Author 丨 Gao Shi
Edit 丨Ling Fox
Original 丨 game hunting
At a time when the web of policy regulation is tightening day by day, two news that should not be too related in business logic can be reasonably linked.
Interesting.
One or two news, some questions
What does it mean that an online game accelerator can only accelerate the national service game?
On April 13, Tencent Online Game Accelerator announced that due to the adjustment of business operation strategy, from May 31, "Tencent Online Game Accelerator" will be upgraded to "Tencent Game Manager" and gradually stop the old version of the service.
The most important thing is that after the product upgrade, it will only support the acceleration of the national service game.
In the current online game network environment, the biggest role of an online game accelerator is to reduce the network latency caused by the remote distance of the external service game server. In other words, an online game accelerator that can't speed up the game is essentially no different from a refrigerator that won't refrigerate.
This "upgrade" means that Tencent will abandon this online game accelerator business. Judging from the online game accelerator products currently on the market, the Xunyou Accelerator with guiyang state-owned background will undertake more acceleration services for Tencent's mainstream game products.
I have to say that in the special context of the mainland Internet, the big factory can always play out the words we are familiar with. Following the use of "Fu Bao" instead of "overtime" and "graduation" instead of "layoffs", this time it is Tencent's turn to replace "cutting business" with "upgrade".
It is not uncommon for large manufacturers to adjust their business lines, and the simplest reason is usually not to make money, and the general operation is to slowly downsize and reduce the priority of resources.
However, when a business is not profitable and the policy risk is high, it often faces the end of the online game accelerator business being directly "one pot end".
Just two days after Tencent's announcement, a Notice on Strengthening the Management of Game Live Broadcasting on Online Audiovisual Program Platforms (hereinafter referred to as the Notice) was published by the State Administration of Radio and Television.
The notice believes that "for some time, problems such as the chaos of online live broadcasting and the addiction of young people to games have aroused widespread concern in society, and it is urgent to take effective measures to strictly regulate them." ”
Therefore, it is necessary to standardize the live broadcast of games from many aspects, including strictly prohibiting the dissemination of illegal games and strengthening the management of the broadcast of game live broadcast content. Among them, the notice further emphasizes that "all kinds of online audio-visual programs shall not broadcast online games without the approval of the competent authorities".
Similar regulatory provisions are not new in the field of audiovisual content on the mainland. Needless to say, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) and the former Ministry of Culture have not been soft on the legislative amendments.
This new notice is only to extend the hand of supervision a little and more clearly extend to the field of game live broadcasting, which is also in line with the consistent style of relevant departments.
However, when Tencent, known as the industry weather vane, opens its business adjustment, it encounters relevant regulatory policies at the same time, such coincidences are often easy to make people think, and it is difficult to maintain rational thinking:
Is Tencent's exit this time a simple business adjustment, or is it releasing some kind of signal? From "unplayable" to "unplayable", how much time is left for the industry and players in between? Under regulation, where will the future of the industry go?
II. "The Life of the Abandoned Tencent Online Game Accelerator"
In fact, the death of Tencent's online game accelerator can already be seen from the two "industry events" last year
First, at the beginning of last year, Tencent's online game accelerator was publicly executed for "selling pirates".
In March 2021, some players found that Tencent's online game accelerator sold the offline version of the game "Ghost Valley Eight Wilds" in its own prop mall, with a list price of only 2.8 yuan.
The so-called offline version of the game operation logic, this is to use the Steam account to buy the genuine "Ghost Valley Eight Wilds" (original price of 68 yuan), and then share the account to the players who buy the offline version; because all purchasers use offline mode to play, bypassing the Steam online verification mechanism, so an account can theoretically be shared with a large number of players at the same time.
In simple terms, this kind of behavior is to openly sell pirated games under the guise of renting accounts.
The incident quickly fermented on the Internet, and the outside world also raised the behavior of Tencent's online game accelerator to the level of Tencent's values.
Passages such as "I saw half of the people in the comment area scolding Tencent, I am sad, the other half of the people do not have keyboards" became a regular in the relevant news comment area.
Although Tencent Online Game Accelerator subsequently issued an "apology" statement and said that it had taken down the relevant games, the incident caused incalculable damage to Tencent's corporate image.
This piracy storm laid the groundwork for the fate of Tencent's online game accelerator to be "beaten into the cold palace" in the future.
The Notice on Further Strict Management and Effective prevention of minors' addiction to online games, issued at the end of August last year, became a "trial letter" announcing the death penalty of Tencent's online game accelerator.
This new notice, known as "the strictest anti-addiction in history", not only puts forward stricter real-name authentication requirements for the online real-name system, but also directly gives the near-strict requirement of "minors playing games for up to three hours per week per person".
With the introduction of the new regulations, the entire industry quickly responded to the call. Identify minors through real-time face recognition technology, prohibit minors under 12 years of age from recharging... Through endless "self-castration", game companies handed over their respective submissions to the regulatory authorities.
