Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 Mirror Entertainment (ID: jingxiangyule), author 丨 Zhang Haiying, editor 丨 Li Qianxue
Recently, the entry #Tencent investing in a game company on average 7 days has been hot searched.
According to a number of media reports, Tencent invested in 27 game companies in the first half of 2021, calculating an average of 7 days to invest in one, and covering all major categories.
The last time Tencent expanded wildly in the game territory was from 2014 to 2015, and then this wave of investment boom gradually faded due to the rise of "Glory of Kings", and Tencent once became the "world's first publisher".
After 6 years, the head product of the mobile game market is still "Glory of the King", and the "Peace Elite" with Tencent in 2019 has not been able to replace its status as a "game overlord". But after all, the explosive game has a cycle, coupled with the emergence of "Original God" and "Awakening of All Nations" last year, or Tencent Games feels the crisis.
In fact, this round of investment boom has already begun, starting from August last year, especially at the end of the year, in november to December two months in a row of 13 game companies, this emergency expansion trend in the first half of this year further escalated.
According to the statistics of Mirror Entertainment, in the first half of 2021, "Tencent Investment" participated in the investment of as many as 49 game companies, with an average of one game company invested every 4 days. 3A, indie games, VR, e-sports, cloud games, mobile games, two-dimensional, female direction, SLG... In particular, a full-scale investment has been realized.
However, from the perspective of Tencent's investment projects in the first half of the year, it is not difficult to find the focus of its investment direction - IP development, two-dimensional, female orientation, and new technologies.
<h2>IP</h2>
According to the "Forecast analysis of the market status and development trend of China's mobile game industry in 2021" released by the China Commercial Industry Research Institute in December 2020, the total number of gamers in China is expected to reach 680 million in 2021, of which 660 million are mobile gamers.
In 2021, the market size of IP mobile games can reach 152.5 billion yuan, accounting for 64.7% of the mobile game market share in 2021.
It can be seen that the development prospects of IP mobile games are great.
Tencent, with its complete IP ecosystem behind it, has great advantages in IP development. Last year, Tencent's "troika" strategy opened up the upstream and downstream IP ecological chains, and based on this, it successfully created explosive projects such as "Qing Yu Nian" and "Son-in-law".
On June 13, Tencent Pictures, Xinli Media, and Yuwen Film and Television held a forum on "Discussion on the Symbiosis creation of IP in multiple fields" in Shanghai, pointing out that the IP market is becoming more and more mature, and the market demand for IP has gradually upgraded, creating high-quality and long-term IP, and exploring the benign symbiosis of IP across fields has become an urgent problem to be solved.
In the cross-field symbiosis of IP, in addition to the horizontal connection of animation, online text, film and television, it can also cross fields to games, radio dramas, derivative peripherals and other subdivisions.
Judging from Tencent's investment projects in the first half of the year, IP development has two directions: film and game IP linkage and original IP content research and development.
On March 14, Tencent spent 2.79 billion yuan to increase its holdings in Century Huatong, becoming the second largest shareholder with 10% of the shares. Sheng qu games, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Century Huatong, formerly known as Shanda Games, an established Chinese game company, has been reported to have invested a strategic stake of 3 billion yuan in 2018.
This increase in equity is not surprising. As a pioneer in the field of domestic games, Sheng qu games hold a lot of classic game IP, and in the past two years, it has actively explored the direction of film-game linkage. In 2014, its popular game product "Valley of the Dragons" was adapted into the movie "Valley of the Dragons: Breaking Dawn".
The "Qing Yu Nian" mobile game developed by Sheng Qu Games this year has also become a tencent re-promotion project in 2021, and the tencent IP ecological strategy of the explosive IP + veteran game developer and the film-game IP linkage is fully demonstrated.
In terms of content research and development, the investment of animation game content developers is also remarkable.
Doji Studio, which Tencent invested in April, is a company that provides comics, novels and game production services, focusing on the research and development of animation game content with scripts and copywriting as the key cornerstones and comics, game worldviews and literary creation as the carriers, which is a game content developer with strong narrative and a hotbed for incubating original IP.
In addition, upstream animation and Black Rock Network are also based on the content research and development of anime game IP compared with game production, and their copyrighted products are animation and online novels.
<h2>Quadratic</h2>
At the end of September last year, "Original God" opened a public beta, and the main concept was "open world two-dimensional mobile game". According to Sensor Tower data, "Original God" attracted $245 million in the first month of its launch, surpassing "Glory of the King" to become the world's highest-revenue mobile game in the same period, and was seen as a signal to ring the alarm bell of Tencent's games.
Miha You, the developer of "Original God", has positioned the two-dimensional route since entering the game industry. Before "Original God", Mihayou's most well-known "Crash Academy Series" is also a large number of two-dimensional players, with a good reputation, and firmly grasps young users.
The two-dimensional has always been Tencent's weaker plate, Tencent's game products are not many popular and popular two-dimensional games, this time the sudden rise of "Original God" is hit on the soft underbelly of Tencent's games.
"Entering the secondary yuan track" is actually an important strategic direction for Tencent. Tencent's loss of hand with "Original God" is not negligent - in 2020, there was news that Tencent wanted to invest in Mihayou and was rejected.
This year, Tencent is focusing on the two-dimensional track. In March, Tencent launched the self-developed two-dimensional mobile game "White Night Aurora", breaking the previous two-dimensional strategy of animation game linkage, and opening up the domestic and foreign markets with pure self-developed IP.
In terms of investment, it has also expanded its two-dimensional content library with a slightly aggressive attitude, and has taken many two-dimensional game developers with mature works under its command to pave the way for the two-dimensional game track.
