Produced | Tiger Sniff Commercial, Consumer and Mobile Group
The author | hollow triangle
The title image | Visual China
Entering January, the annual "Annual List of National Tour Sales" was released, and the total sales of domestic buyout games last year were 2.79 billion yuan, an increase of 335.9% year-on-year. In 2015, that number was only $100 million.
In six years, it has achieved nearly 30-fold growth, of which the growth rate in 2017 and 2018 is more than 100%. By 2020, the total sales of domestic stand-alone games have grown to 640 million yuan, and last year, this data once again achieved a leap forward, reaching the order of 1 billion.
The exaggerated increase mainly came from the top of the list of "Forever Destroyed". In the past few years, the statistical object of the "National Tour Sales Annual List" was domestic stand-alone games, while this year, with the "buyout system" as the statistical boundary, online games such as "Forever Doomed" and "Ancient Network Overseas Edition" were able to enter the list. Among them, "Forever Doom" sold 7 million copies and contributed 1.4 billion yuan in sales with the competitive gameplay of the martial arts version of Battle Royale.
The second list of "Ghost Valley Eight Wilds" and the third "Dyson Ball Project" also contributed a lot, selling 3.9 million copies and 1.9 million copies respectively. The birth of three domestic buyout games with sales of more than one million in a single year is the first time, and the sales of the three works in the same period are also much higher than those of "Pascal Contract" (1.05 million copies), "Gun Rebirth" (1.05 million copies) and "Invisible Guardian" (1.4 million copies) in 2019.
The biggest significance of the buyout system as a statistical standard is that it reflects the survival soil of domestic single-player games to a certain extent.
"The sale of 7 million prepaid games is a great incentive for the entire industry, and the industry can clearly feel that the original domestic buyout game user scale can already be so large." Such sales data shows that excellent game development teams can not only survive, but also survive comfortably in all aspects, and buyout games begin to enter a healthy cycle of development. Yang Yang, founder of TipsWorks, told Tiger Sniff.
Another recent piece of news can also explain the purchasing power of domestic players - last December, Josef, the producer of TGA2021's best game "Double Trip", was interviewed by foreign media, according to him, the global sales of "Double Trip" have exceeded 3.5 million sets, half of which are contributed by Chinese players.
In the case of a good user environment, has the "rise of national tourism" that will be mentioned from time to time arrived?
The trend is good
After the ban on game consoles was lifted in 2014 and Steam opened up the real sense of the country in 2015, domestic stand-alone games have a foundation for development, and after several years of momentum, they are now entering a stage of rapid growth, and there is huge room for growth.
What was the concept of last year's nearly $3 billion in sales? According to Kadokawa research estimates, the global console game market size in 2020 is about 51.2 billion US dollars (different institution statistics are different, the overall range of 40-50 billion US dollars), the PC game market size is about 37.4 billion US dollars, 3 billion yuan only accounts for about 1% of the entire stand-alone market share.
As a developer, Yang Yang believes that the high-quality domestic stand-alone games that have emerged in recent years reflect the domestic game development strength to a certain extent, and if it continues to develop, China should be able to become a major development force for stand-alone games around the world. In the future, several major groups in Europe, the United States, Japan and China may be formed, and the market share of domestic stand-alone machines is expected to reach one of the orders of magnitude of one of the world's points.
Hu Jiangyang, distribution manager of Thunder Games, started from the Steam platform and provided another perspective. Since the release of domestic stand-alone games mainly relies on the Steam platform, and Steam has accumulated over the years, both overseas users and domestic users continue to grow. With the increase in the size of users, the upper and lower limits of game sales are also constantly improving, and future domestic stand-alone games will be accustomed to landing on the Steam platform in a global manner, without being limited to the country. As long as the user growth of the Steam platform is optimistic, the domestic stand-alone game industry is definitely an overall good trend.