At the same time, a "Self-Discipline Convention on Anti-Addiction in Online Games" that has little legal effect was introduced.
The convention explicitly mentions "resolutely resisting the bypass of regulatory mechanisms and providing services to domestic users through overseas game platforms". This industry convention, with the "strictest anti-addiction in history" East Wind, will directly point the spearhead of supervision to the online game accelerator.
As a result, Tencent's online game accelerator, which has long been reduced to a marginal business after experiencing the "piracy incident", officially opened the countdown to death.
First of all, in the second half of last year, many Tencent online game accelerator users found that the client's network nodes quietly stopped updating, and did not accelerate the entrance for the launch of new games.
Subsequently, the media began to report on a large area that large manufacturers led by Tencent and NetEase began to gradually remove the e-commerce recharge channels of accelerator services. Of course, we can now see that NetEase UU is still rapidly expanding its user territory as the head product of the accelerator market after dodging a round of regulatory limelight.
The fate of Tencent's online game accelerator is completely different.
After the wave of regulation in August and September last year, Tencent's online game accelerator has died out in name only. Combined with Tencent executives mentioned at the earnings conference last month, the current market environment has changed from aggressive expansion to "cost reduction and efficiency increase". The "upgrade" announcement on April 13 can also be said to be a performance art in which Tencent borrowed the knife of policy supervision to cut down the necrotic business.
Third, the online game accelerator, more than "acceleration"
Online game accelerator is one of the few businesses in the industry that can still live in the "gray area" "justifiably".
In the early stages of the development of online games, due to infrastructure reasons such as chaotic network architecture and different levels of maintenance of operators in various places, it was difficult for end-game players to achieve game interconnection across a large geographical span and between different network operators.
In order to alleviate the resulting phenomenon of game stuttering and disconnection, a service platform that provides users with fast and secure connection to game servers through virtual private networks came into being, which is the various types of online game accelerators we see now.
Since the main working principle of online game accelerator is to improve data transmission stability and reduce latency by setting up servers at major network nodes, there is no too high technical barrier, in the past decade, there have been accelerator companies of different sizes on the market.
In 2017, the emergence of PUBG turned the accelerator from a service that optimizes the experience into a "just need" of the market. Because the PUBG server is set up overseas, domestic players can only reduce the delay by using the accelerator to play this "chicken eating god work" of that year.
The phenomenon-level popularity of "PUBG" has greatly accelerated the growth of the entire accelerator market scale; at the same time, the increasingly popular MOBA and gunfight mobile games in recent years have higher requirements for low latency, which has also greatly promoted the development of market scale.
iResearch data shows that the overall revenue of the mainland online game accelerator market is 202 million yuan; this figure exceeded 600 million yuan in 2018; relevant reports predict that by 2025, the entire industry market size will be close to 2.4 billion yuan.
Taking this as an opportunity, online game accelerators began to focus on the acceleration of external service games. Large manufacturers and head service providers began to increase investment layout, small and medium-sized manufacturers in this wave of growth opportunities, the entire accelerator market began to roll up.
For example, NetEase UU focuses on stable and fast games with wide coverage, Xunyou is backed by Guiyang State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and has many years of operational experience; many waist service providers with differentiation as the selling point, such as Thor's "per-second billing" and Wild Leopard's "0 yuan super long trial", have also attracted a group of users and become the backbone of the online game accelerator market.
The Tencent online game accelerator, which was officially launched in 2018, relies on the endorsement of the Tencent brand and ultra-low tariffs, and also occupies a place in the online game accelerator market competition in previous years.
In this new round of market competition, online game accelerators have developed from simply providing "acceleration" services that reduce latency to more diversified directions. For example, it has become common practice to sell games and drain games by embedding third-party marketplaces in accelerators.
There is also a service that we are familiar with, which is another kind of "acceleration" function.
Nowadays, online game accelerators usually provide functions such as Steam clients and Steam community "acceleration". For some known reasons, steam clients have often fallen into a "convulsive" state in recent years, often manifesting as not being able to connect to the Internet to display content pages; not to mention the Steam community and the full comment area.
This situation peaked at the end of last year in a months-long "pumping wave" involving most parts of the country, and mainland players basically could not access the Steam client normally, and only through the "acceleration" of major online game accelerators could the relevant content be displayed. In this wave of players' worries about "Steam being pulled into the blacklist", online game accelerators have ushered in a wave of small peaks in performance.
The entire gaming community is holding unprecedented uncertainty about the future of external game platforms such as playing external games and browsing Steam; at the same time, as various "notices", "regulations" and "conventions" continue to be introduced intensively, the industry is also worried about the regulatory prospects of online game accelerator policies that essentially rely on "virtual private network" technology.
Fear always comes from the unknown, which has long been deeply understood by the domestic game industry and player circles.