In recent times, everyone may be numbed by the news of Tencent's global acquisition of game developers, just a few days ago, Tencent just announced the acquisition of a wholly-owned acquisition of Canadian start-up game developer "Inflexion Games", and just two days later, there is news that as early as November 2021, Tencent has acquired the Polish game developer and publisher, and produced the "King's Gift" series "1C Entertainment".
According to relevant information, Tencent has accelerated its investment and acquisition of game manufacturers at home and abroad in the past year. In the whole of 2020, Tencent invested only 33 in the game field, and by 2021, Tencent had acquired and invested in more than 100 game companies, which is equivalent to investing in a game company every 3 days, and more investment was concentrated in the second half of the year, creating the fastest "investment acquisition" record in the world. Many netizens are curious why Tencent is so crazy to invest and acquire game manufacturers, the main reason may be related to the "meta-universe" frenzy that began last year and Tencent's own technical accumulation shortcomings.
In March 2021, Roblox, known as the "first stock in the meta-universe", went public, creating a staggering price-earnings ratio, and then, Facebook changed its name to Meta, high-profile into the meta-universe, hyping this concept into a new outlet in the Internet industry, for a while, the global Internet technology companies have squeezed their heads towards the field of the meta-universe to drill, Tencent is naturally no exception. But after trying to contact the metaverse, Tencent pessimistically discovered a fact - in this field that should have been its home field, everything that was originally not played could be played.
In a sense, Tencent for the meta-universe, is a unique advantage, as one of the investors of Roblox, Tencent for the first time agent issued the domestic version of "Robles", but this product was only three months after the launch, it was announced by Tencent to stop registration and stop testing... The most fundamental reason is that although Tencent is already the game company with the strongest revenue capacity in the world, it itself relies heavily on social networks to promote the game, and the accumulation of game technology is not outstanding, and it is limited by the hard indicators of revenue of tencent's system itself, and its products also seriously show the characteristics of homogenization and kryptonite, and only adapt to specific user groups.
Aware of its shortcomings in the metaverse, Tencent can only adopt a "snapping" model, hoping to acquire a large number of start-up game companies to bet on teams that can produce technological breakthroughs and win a "meta-universe" future for itself. Sitting on the Golden Mountain but can only do this clumsy, it is really a bit of a miscellaneous taste.
With a distinct counterpart to Tencent, it is NetEase. As a game company that has been "competing with each other" with Tencent for many years, NetEase has been adhering to the development strategy of "re-researching", and its investment and layout in the field of technology are quite deep. This technological accumulation, in the face of the nascent concept of the metaverse, also reveals its unique advantages. As early as a few months ago, NetEase was already recruiting virtual scene construction engineers, face pinchers and other positions, and Ding Lei also said on the earnings call that although the meta-universe has not yet been contacted, NetEase has been prepared at the technical and planning levels. Further, NetEase's ancient style online game "Against the Water Cold" itself is even the earliest online game in China to try the application of the meta-universe.
Speaking of "Against the Cold Water", it is also a big name in the domestic game circle, and this game is the ancient style online game with the best domestic graphic performance and the most application of "black technology". In 2020, NetEase hosted the 20th China Virtual Reality Conference, considering the traffic obstacles caused by the epidemic, NetEase decided to hold the second international distributed artificial intelligence academic conference DAI in "Against the Cold Water", and organized technical teams from multiple departments under it to break through many technical difficulties in just a few months.
With the cooperation of various departments of NetEase, the conference held in the virtual world of "Against the Water Cold" finally realized the functions of ready-to-use web pages, in-game playback PPT, and more than 300 people online at the same time in each venue scene, bringing participants an immersive experience of "immersive", which seems to be a game but closely links virtual and reality, which happens to be the foundation of the "meta-universe". It may be that there has been such a successful attempt that NetEase President Ding Lei will confidently say that on the day when the meta-universe comes, NetEase has the confidence to run faster than anyone.
Compared with NetEase, Tencent's anxiety can be understood. In this urgent state of mind, Tencent frantically launched a "buy, buy and buy", do you think it can really buy a future for yourself