Little by little, Tencent's rudder is turning in a new direction.
According to 36Kr, Tencent intends to acquire game mobile phone company Black Shark Technology, and after the acquisition, Black Shark as a whole will be merged into the business group led by Ren Yuxin, tencent's chief operating officer. It is reported that after the completion of the acquisition, Black Shark Technology will carry out business transformation, and the business focus will shift from game phones as a whole to VR devices.
Since the end of 2021, Tencent has continuously adjusted its strategy to reduce its stake in investment companies. The reason is that the traffic ceiling of the mobile Internet has arrived, and there are not many targets for the capital market to choose. For Tencent, in such an environment, to find industries with more future potential has obviously become the top priority at present.
The metaverse, which is regarded as the potential entrance to the next era, has become a new battlefield for Internet giants to compete.
The big factory piled up the meta-universe
The term "metaverse" spread across the globe overnight. Google Trends shows that in January 2022, the global index on the "metacosm" reached 100. Before January 2021, the use of this keyword did not even exceed 1.
In foreign markets, roblox, the "first stock of the meta-universe", once exceeded 70 billion; then Facebook changed its name to "Meta" to fully turn to the meta-universe. At home, the competition in the metaverse is equally fierce.
From the baidu create 2021 (Baidu AI developer conference) held at the end of last year on the meta-universe APP "Xi'an", to Alibaba Cloud's partnership with game development studio JP GAMES... Domestic Internet giants are gathering on the "meta-universe" track.
In addition to the software level, on the hardware side, giants have also begun to open their wallets to "buy, buy and buy". Facebook acquired Oculus, a VR headset brand, for $20; Pico, a VR hardware manufacturer wholly owned by ByteDance; and Tencent's acquisition of Black Shark Technology.
It is obvious that when human beings are about to move towards a deeper virtual future of online and offline integration, it has become the consensus of big manufacturers to cut from the soft and hard sides to the meta-universe track synchronously.
If you look at it from the current technology, the most in line with the concept of "metacosm" is VR technology. Facebook has said that the hardware carrier of the future meta-universe will not be computers and mobile phones, but VR headsets. Because the VR headset can completely envelop the user's field of vision, providing a virtual world with free viewing angles and a high sense of immersion. Therefore, VR will be an indispensable and important part of the metaverse era.
Stretching the long line, the hardware entrance of the metacosm will show a diversified trend, in addition to common terminals such as VR and AR, it also includes tactile gloves, somatosensory suits, smart glasses, brain-computer interfaces and other peripheral hardware that enhances user immersion and brings multi-dimensional interactive experience. Hardware devices, as the entrance to the metaverse, will be the key to the future.
However, it should be noted that the metaverse involves technologies including VR, AR, AI, 5G, NFT, Internet of Things, etc. At the current level of technology, it is still impossible to create a virtual world that can achieve the effect of deceiving human senses, and the existing "metaverse" is only a collection of high and new technologies that humans have at present. However, from the perspective of the future, working together from both hard and soft parties is undoubtedly the best option to seize the highlands of the meta-universe.
"Penguins" and "Black Sharks", how much imagination can you have in the metaverse?
In fact, Tencent has already made moves in the meta-universe track. Prior to the IPO, Roblox raised $150 million in Series G funding, valuing it at about $4 billion, and Tencent was on the investor list.
Today, although the market value has declined, Roblox's market value is still 10 times more than the previous valuation. Perhaps it is the huge return on investment in Roblox that has inspired Tencent, which is secretly working on the meta-universe track. However, it is difficult to find such a company in the domestic market where the related industry has just started.
So, why did you choose Black Shark?
Tencent will choose to "hold hands" with the black shark, in fact, there are already signs. As early as January 2020, Tencent reached a cooperation with Black Shark Technology to explore innovations in game functions at the software and hardware levels.
Based on the existing cooperation, Tencent and Black Shark will not need to go through the run-in period, which will help accelerate Tencent's promotion of virtual reality-oriented hardware technology. Coupled with the fact that Black Shark has already begun to explore VR and other related products, the cooperation between the two sides is nothing less than icing on the cake.
Secondly, the acquisition of Black Shark will strengthen Tencent's shortcomings in hardware manufacturing. Black Shark has cooperation experience with Qualcomm, a major mobile processor chip manufacturer, and as a sub-brand of Xiaomi, it has the industrial chain guarantee of Xiaomi, a domestic mobile phone head manufacturer. Obviously, it is of great benefit to Tencent's current layout in the meta-universe.
