations, various regions, all ages competing on the same stage. The author believes that if the board game can continue to play its own advantages, adhere to legal compliance, improve the ecology of e-sports events, further enrich the way of running the game, expand the audience, and achieve cross-border dissemination, then "everyone is an e-sports player, everyone can enjoy the fun of e-sports" is just around the corner.