Steam online user peak over 25 million / Image: Steam
GameraGame founder Ye Qianluo mentioned the cyclicality of the industry. Because the game development cycle is usually much more than 1 year, each team has its own plan for the time node when it chooses to launch the product. In the next few years, there may still be a phenomenon of "big and small years", but the overall market size will be mainly climbing, showing an upward fluctuation trend.
So, to what extent has domestic single-player games developed, it can be regarded as a rise?
Yang Yang feels that as long as he no longer uses domestic as a label to distinguish works, he can naturally forget that this is a domestic work when experiencing the game, which can be regarded as success. The "Shadow Torch City" on this list has this feeling, if it is not deliberately emphasized, players will hardly associate it directly with domestic games, and the discussion related to it is also carried out in the context of the game, rather than domestic games.
As an indie game publisher, Ye Qianluo believes that TGA's annual indie game is a target that can be pursued. Different from the idea of 3A games being stable first, domestic independent games are showing good creative ability on the basis of the improvement of production level, such as "Caged Peeping Dream" on this list, and "Word Game" that just hit Steam on January 21.
And the works that can sell millions of dollars every year are already a precursor to the rise of domestic single-player games in Hu Jiangyang's view.
Behind the rise
The global stand-alone game industry has always been led by Japan, Europe and the United States, and domestic stand-alone machines are still the role of catch-ups, and the gap is not small. On the basis of gradually cultivating the local market, the main factors for the "rise" of domestic stand-alone games at present are funds, users and communication environment.
Active capital is very important. In Yang Yang's view, the capital environment in front of the domestic stand-alone game industry is not worse than that of foreign countries, and even the capital activity is very high. In the past, only a few overseas manufacturers could spend more than 100 million US dollars to develop a game, and now there is such a possibility in China, and there is a high willingness to inflow funds. The difficulty, of course, is how to prove that a team can navigate such a project.
From about 2021, almost all the powerful teams in the industry have expanded on the original basis, and the capital has also shown more interest in domestic stand-alone games. Compared with the earlier investment in research and development of hundreds of thousands to millions, gradually tens of millions of projects began to appear, and even more than 100 million investments have also been heard. Some high-quality IP and companies accumulated by word of mouth have also climbed rapidly in valuation.
2021 China Travel Sales List Roundup / Photo: China Travel Sales List Weibo
Hu Jiangyang believes that another support for the development of domestic stand-alone machines comes from domestic users. Users of the age group from 85 to 95, when they were young, basically experienced a variety of domestic games, and were also affected by overseas games, they have feelings for domestic games and Chinese culture newspapers, and are the purchasing power and driving force for the development of domestic single-player games.
As a publisher, Ye Qianluo believes that the current communication environment is also one of the boosts for domestic stand-alone games. Many game media, platforms, and anchors are actively paying attention to and promoting domestic stand-alone games, and a considerable part of them are free. It's not hard to understand, they are just one of the emotional users mentioned above.
Based on this information, we can make a simple analysis of the development of domestic single-player games in recent years.
The development of top stand-alone games has invested tens of millions of dollars, and the development cost of AAA games such as "Red Dead Redemption 2" has reached 170 million US dollars. However, with the rapid development of mobile games and the more efficient input-output ratio, many traditional game manufacturers overseas are rethinking business matching.
The domestic environment is just inverted, the mobile game industry has come to the fore, rapidly occupying the global market, and stand-alone and console games have become a vacuum zone. Whether from the perspective of long-term strategy, short-term benefits, and user expectations, domestic stand-alone machines have their inevitability to fill the gaps.
Around 2015, domestic stand-alone games began a new round of testing the waters. For a considerable period of time, the developer's living environment, technical level, and publishing ability are far from being comparable to today's, and the story of independent game entrepreneurship in the category of emotional dreams is often reported. After a brutal survival of the fittest, about 90% of the game projects ended in failure, and of the remaining 10%, the vast majority of projects could only break even, and in the end, less than 1% of the projects enjoyed commercial and word-of-mouth harvests.