In April, Tencent's investment in "Girl Frontline" developer Scattered Explosion Network received attention. Scattered explosion network is a well-known manufacturer in the field of two-dimensional games, and its product "Girl Frontline" has maintained a rating of more than 8 points on game platforms such as B station and TapTap, and has been widely praised in the two-dimensional circle.
Tencent's deep blue interactive, its founder Zhou Jian is the producer of the well-known two-dimensional female to the game "Food Language". In the 2020 domestic two-dimensional mobile game flow ranking list of "domestic two-dimensional mobile game observation" statistics, "Food Language" rushed to the tenth place with a flow of 600 million yuan, which is very prominent in the same category of game products.
Data source: B station up the main "domestic two-dimensional mobile game observation", its basic data source from appannie, Sensor Tower
Longyuan Network, which Tencent invested in May, has a large reserve of two-dimensional games, including "Laigu", "Huazha Speechless", "Tenjin Academy", "About My Rebirth into Slime", etc., which is regarded as the manufacturer with the largest reserve of secondary-dimensional products in Chengdu.
In addition, game manufacturers such as Lingjian Network, Dawn Interactive, Chaolu Technology, and Independent Developer Alliance all have a strong two-dimensional background.
<h2>"She's economical"</h2>
Judging from Tencent's investment projects in the first half of the year, the proportion of women's investment is very eye-catching.
Sugar Games, Asagiri Games, Bobo and Small Partners' Companies, Palm Dream Network and many other developers of women-oriented games, its product types cover dressup, social, cultivation, role playing, simulation management and other categories, such as "Girl Frontline", "Natsume's Beautiful Diary", "Cooking Dimension" and so on are also the head of the female game products on the market.
Under the "she economy" trend, all walks of life are targeting female consumers who have gradually become the main members of consumption, and the game field is no exception.
The game industry has been competing for male users for decades, and has basically developed into a competition in stock, so that the growth space of male users is extremely limited. As a market to be explored, the women's market has considerable prospects, and the expansion of the mobile game market has accelerated the arrival of the "female user dividend period".
According to the "2019-2024 Women's Mobile Game Industry Market In-depth Survey and Investment Prospect Forecast Analysis Report" released by the New Thought Industry Research Center, female consumers spend about 30% more time and money on games than male consumers, and the weekly retention rate is much higher than that of men.
The female-oriented game also has a unique advantage in the linkage of film and television IP. The audience of film and television dramas is highly overlapping with female users, so that they have a large space to play in the gamification of idol dramas, costume dramas, and palace fighting dramas, such as Tencent's "Yanxi Raiders: Phoenix YuFei" and "Qing Yu Nian" launched this year.
Many game manufacturers have long seen the huge potential of the female market, "Love and Producer" and "Miracle Warmth" in the two major categories of women to the game "Otome direction" and "dress-up direction" have handed over satisfactory answers, for women to the market to develop a good warm-up.
This year, Tencent's Northern Lights Studios' self-developed interactive mobile game "Light and Night Love" and the strategy card RPG "White Night Aurora" developed by Touring Dog Studios are aimed at female players.
<h2>science fiction</h2>
In terms of overseas projects, Tencent has invested in Russian game developer Mundfish, French game developer Dontnod Entertainment, British game developer Payload Studios, and acquired Canadian game developer Klei Entertainment, with most of its game genres in the science fiction category.
On May 18, Tencent invested in American game studio Bad Robot Games. The game studio was born out of American production company Bad Robot, with Michael Booth, the producer of "The Way Away" as general manager.
According to its CEO Anna Sweet, the team led by Michael Booth is developing an AAA-level original game on PC and console platforms, and the studio will immerse gamers in a cinematic experience based on the worldview created by Bad Robot Productions through film and television works, and set their sights on the new interaction of film and television IP that operates across segments.
Tencent's exploration of overseas science fiction categories and new technology experiences may be closely related to the future development direction of "meta-universe" games.
"Meta-universe" is the future track that game giants are optimistic about.
Metaverse was born out of the concept of a "universe parallel to the real world" proposed in the 1992 science fiction work Avalanche. People in the real world break the boundaries of time and space in a digital form, living in a metaverse parallel to the real world, never going offline.
This concept was vividly displayed in the 2018 Spielberg-directed movie "Ready Player One", based on vr, AR technology in the virtual world, the classic IP in film and television games and the social system in the real world meet across dimensions, providing players with an incomparably realistic immersive game experience, which has also become the future exploration direction of the game field, and the entry of major giants at home and abroad is also expected.
Roblox, which is regarded as a "pure metaversmic concept stock" by the outside world, is also the first company to write a "metacosm" into the prospectus, and its new business model and narrative have brought a lot of imagination space to product iteration and metacosm exploration.
Roblox is a game creation platform that can be both a creative engine and a creative community where users can create, publish, and play games created by others. During the pandemic, Roblox's player engagement rate soared by 40%, users rose by 75%, MAU reached 164 million in 2020, and revenue exceeded $1.2 billion in 2020 alone.
As early as the end of May 2019, Tencent reached a strategic cooperative relationship with Roblox and established a joint venture to establish Robles to incubate the domestic creative ecology. At the 2021 Tencent Games Annual Press Conference, Tencent announced that Robles will hold a national creation competition to attract users to actively participate with a prize pool of 6 million.
Tencent's "super digital scene" strategy , " Better connecting the virtual and the present, the past and the present, time and space , and becoming a better way of connecting people and society " also coincides with the concept of "metaverse"...
The second half of 2021 has begun, and the expansion of Tencent Games has not stopped.