Under the restart of the game version and the delisting of Penguin E-sports, Tencent Games once again stood at a crossroads.
Written by | Zhao Weiwei
After 263 days, the domestic game version number was restarted.
On the evening of April 11, the official website of the State Press and Publication Administration announced the approval of domestic online games in April 2022, and 45 new domestic games received version numbers, and the approval time for payment was April 8.
The games that got the new version include "Junior Three Kingdoms: Pocket Battle" of Youzu Network, "Tower Hunter" of Gigabit subsidiary Thunder Network, "Sword Net 3 Origin" of Xishanju, "Party Star" of Heartbeat Company, "Dream Voyage" of 37 Mutual Entertainment, etc.
This signal is undoubtedly a boost to the game industry, but some people in the game industry have shown calmness, believing that the game version number will still be tightened in the medium and long term, and the game projects that have not yet been established will remain tense.
It is worth noting that tencent and netease game products do not appear in the list. In the coming period, the uncertainty faced by Tencent Games remains to be solved.
At the end of March this year, the SLG (strategy) mobile game "Return to Empire" was officially launched, which is a game jointly developed by Tencent Tianmei Studio Group and Microsoft Xbox Game Studios, and quickly climbed to the top of the App Store free list on the day of launch.
Tencent and Microsoft join forces, naturally thousands of pets in one, you can borrow Professor Jin Canrong to borrow the topic to play the war strategy, you can also borrow the Internet celebrity Luo Yonghao to do advertising endorsement show a spoof marketing.
Intensive promotion has been laid out, not only in Tencent's QQ, WeChat and app treasure markets with huge traffic will see the exposure of this game, douyin, Kuaishou and other short video and live broadcast platforms, "Return to Empire" has also become one of the popular mobile games promoted by game anchors.
But the reputation is not satisfactory, even before the launch of "Return to the Empire", the producer Brayden wrote two open letters in response to the feedback obtained during the test, the APP Store and Tap tap are not excellent ratings, or revealed the player's pickiness about this SLG game, after all, in the field of SLG games, Tencent has already had "The King of Chaos" and "Under the Red Map" a number of game works, the overall performance can not be said to be outstanding.
New works are easy to get, good works are hard to have, and the "blockbuster" games that are more worth waiting for are far from coming.
Also produced by Tencent's Tianmei Studio, it will also be launched in 2022, and two new games under the "Glory of Kings" IP universe have long been satisfied with the appetite of players, one "Codename: Breaking Dawn", one "Glory of kings • world", both of which have only exposed a few sets of live videos, and have been pinned on high hopes, known as the "Tencent version of the original god" that will be open world.
Will the new game become the "Tencent version of the original god"? It is still too early to make a conclusion, but the industry's desire to break the existing pattern is true.
However, under the restart of the game version and the delisting of Penguin E-sports, the high uncertainty of the industry still exists, and Tencent Games once again stands at a crossroads.
1
Overseas inbound volumes
The basic disk of Tencent Games is still relatively stable, and the latest data report released by Sensor Tower shows that in the first quarter of 2022, the global mobile game revenue ranking, the top three are still the old faces who are stable and steady.
The first place is not surprisingly the Glory of the King, which ranks first with a revenue of 735 million US dollars (about 4.67 billion yuan), and since becoming the global mobile game revenue champion in 2017, "Glory of the King" has been a stable "gold absorbing weapon" for Tencent games for many years.
Second place also came from Tencent, where PUBG (which combined peace elite revenue) surpassed third place Mihayou's Original God with a score of $643 million (about 4.09 billion yuan).
Even so, Tencent is not without its worries.
The data of self-developed IP games such as Mihayou's "Original God" and Lilith's "Awakening of All Nations" are constantly impacting the market share of Tencent games. Especially during the Spring Festival in 2022, with the revenue of "Glory of Kings" soaring by 92%, a large number of game data have ushered in a highlight moment.
In particular, sensor Tower data shows that in January 2022, the top three in the ranking of Chinese mobile game products in overseas market revenue and downloads are Miha you's "Original God", Tencent's "PUBG" and Lilith's "Awakening of All Nations".
