On July 29, on the eve of ChinaJoy, the organizing committee announced an urgent notice: in view of the current domestic emergency situation, in order to ensure the safe and smooth holding of the exhibition and the conference, it was decided to further improve the epidemic prevention level of the exhibition after research. All personnel entering the ChinaJoy venue and conference site, including exhibition and conference staff, on-site audiences, media personnel, etc., must complete nucleic acid testing in the Shanghai area, and the admission requires a double code check to ensure the health and safety of exhibitors and participants.
This is an unexpected notice, as the most recently trafficked exhibition and conference event, even if this decision is equivalent to this year's ChinaJoy closed the door to the general audience, it is also necessary to do, safety first.
At the same time, ChinaJoy's various activities have been on the string, even if the number of audiences will be greatly reduced, but The significance of ChinaJoy as an industry exchange activity still exists. From yesterday to today, most of the practitioners participating in the meeting have arrived in Shanghai, and almost all the people in my circle of friends are non-stop in the local nucleic acid, preparing for protection, and then rushing to the scene to wish them all peace.
If you look back after many years, this year's special ChinaJoy should be fresh in the minds of practitioners. But from another aspect, the coexistence of pressure, risk and challenge seems to be a situation that has always existed in the game industry, and what the Chinese game industry is best at is to develop in an orderly manner under pressure.
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Coincidentally, ByteDance's comprehensive digital marketing service platform Giant Engine shot a documentary about the game industry some time ago, called "Back to the Future", which has a somewhat contradictory title with its special meaning: the documentary mainly reviews the unforgettable period of 2018 that has made countless practitioners unforgettable, and stands at this point in time, with the inertia of the industry development in the past three years, to look forward to the future.
2018 was a pivotal year for China's game industry, an era of stepping on the brakes, and the changes in the general environment made it difficult for small and medium-sized teams in the game industry at that time to develop, and countless developers did not know where the goals and hopes were.
But after three years, China's game industry has ushered in a more benign development than in the past, saying that market competition is good, saying that it is forcing fine products, in short, compared with 2018, everyone can see the results of domestic game progress. This achievement is not only reflected in the domestic market, but also in the overseas market. For a time, among the top three brands of Japanese teenage women, the first place was TikTok, the second place was Tribute Tea, and the third place was "Wilderness Action". Domestic two-dimensional games have become regular customers of Akihabara street advertisements.
The manufacturers who appear in the documentary are representatives from different fields, including traditional manufacturers such as NetEase, Ali, 37, and Perfect World, as well as emerging companies with increasing influence in the industry, such as Heartbeat and Mihayou, and "Ghost Valley Eight Wilds" and "Ninja Must Die" are representatives of small and beautiful game studios, who talk about their feelings in the documentary, and in addition, representatives of the You research agency also appear in the documentary.
From the mouths of different practitioners, we can see a more realistic format in 2018. In 2018, mihayou's eyes are under pressure on the entire company and projects, because what he does has not been verified in the Chinese market. In 2018, in the eyes of NetEase, the Chinese game market has entered a very red sea state, with many large factories. In 2018 in the eyes of 37 mutual entertainment, everyone is fighting for speed and competing for demographic dividends with homogeneous products...
In the documentary, Ali Lingxi Interactive Entertainment said, "In hindsight, the whole of 2018 is very important, it allows all game practitioners to calm down and think about what kind of games users need."
The result of everyone's thinking together determines the future of the game industry.
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This year's ChinaJoy is in an era of continuity.
Players familiar with console games may know that next year is a "fairy fight" year for the foreign game industry, with Sony's "God of War Twilight", Nintendo's "Breath of the Wilderness 2", Miyazaki Hidetaka's "Eldon's Law Ring", B Society's "Starry Sky", each of which is the most important product this year, but it will be released next year.
But few players know that for China's game industry, next year is also a year of fairy fights.
Unlike three years ago, China's game development industry has grown rapidly, and although it is still far from the mature industrial system abroad, it has gradually been able to cope with large-scale project pipelines. Last year, the market results of "Original God" after the public beta made all large companies re-examine the growing user demand in China and the gradual accumulation of game industry capabilities. It is understood that many manufacturers have large-scale game projects in their hands in development, they are different from the pursuit of speed of small and medium-sized mobile game products, all need a longer development cycle, therefore, in 2021, not only foreign countries are making a "game famine", for Chinese game manufacturers is also a vacuum period, many manufacturers have put the development of larger blockbuster products in the next year.
Judging from the history of foreign game development, this kind of arms race is not a foolproof solution, but it is a necessary way for game industrialization. For the formalized game market, more challenges today are the growing demand of users, excellent products continue to emerge, and the future market pattern may produce some new unknown changes. The mature development process can be more flexible to deal with the rapidly changing market.
However, game development needs to be very forward-looking. Unlike other content creations, the game development team is equivalent to a very large ship, moving towards the target from the moment it is launched, and it is not easy to turn around. A better product takes at least two to three years to develop, which is equivalent to a great effort for the creator in a limited youth.
In the field of games, the user attributes covered are too complex and too deep. How to find their target users efficiently and accurately is a problem for all game companies, no matter how powerful this company is, it must be subject to the threshold of user acquisition.
This is also the original intention of the huge engine to shoot this documentary. This platform allows developers to showcase their products and pass on the needs of users to developers. Through convenient marketing features, game developers can focus more on making game experiences, and the user side is reached by countless content creators and data - such as the 600 million monthly active viewers and creators on Douyin.
During this ChinaJoy period, The Giant Engine also released the "2021 Giant Engine Game Content Ecology White Paper", from which we can see a lot of data.
In the past two years, the strong demand for game content consumption has grown rapidly on platforms such as Douyin, Today's Headlines, and Watermelon Video. According to the data of huge arithmetic, in May 2021, the overall playback volume of video and graphic game content increased by 271%, of which the playback volume of Douyin increased the most. Overall, the game content consumer market shows a steady upward trend.
It is worth mentioning that the game genre with a small base of long tail is rapidly rising with the help of short video platforms, such as narrative and nostalgia, with a year-on-year growth rate of 8477% and 1005% in May 2021, respectively, and a year-on-year growth rate of 447%. Whether it's video or live streaming, niche gaming growth is pretty impressive.
Nowadays, just like the routine registration of their own public accounts and official blogs, game developers have naturally begun to create enterprise accounts on Douyin, form a content matrix, display game content in the form of short videos, and interact more flexibly with the audience, thus contributing to the long-term operation of a game.
As the documentary says, in this day and age, as long as you are talented and your work is good enough, you have the right to speak. Once this discourse power is formed, it is a wealth that is difficult to lose, and this wealth can be used properly to promote the development of the industry.
epilogue
China's game industry has always had the characteristics of becoming more and more courageous, and after the deep cultivation of silence, it will blossom in spring.
According to the data of the "China Game Industry Report from January to June 2021", from January to June 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's self-developed online game domestic market was 130.112 billion yuan, an increase of 8.3% year-on-year, and continued to maintain more than 80% of the domestic market share. In the first half of the year, the actual sales revenue of self-developed games in overseas markets was 8.468 billion US dollars, an increase of 11.58% year-on-year. Today's Chinese products are at the dawn of a full range of multi-category sea. I believe that in time, there will be a game product representing Chinese culture standing in the center of the global cultural stage, and the world will eventually see the power of Chinese games.