Correspondingly, in 2015, the scale of Steam users was 142 million, of which the number of domestic users was about 6 million. Investing in domestic stand-alone games was a promising "risk project" at that time.
Red Dead Redemption 2 cost nearly $170 million to develop / Image: Steam
In the following years, the emergence of blockbuster works and the growth of the Steam platform's own users began to inject vitality into domestic stand-alone games. Works such as "Lost Castle", "Ash", and "Taiwu Painted Scroll" have not only gradually increased the sales of domestic stand-alone games from 100,000 copies to one million copies, but also attracted more game developers and funds to invest in stand-alone game research and development. In 2015, the number of domestic stand-alone games on Steam was only a few dozen, and by 2021, this number has exceeded 700.
Also in this cycle, the user scale of the Steam platform has also experienced explosive growth. According to official data, the number of Steam registered accounts has exceeded 1 billion in 2021, and the number of monthly active players has exceeded 120 million. According to the calculations of different institutions such as Steamspy, as of 2018 alone, the number of domestic Steam users has exceeded 50 million.
High-quality products take the lead in success, play a demonstration effect, and then gradually have capital intervention to spawn more high-quality products. These excellent game works and the Steam platform promote each other and symbiosis, and the scale of the entire domestic stand-alone game market is gradually expanded. At present, capital's attention to single-player games is no longer a gamble on luck, as long as the selection is prudent, profit is a high probability event.
As for the shortcomings faced by domestic single-player games, the views of the above-mentioned industry insiders tend to be consistent - lack of talent and industrialization accumulation. Compared with foreign industries that tend to be mature, the domestic development team has no shortage of skilled and skilled producers, but it lacks a team with high run-in and maturity, and there is no industrialization foundation precipitated by overseas large factories. And once the best talent emerges, it also faces the risk of being poached by mobile game manufacturers.
In addition, policy pressures remain. Last week, the news of the layoff of ByteDance's war investment department came out, hu Jiangyang speculated that due to the impact of policies, tencent, B station and other head companies may slow down the investment in stand-alone games, and medium-sized companies such as Heartbeat, Thunder, and Coconut Island are not restricted, but the total amount of funds is limited.
Face the pressure
With the rapid development of the industry, there will naturally be no shortage of problems. After the list was announced, the list's description of the EA model (Early Access, a preemptive payment model in which games are sold at a preferential price in advance during development and promises development goals and schedules) has sparked a lot of discussion.
For independent game development, the original intention of the EA model is unquestionable, and its help to developers is mainly twofold: to survive the early period of financial difficulties, and to achieve co-research with users in the development process to deliver better products.
But in practice, the EA model is actually a kind of advance payment similar to crowdfunding, with user trust, and trust is not one-to-one, nor overnight. When most projects can maintain this trust, the EA model is in a virtuous circle, and when a certain percentage of projects cannot be delivered on time and with quality, breaking user trust, the EA model will also be questioned. The boundary between the two may lie whether the development team will use EA to complete research and development more smoothly, or whether it is intended to use EA to recover costs first. Building on the existing EA model, the Steam platform may need to build more granular rules to allow the EA model to have access and oversight. Development teams also need to use the EA model cautiously to prevent credit collapse and backlash.
EA pattern example/image: Steam
In addition, another problem that domestic manufacturers need to consider is how to resolve the pressure from users. Domestic stand-alone games started backward, but domestic players have been baptized by Steam for many years and have a high game aesthetic. From the perspective of manufacturers, gradually improving the quality of the game is the safest route; but a considerable proportion of domestic players have been expecting a "god work" to appear, directly rewriting the history of domestic stand-alone games. This contradiction will exist for a long time in the field of domestic stand-alone games in the future.
Excessive pressure can lead development teams to make unnecessary choices, such as Paladin VII – using Unreal Engine 4 and reforming it to just-in-time combat, which magnifies technical flaws. So how to deal with this dislocation, balancing game development and user expectations, will be a unique test that domestic manufacturers must face.