Last year, Ma Huateng mentioned a term for the first time in Tencent's internal publication "Three Views" - "true Internet", that is, the product of the new upgrade of the mobile Internet, providing integrated services from both real and virtual aspects. For Tencent, the top priority is to create an entrance in the field of VR hardware that can carry its own virtual and real connections.
Looking at the global metaverse track, the path of the giant into the metacosm is basically the same. From the acquisition of VR manufacturers, the completion of the "soft and hard connection" development model, which is undoubtedly the most effective way for Internet companies with soft power.
According to Tencent's "true Internet" development logic, Tencent needs to hold a "key" to open the entrance to the meta-universe in its hand. In particular, under the basic logic that the metacosm is likely to fundamentally change the social form of human beings in the future, as the owner of WeChat and QQ, the largest social platform in China, Tencent, which started by social networking, is obviously unwilling and cannot fall into the inferior position in its "old line".
"Meta-Universe": a new battlefield for game phones?
Perhaps for the Black Shark, it may be a good choice to be taken under Tencent.
In April 2018, the Black Shark mobile phone debuted. In addition to the cost-effective and unique design of the main meter mobile phone, the Black Shark mobile phone has set its sights on the problem of high heat reduction and frame drop in high-load scenarios such as games, which has opened the beginning of the "inner volume" heat dissipation of the mobile phone market.
After this, smartphone brands played the "heat dissipation card". From "sandwich liquid cold heat dissipation" to "stacked waterfall VC stereoscopic heat dissipation"... Even if you work hard in the heat dissipation link, it is difficult to make a substantial difference compared with flagship mobile phones that also have the same capabilities.
The reason why gaming laptops can be distinguished from ordinary notebooks is that they have fundamental differences in core hardware parts such as CPUs and GPUs. In contrast, the game phone is even almost indistinguishable from the flagship machine in terms of configuration, and even "there is no more than enough". Under the condition of excessive homogenization, the living space of game phones is constantly being compressed by ordinary smart phones.
At the same time, the global mobile phone market has become saturated, and the development has fallen into a bottleneck period. According to IDC data, since the beginning of 2017, global smartphone shipments have declined year after year and have entered a negative growth state.
In this context, on the one hand, Black Shark has to face the squeeze of ordinary smart phones, on the other hand, it also has to deal with the competition of other game mobile phone brands. In order to survive, it is obviously necessary to find a breakthrough in diversified scenarios, such as the metaverse.
In particular, the metaverse has a natural and close connection with the game, and Black Shark, as a domestic game mobile phone manufacturer, has a certain degree of overlap with the metaverse natively. As mentioned above, Black Shark has the experience and conditions of related hardware manufacturing, so the transformation to virtual reality equipment manufacturers has a foundation and foundation.
Zooming in to the entire game mobile phone market, in the era of stock competition in the mobile phone market, the living space left by the smartphone market that has been extremely "involuted" has long since bottomed out. In particular, when the upstream chip will not appear in the reality of "game mobile phone special edition", game mobile phone brands that cannot form fundamental differences in hardware must also think carefully about how to go down the road in the future. The meta-universe may be a good way out for game phones.
However, the path of the metaverse is not as easy as imagined. At present, Black Shark Technology is recruiting VR/AR optical design experts, VR image algorithm engineers and other technical personnel in the field of enhancement implementation. Compared with Byte's Pico and OEM Oculus's Goertek shares, in other competitors have products entering the market, the black shark of the game phone still needs to start from scratch from basic technologies such as optical module design of VR/AR products. In order to complete the catch-up technically, the road ahead of Black Shark and Tencent is still very long.
At last
The existing metaverse is still in chaos, and what the future will be is only an unknown.
Virtual reality may seem close, but it's far away. As the famous science fiction writer Liu Cixin said: "There are two paths in front of mankind. One outward leads to the sea of stars; one outwards leads to virtual reality. "The time for human exploration of the stars is measured in the century, and the metacosm will remain a "virtual reality" until the technology has made a fundamental breakthrough. However, who can be prepared first, then it may lead to a new era.
Opportunities are waiting for everyone, who can hold it, and look at the future.