Zhang Zhi'an: The game needs to grasp three pairs of keywords to go to sea

At the "2021 China Game Industry Annual Conference", a set of data was particularly eye-catching: this year, the sales revenue of China's self-developed games in overseas markets was 18.013 billion US dollars, an increase of 2.563 billion US dollars over last year, an increase of 16.59% year-on-year. Overseas markets have a large potential income improvement space. According to agencies, the potential scale of domestic game going to sea in 2024 will reach 69.1 billion US dollars (equivalent to 439.8 billion yuan), which is 4.5 times the scale of overseas revenue in 2020.

On the road to the sea, domestic game manufacturers have entered the era of "great navigation" from the initial attempt and rise to today. In the meantime, especially represented by Guangzhou, there have been "pioneers" such as 4399 on this game "globalization" journey, as well as strong "front waves" such as NetEase Games and 37 Interactive Entertainment, as well as "Mesozoic Generation" such as Xinghui Games and Tianyou Network. What to pay attention to during the game's going to sea, Professor Zhang Zhi'an from Sun Yat-sen University previously expressed his views at the annual meeting. The following is Zhang Zhi'an's speech -

From last year to this year, especially this year, going to sea is really hot, last week, when the internal industry research team statistics a data, in the first half of this year, There are about 22 listed companies in China's games, and the median year-on-year growth rate of overseas performance is about 30%-40%. The market share of these 22 listed companies in the 5 regions of the world basically accounts for about 20% of the industry share, so I think it may be more deeply felt that Chinese games may now usher in a relatively vigorous development in all parts of the world.

In my own process of going to sea, there are three pairs of keywords that are more important.

First, enterprises should clearly understand the relationship between industry and responsibility. Our industry is booming, because young people around the world, including young people in China, have very large demand, but this industry will also have its controversial parts, such as the protection of young people and the hedging of youth culture, quality culture and mainstream culture in the rapid development of the industry. So you will find that the Chinese government's regulatory policy will actually have a supervision from licensing to youth protection. Even sometimes in the development process of the game market, for example, a sudden report in the media will lead to a shrinking of the market value of listed game companies or related IT companies.

Such a stumbling block in the process of progress constantly reminds the industry to grow bigger through technological innovation and industrial cooperation on the one hand, and at the same time to shoulder the social responsibility of the game industry in the process of industrial development, especially the responsibility of the platform and the enterprise itself.

Second, grasp the relationship between going to sea and spreading. Chinese games go to sea and bring a lot of Chinese cultural elements to the past, but under different cross-cultural premises, the user's cognition of Chinese culture after the game is landed is very complicated, and even now many users are difficult to distinguish between Chinese, Korean and Japanese games. This inspires us that with the industry going to sea, we may also need to respect cultural differences more, more in cultural experience products and marketing communication can have more, from visual impact to cultural perception and cultural cognition of story communication, so that the game to go to sea and the spread of culture have a better combination.

Finally, it is necessary to grasp the relationship between numbers and humanities. In the development of the game industry, there will be more and more intelligent technologies and technology-driven, but we must always remember that beyond the digital basis is still the adherence to the essence of human spirit, that is, the promotion and amplification of the humanistic spirit. So I think that in the future, while we accompany the whole technology, we may also put more and more emphasis on humanistic care.

Text/Guangzhou Daily Xinhuacheng reporter Cheng Yilun

Photo: Guangzhou Daily Xinhuacheng reporter Cheng Yilun

Video/ Guangzhou Daily Xinhuacheng reporter Cheng Yilun

Guangzhou Daily New Flower City Editor Cai Lingyue