After 8 months, the website of the State Press and Publication Administration finally announced the approval information of domestic online games in April 2022, and a total of 45 games received version numbers. On April 12, the stock prices of A-share listed companies with related game businesses generally rose, and many securities companies also released research reports to be optimistic about the game sector, and the market sentiment was temporarily excited. However, the author believes that it may be too early to be too optimistic about the future of the game industry, because the idea of strong game supervision has not changed, and the future development path of the industry has yet to be explored. In order to curb the profit-seeking impulse of some game companies, the entire game industry is the only way to strengthen supervision, and the industry ecology that has exploded and grown barbarically since the 4G era may be difficult to reproduce.
Whether it is the 2018 or 2021 version of the brakes, the focus is on the rectification of the chaos in the game industry, "the game has been growing barbarically for a long time, at that time, as long as the game does not step on the red line of laws and regulations, there are too many inferior games, and it will bring the danger of collapse to the industry in the long run." ”
In the future, the game industry will be more inclined to high-quality content to games, and head game companies with strong research and development capabilities are expected to maintain competitiveness. Therefore, the future game market or further concentrated to the head, with talent and resource advantages, the number of head manufacturers to get the number of version numbers and capabilities than small factories are much greater.
Parallel with the boutique is to go to sea, in the case of the peak of the traffic dividend, the contraction of the version number, the game to the sea has been the top priority of many game manufacturers, starting in the second half of last year, the urgency of game companies to go to sea has risen sharply. Tencent upgraded the overseas version of Arena of Valor to an important strategic project, and the investment budget has also doubled. The Tianmei Studio Group and the Photonic Studio Group have also set up new self-research studios in many overseas places. Tencent's goal is to account for 50% of the total revenue of the game in overseas markets.
NetEase CEO Ding Lei issued a "summons order" to collect global game talents and accelerate the development of overseas markets. ByteDance has spent nearly 5 billion yuan to acquire Mu Hitomi Technology, the latter's Mobile Legends has been suppressing the overseas version of "Glory of kings" in the Southeast Asian market.
NetDragon, a veteran game manufacturer in a corner of Fujian, saw its overseas revenue increase by 7.9% year-on-year last year, and NetDragon said it would continue to replicate and expand Conquest's successful operating model in Egypt and expand into the Philippines, the United States, Canada and Saudi Arabia. In addition, in view of the fact that MOBA is one of the most popular game categories in the world, it believes that its other flagship game with more than 200 million domestic registered users, "Soul Blade", also contains huge overseas market potential. Therefore, efforts will be stepped up to expand the game into new overseas markets such as Pakistan and Vietnam. At the same time, it is planned to launch the first overseas version of the Final Oath in the Southeast Asian market in the second half of 2022. As for whether the Demon Domain is going to sea, there is no official information.
In addition to the above, domestic game manufacturers such as Mihayou, FunPlus, Lilith, IGG and other domestic game manufacturers also have long-term experience in going overseas and good research and development strength, and have achieved good results in overseas markets.
According to the report of the Game Working Committee of the China Music and Digital Association, in 2021, the scale of China's self-developed mobile games going to sea was 18 billion US dollars, an increase of 16.6% year-on-year, and in the first half of 2021, 23.4% of overseas TOP 2000 mobile game publishers came from China, an increase of 3.6% year-on-year.
Although the release of the version number has been reopened, concerns about the tightening of future review standards remain. Analysts at a number of brokerages believe that the general trend of Chinese game companies going overseas will not change.
In addition, policy factors are only one of the reasons for the large-scale overseas of game companies. From the market level, the domestic mobile game market has also faced fierce competition in the Red Sea and is in urgent need of new traffic pools.
To put it simply, the game user dividend in the domestic market has basically touched the ceiling. According to the Data of the Game Working Committee, in 2021, the penetration rate of mobile game users in China will be close to 100%. Last year, the number of game users in China reached 666 million, an increase of only 0.22% year-on-year. In the past few years, although the growth of users has been slow, the user scale has mostly increased by tens of millions of dollars per year, and the increase in last year has not changed much compared with 2020.
At the same time, the revenue growth rate of overseas games last year (16.6%) was much higher than the overall level of the country (6.51%). From the demand side, the overseas mobile game market space is twice the size of the domestic mobile game market, compared with the level of 70% penetration rate of Chinese mobile game players, the penetration rate of mobile game players in the main markets in Europe and the United States in 2021 is only about 40-50%, and there is still a lot of room for improvement in overseas mobile game penetration and payment.
In short, the version restart is a life-saving fresh air for domestic game companies that have been suffocating for a long time, but its oxygen content is also very thin. In the future, it is not surprising that more games will be born entirely designed and built for overseas markets, and a new battle will unfold in exotic markets.