In particular, "Original God", once the highest-grossing mobile game overseas, reached $230 million in overseas revenue on mobile in September 2021, breaking the monthly revenue record set by mobile games in October 2020.
Overseas markets have become a must for domestic game manufacturers, and there is already a trend to accelerate involution, and the international game business has become one of Tencent's current three major strategies, the other two are SaaS (software as a service) and WeChat video number.
Of course, vigorously expanding overseas markets is also because the domestic market is affected by the version number and supervision and many other reasons, and the 2018 version number frozen approval for eight months, the July 2021 version of the suspension of the game industry once again encountered adjustments and reflections, the game industry people generally expressed concern about the version number crisis, game stocks have also ushered in a decline.
But Tencent also has its own countermeasures, in the early 2022 Tencent Game Academy internal sharing, Tencent senior vice president Ma Xiaoyi mentioned that overseas emerging markets are experiencing similar opportunities from 2011 to 2014 outbreaks.
Tencent Games has begun to significantly strengthen regional capabilities, including the deployment of local teams in many regions, such as Tianmei Studio and Photonic Studios have set up self-developed studios overseas, "so the investment of teams in these regions into a structure and scale is a very big focus."
From Tencent's financial report, the fourth quarter of 2021 in the international market game revenue of 13.2 billion yuan, the growth rate reached 34%, international revenue accounted for 30.8%, the annual view, the international market game revenue increased by 31%, reached 45.5 billion yuan, much higher than the domestic market growth of 6%, when the domestic market and the international market from Tencent financial report separately disclosed, it indicates a strong market space in the overseas market.
The problem is that competition in overseas markets is not easy, Tencent Games hopes that overseas market revenue will account for 50% of total game revenue in the future, and now there is still a long way to go from this goal, and NetEase Games has previously expressed similar goals.
More importantly, the rise of Shanghai game companies such as Mihayou and Lilith has broken the dominant position of Tencent and NetEase in the game industry, and has greater ambitions.
2
Investment pathfinding
The rise of Mihayou has made "Tencent miss the original god" a hot topic of discussion in the outside world.
The drama is that under the absolute advantage of Tencent Games, Mihayou completely bypassed the traditional distribution channels such as Tencent's app store, chose to publish games on the official website, B station and TapTap, and finally achieved the second position in the world in terms of revenue. What we saw later was that Tencent Games, which smelled insecurity, had become known for its more aggressive "buy, buy, buy" strategy over the past two years.
According to the statistics of Gamma Data (CNG) on the investment amount disclosed by the TOP10 companies in the number of investments in 2020-2021, Tencent's funds in the game investment market exceeded 40 billion yuan, which is equivalent to nearly 80% of the investment amount of the entire industry.
In fact, there are also many game investment cases that do not disclose the amount of investment, and ByteDance's investment in the past two years is equally aggressive, acquiring two high-quality companies such as Mu Hitomi Technology and Youai Interactive Entertainment in 2021, and also investing in more than ten small and medium-sized game companies such as Dreamway Information and Yomi Interactive.
Internet companies represented by Tencent and Byte have spared no effort in investment and acquisition, hoping to incorporate high-quality game companies into their own umbrellas. But the problem is that more and more independent self-developed game companies refuse to be manipulated by large companies, not only tencent or byte, but also the possibility of losing independent development.
Previously, a Game Company in Shanghai developed a game for three years that was about to go online, and the demo version caused great heat and attracted the attention of many game companies, but the big companies were disappointed, and its founder said, "As long as you can call out the name of the company have found us, but we want to do it ourselves, whether it is domestic or overseas, we do it ourselves."
Investment as a way for game companies to explore the way, for self-developed small and medium-sized game companies, the future represented by Mihayou and Lilith is obviously more attractive than being invested by large companies.
When the target of Tencent's game investment has been filled with China's game industry, the self-developed companies that refuse to be invested by giants often become a symbol of independent power in the Chinese game market, and the products they have worked hard to create often have personality traits that mainstream manufacturers do not have, so they also have a more high-quality construction.
