Text/Yiting Chen
Morning notice, afternoon departure, I am afraid that no company is more crisp than Huya cutting people.
The international business cut 70%, the domestic business cut 20%, pinch the finger, a total of only 2,000 employees of the tiger tooth, almost 1/4 cut. You think this is the ceiling for layoffs? Douyu waved a big hand and laid off 30% of the staff. It is worthy of being a difficult brother in the game live broadcasting industry, and the layoffs are more than one fierce.
How did it lay off again? Don't ask, ask is to reduce costs and increase efficiency, ask is normal optimization, and then ask is congratulations on graduation. The most fatal reason is that the company has no money. In the fourth quarter of last year, Huya achieved a turnaround, with a net loss of 313 million; Douyu was even worse, losing 5 consecutive quarters and losing 400 million yuan last year.
How shocking the financial report is, how crisp and clean the layoffs are. The first to bear the brunt are those departments that burn money, such as the international department that expands outward, the ministry of commerce that expands its business, and the operation department that is extremely expensive, and then cuts down all those inexperienced fresh graduates.
But even so, the days of tiger tooth fighting fish are very difficult. After all, this year's game live broadcast can be described as debuff stacked.
Last year, the state tightened supervision of the live broadcasting industry, blocking more than 7,200 anchors and restricting the rewards for minors' live broadcasts. Losing the underage market, to be honest, has little impact on the game live broadcasting platform. From 2018 to 2021, the contribution rate of Douyu's live broadcast revenue has increased by 7 percentage points.
The real crisis is that the state "strictly prohibits the dissemination of illegal games by online audiovisual platforms", what does this mean? Games that don't get a version number will no longer exist on the live streaming platform.
However, since july last year, the game version has been suspended for 263 days, during which nearly 2,000 companies have collapsed. There are no new games for more than two hundred days, not to mention whether the anchor will be tired of playing, and the audience is tired of watching. The absence of new games means that there are no new users, and it also means that the platform can only rely on old games.
"Glory of Kings", "Peace Elite", "League of Legends", these three hottest games, the copyright is in the hands of Tencent. Tencent has copyright, Huya Douyu has traffic, then the best way is to merge the two into Tencent's command.
For this merger, Tencent laid out for 3 years, successively invested in Huya and Douyu, becoming their largest shareholder and having actual controlling rights. According to the plan, the new company after the merger will gain 80% of the market share in the pure game live broadcast product, seeing that a behemoth is about to form, I did not expect to encounter anti-monopoly, and the merger was stopped.
The failure of the merger had little impact on Tencent, but caused a devastating blow to Douyu, first the stock price fell all the way, and the market value shrank by more than 90% compared with the high point in 2021; then, The co-founder of Douyu, Zhang Wenming, left his job. On the other hand, Huya also spent 2 billion yuan to buy LPL exclusive broadcast rights, resulting in the platform operation being overwhelmed.
After losing the scale advantage of the merger, the Tiger Tooth Fighting Fish not only had to fight with each other, but also resisted foreign invasions. B station, Kuaishou, and Douyin are all laying out the game live. The user scale of these platforms is hundreds of millions, not only the financial strength is far more than that of Huya Douyu, but also poaching their anchor resources.
One of the most determined is the b station, invited the CEO of Big Goose Culture, COO from the command of live broadcast, spent 800 million to buy the League of Legends live broadcast copyright, poached the douyu sister Feng Timo, the result we also know, not very ideal, recently b station live broadcast business is also a layoff optimization.
Since 2020, the number of paying users in Huya and Douyu has decreased. The entry of giants not only divides up their anchor resources, but also steals the attention of users. As a game vertical live broadcast platform, Huya Douyu has a relatively small audience, but the loyalty of spending money is high, and now the user traffic has peaked, and even the suspicion of running away is undoubtedly a heavy blow.
Unexpectedly, the two big brothers of this game live broadcast met again because of layoffs, which is really regrettable.