Overseas distribution is back

Image source @ Visual China

Text | Gamewower

According to Xiamen Daily, the special cultivation of "Game Going to sea" sponsored by NetEase Xiamen Digital Industry Center was recently launched, and the activity will help the Xiamen game creation team to open up overseas markets through a 3-6 months of training and ecological resource docking.

Under the choice of survival open source, after the game company clarifies the strategic necessity of going to sea, the next step needs to be solved" where is the problem? How to come out? "Follow-up questions. At this stage, the needs of some SMEs that lack corresponding experience and cannot afford additional costs have once again promoted the development of overseas issuance-related businesses.

Prior to this, the focus of the head enterprises on overseas was more focused on investment and acquisition, self-research on specific categories, and cooperation with overseas traditional manufacturers in IP, etc., while the focus of the NetEase Xiamen Digital Industry Center was to help the small and medium-sized game creation team to open up overseas markets.

At the end of last year, the game value theory on the launch of the Level Infinite brand mentioned that this means that Tencent Games' business for overseas markets has gone from a single breakthrough in overseas markets in the past to the integration of investment, research and development and distribution today, forming a systematic, systematic and industrialization process of overseas business.

Demand-driven development, the release of this role in the domestic game market development ups and downs. After gaining new core advantages, it is foreseeable that whether it is a separate business team or a head enterprise that has already developed and operated as a whole, it will become a new trend to integrate more forces into overseas issuance business.

Demand-driven development

From the perspective of role, publishing as a part of the industry, the key is to help the game sell better. Whether there is a need for independent existence around the distribution link, the domestic attitude has also undergone a 360-degree change.

In the early days of the mobile game outbreak, some publishing companies relied on one or two games to even achieve listing, such as Kaiying, Blue Harbor, Kunlun Wanwei, Leju and so on. After 2015, a large number of issuing companies collapsed, many R & D teams that tasted the taste of success chose to embark on the road of integration of research and transportation, self-research and spontaneity, and the original distribution business-based enterprises also began to transform through acquisitions or internal formation of R & D teams, and the industry appeared similar to the "simple distribution company lacks sufficient value" view.

In terms of development logic, game publishing has always been driven by demand, as an intermediate link between research and development and users (traffic), using the information gap between the two sides to provide corresponding services, and its decline is not difficult to understand.

With the maturity of the development of the industry, R & D for traffic and user acquisition understanding continues to increase, on the other hand, under the pressure of product competition, as a traffic provider, channels, advertising and marketing platforms and other active contact with R & D parties to provide services, with their own distribution business, naturally squeezing the original middleman's living space.

We can see that the teams that are still in the inbound issuance business before and after 2020 often bring their own traffic, including live broadcast platforms such as Huya and Kuaishou, and traffic platforms such as B station and Byte.

Now in the era of collective overseas, the logic of overseas distribution is the same as before, the cultural market environment in different regions, user preferences and habits, marketing strategies and traffic acquisition methods and other information differences have given the distribution team a new living space, and on the overseas-related sharing forums, there will often be advertising marketing analysis companies, Meta Google and other delivery platforms including cross-border payments and other distribution teams.

Upgraded cooperation and competition

The game value theory in the article "Overseas Competition, Local Protection and Game Enterprises Sandwiched in It" mentions that for many different purposes such as regulating and rectifying the market and protecting local enterprises, local governments' policies on game market supervision are not the same, which will inevitably affect the trade-offs of enterprises. With the expansion of the scope of development, local, especially important market-related policy changes are unavoidable real problems, and enterprises need to face these difficulties and make choices.

Compared with the domestic market competition, the complexity of market research information caused by the number of regions has increased exponentially, which also means that the game companies want to learn and grow to obtain the cognitive cost of the target market is higher the cost of time and energy, in the era of intensified competition and rapid rise in product costs, many head companies have chosen to open new studios or form teams overseas, including talents, costs, policies and many other comprehensive considerations behind them to cooperate to cope with possible development needs.

However, for small and medium-sized teams, it is necessary to find shortcuts to reduce the burden and reduce risk, and this demand has further spawned the growth of overseas issuance-related businesses.

Through comparison, we can better understand the changes and upgrades of internal and external releases. The ability of domestic channels to find quantity has become to find better solutions to the marketing mix of different regions and international platforms and provide one-stop, integrated services; for example, Huawei's HMS Overseas Ecosystem Alliance and Byte, which have international channels, can continue to replicate the domestic model; upstream penetration of the distribution direction provides more targeted suggestions for product development and technology.

Previously, the focus of most game manufacturers was still on how to better compete for traffic in the stock market, whether domestic or foreign, the soaring price of traffic also increased the burden of competition, looking for new high-quality traffic and in-depth utilization is a common problem of manufacturers, channels and publishers.

This has also spawned the development of private domain traffic and the initiative of the traffic platform to go deeper into the operation and research and development links, in addition to promoting the deepening of resources and forms, providing more resources and traffic, and actively studying how to contribute to improving user conversion (providing user research and analysis). This service upgrade is also one of the core advantages of Tencent, NetEase and other leading enterprises in opening overseas distribution business.

In the overseas distribution business, the support and service advantages given by Tencent are: from technology empowerment to research and development support, from "service game (GaaS)" to global market insights, including e-sports system capabilities and global multi-regional distribution.

Compared with the channel resources owned by China, Tencent NetEase's R&D and technical advantages accumulated through overseas exploration are the key to attracting small and medium-sized teams to cooperate overseas. Of course, this ability also needs to be dialectically viewed, and in the field of stand-alone and mainframe, there are also publishers who suggest that the R&D team should limit their development ideas too much.

In summary, under the inevitable trend of going to sea, the actual needs of small and medium-sized teams and the exponential information gap in overseas markets have further enhanced the necessity of overseas issuance business, and even more leading enterprises will consider developing this part of the business to cooperate to cope with competition. As mentioned earlier, under the wave of competition globalization, China's leading game companies will accelerate their brand building and upgrading, make up for their original lack to meet the needs of the market. Brand building needs products, and self-research takes time, to some extent, with high-quality products and new teams to establish contact and cooperation to go to sea, not only let the team accumulate experience, but also to accelerate their own international brand cultivation, quickly build awareness of a means.