When Chinese game companies with independent consciousness are unwilling to accept the pull of giants, Tencent Games is increasingly extending its investment vision to overseas markets. In 2018, Tencent launched an investment project called TGIF (Tencent Gameplay Innovation Fund) to find small-scale innovation teams around the world.
In 2022, Tencent kept moving, acquiring Canadian game studio Inflexion Games, investing in Australian NFT company Immutable, and New Zealand manufacturer Riffraff Games. Throughout 2021, Tencent has continued to recruit game manufacturers with AAA-level blockbuster potential around the world, whether it is Russia, Japan, the United Kingdom or France, by investing in card slot-related game tracks, the number of investments is far greater than ever.
Of course, the results of the bet are gradually revealed, such as Tencent's partnership with Roblox in 2019 and then choose to buy shares, such as choosing to become Snap's largest external shareholder, Snap is now thriving in the AR field. Such an operation allows Tencent Games to have many possibilities for global success in overseas markets, so as to create an industrialization capability of "global research and development + global distribution".
3
Unsure signal
Once again, uncertain signals from the gaming industry are emerging.
On April 7, Tencent's Penguin Esports announced its delisting and will terminate its operations on June 7, 2022. Founded in 2016, this mobile esports content platform has gone through the most brilliant years of the live broadcasting industry.
In the past decade, game live broadcasting has played an important role in promoting the promotion and release of games, and many new games have often entered the field of vision of a wider range of players because of the drive of well-known game live broadcasting, thus forming a broad market, and the holding of e-sports events such as The Glory of the King and league of legends has made e-sports entertainment content have a wide appeal in the hearts of countless young people.
As Tencent's self-built live broadcast platform, Penguin E-sports, although one step behind the opponents of live broadcast tracks such as Douyu and Huya, is still an important part of Tencent's game business, carrying the key role of Tencent's game content ecology and traffic conversion.
Tencent has previously disclosed the commercialization data of Tencent e-sports. In the first half of 2019, tencent e-sports's events in the copyright licensing revenue of 370 million yuan, the total sponsorship reached 440 million yuan, a total of nearly 900 million yuan, of which the best commercialization effect of the event is undoubtedly the League of Legends LPL and the Glory of the King KPL, League of Legends peripheral products and league sponsorship income have reached the level of 100 million yuan.
E-sports is indeed a good business, especially for Tencent Games, when Penguin E-sports was founded, the commercial sponsorship was only 0.6 billion, and three years later this figure reached 440 million, an increase of 633.3%. This figure was not lethal compared to the Huya and Douyu that were listed at the time, and only showed Tencent's potential opportunities in the field of e-sports.
However, with Douyu and Huya accepting the merger invitation of the major shareholder Tencent in 2020, this invitation was later suspended due to anti-monopoly review, and Tencent's plans in the field of e-sports were completely disrupted. This uncertainty has caused Penguin Esports to gradually marginalize, and the business has been shrinking, so that at the beginning of this year, the news of frequent departures of anchors was reported.
Anti-monopoly review, together with the once-suspended game version number, juvenile anti-addiction supervision and other issues, constitute a high degree of uncertainty in Tencent Games, and how to transform the crisis brought about by uncertainty into a stable imperial moat is the biggest test facing Tencent Games in the future.
Of course, there are also opportunities in the high degree of uncertainty, depending only on who it is.
Just like Yao Xiaoguang, who did not join Tencent before that year, joined Shanda with a 3D engine and became the chief producer of "Miracle", on the wall of the research and development department, he posted a slogan: "Let us quietly surpass BLIZZARD (Blizzard Entertainment)", when Yao Xiaoguang became the father of "Glory of Kings", this slogan was still taken out by posterity to show that the dreams of domestic game producers are ambitious.
Today, for the young people in Mihayouli, who focus on creating two-dimensional games, they choose to reject the investment of Tencent and Byte, which is also a kind of dream.
Reviewer | Chen Qiulin
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