Image source: Visual China
Entering 2023, the mobile phone market is undergoing a new round of reshuffle, in which the days of gaming mobile phones are not good.
Black Shark Mobile, which once ranked first in the vertical field of gaming mobile phones, withdrew from the stage after experiencing layoffs and wage arrears. The big manufacturer Lenovo also recently cut the entire savior game mobile phone business line, leaving the more mainstream positioning Motorola as the sole seedling of Lenovo's mobile phone business.
As early as a few years ago, gaming mobile phones used to be a sunrise industry.
Since 2017, driven by "Honor of Kings" and various "chicken-eating" games, led by Razer's Razer Phone, Xiaomi's Black Shark, ZTE's Red Devil, Asus' ROG, Vivo's IQOO, OPPO's realme, Lenovo's Savior game mobile phone have been released successively.
These brands have more or less existed as gaming phones, or smartphones with games as their core functions.
However, in 2023, the category of game mobile phones is being abandoned by the mobile phone industry. Of the above smartphone product lines, it seems that only ZTE's Red Devil and Asus ROG mobile phones are still adhering to the e-sports route, and other brands either give up not to do it, or give up the label of gaming mobile phones like iQOO and realme, and embrace the public.
Xiaomi partner Lu Weibing once said at the end of 2022 that you don't need an e-sports mobile phone in 2023, and e-sports mobile phones are destined to die. Xu Qi, vice president of realme, also recently said that realme's smartphone is the main machine with e-sports characteristics, rather than a professional e-sports mobile phone with limited vertical segments.
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When it first entered the track, the industry's view of gaming phones was certainly positive.
Lu Weibing once said when releasing the Redmi K40 Game Enhanced Edition in April 2021 that Redmi users are getting younger and younger, the core is probably in their 20s, and they are spending more and more time on games, which is one of the reasons why Redmi cut into gaming phones.
According to Wu Shimin, the founder of Black Shark Technology, there are two factors for starting a game mobile phone, one is the rise of large-scale mobile games, which may give rise to new demand, and the other is that gamers have strong spending power and can fully support the consumption of game mobile phones.
High spending power + young users support the original dream of gaming mobile phones, and also give game mobile phones unlimited imagination space. However, the reality is that the market performance of gaming mobile phones has never fulfilled expectations from the outside world.
Lu Weibing once revealed that the total shipment of game mobile phones in China in 2021 will be about 1.7 million units. According to whale staff data, the cumulative sales of game mobile phones from January to September 2022 were about 3.2 million.
Since gaming phones themselves do not have standard definitions and boundaries, they may cause deviations in the statistics of various companies, so the above data is not contradictory.
What is certain is that no matter how statistically it is, the sales of gaming phones should be in the order of millions. Compared with the total shipment of 329 million Chinese smartphones in 2021, the sales of gaming mobile phones are not even a fraction. For comparison, the financial report shows that Nintendo sold a total of 23.06 million Switch consoles in 2021.
Without the constraints of the chip, it is difficult to hide the homogeneous kernel
While the sales volume cannot be raised, the differentiated product form of the game mobile phone is also gradually dying out with the iteration of the chip.
Traditionally, gaming phones have been characterized by strong heat dissipation, high refresh rate screens, and long battery life.
Strong heat dissipation can cope with the heat generated by the mobile phone chip due to calculation during long-term games, ensuring that the mobile phone will not have the problem of stuttering due to heat accumulation; High refresh rate screens generally refer to specifications greater than 90Hz, that is, they can display more than 90 frames per second, so as to achieve a smoother display effect; Long battery life is to meet the actual needs of the game, through large battery, fast charging and other ways to extend the continuous game time of the mobile phone.
To meet the requirements of strong heat dissipation, game mobile phones often add a large area of graphite, VC, liquid cooling, metal frame, vapor chamber and other configurations inside the mobile phone; To achieve long battery life, it is necessary to increase the capacity of the battery. This has led to a thick and heavy appearance of gaming phones.
At present, the weight of game mobile phones is generally more than 220g, and the thickness is also more than 9mm, which is contrary to the mainstream public's preference for light and thin smartphones.
With the development of chip technology, especially after the latest generation of Qualcomm adopts TSMC's 4nm process technology, it is difficult for gaming mobile phones to open the gap in experience with ordinary smartphones with the same configuration of high-brush screens.
According to the test results of Titanium Media App and other institutions, the gap between flagship mobile phones and professional game mobile phones in the frame rate of the game screen is often only within a few frames, and it is difficult for ordinary users to detect the experience gap.
With the maturity of the relevant supply chain, today's thousand-dollar entry-level smartphones have also become popular with 120Hz high-refresh screens, which may further reduce people's demand for gaming mobile phones.
The Black Shark 5 Pro with pop-up shoulder button design has a body thickness of 9.5mm
In addition to chips, the appearance design of gaming mobile phones is also approaching mainstream mobile phones. For example, the last generation of Lenovo Savior Y70 has returned to the mainstream design, and there is almost no difference from ordinary mobile phones in appearance. The Redmi K series, after the K40 and K50 generations are equipped with mobile phone shoulder buttons similar to gamepad experience, also returned to the mainstream mobile phone shoulder button design on the new generation of K60.
A mobile phone developer told Titanium Media App: "Gaming phones are more like special products of a specific period. In previous years, Qualcomm's SoC chip generated too much heat, and Snapdragon was nicknamed the fire dragon, but mobile phone manufacturers had no other choice but to pile up materials on heat dissipation. Nowadays, with the advancement of technology, the pressure of chip heat dissipation is not so great, and the gap between gaming mobile phones and ordinary mobile phones is naturally inseparable. ”
Niche products are difficult to resist downward market pressure
Image source: Visual China
In terms of product form, the origin of the concept of gaming mobile phones mainly comes from game notebooks and game consoles.
However, gaming notebooks are much more than just gaming at the product level. Due to the need for many designs and videos, gaming notebooks are often high-performance notebooks that exist as productivity tools.
The current gaming phones and even smartphones obviously do not have productivity attributes. The high computing power of the gaming mobile phone itself has not stimulated new demand.
If you compare a gaming mobile phone with a gaming console, the biggest problem with a gaming mobile phone is that there is no exclusive content ecology brought by the platform. For example, Nintendo Switch's Mario series of games and Sony's PlayStation's God of War series games are platform-exclusive or most sales cycle exclusive games. If consumers want to play platform-exclusive games, they must first purchase the corresponding game console.
At this point, the game mobile phones over the years have only cooperated with game companies to achieve some optimization effects, and there is no precedent for exclusive games, giving users a reason to "you have to". Therefore, it is difficult for games and gaming phones, content and hardware to achieve the effect of driving sales to each other.
In addition to consistently failing to meet market expectations and gradually homogenizing, gaming mobile phones are also under downward pressure from both the smartphone and gaming industries.
In 2022, smartphones have entered the darkest moment they have never seen before. According to Canalys data, global smartphone shipments declined for four consecutive quarters in 2022, with the overall market decline of 12% for the whole year, and total shipments fell below 1.2 billion units, the lowest since 2014. Among them, shipments in the Chinese market fell by 14% in 2022 to 287 million units, a decade low.
According to the "2022 China Game Industry Report" jointly compiled by the Game Working Committee of the China Phonological Association, the China Game Research Institute and Gamma Data, the actual sales revenue of China's game market in 2022 will be 265.884 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 30.629 billion yuan, a decrease of 10.33%; The number of game users was 664 million, down 0.33% year-on-year.
The current environment facing gaming mobile phones in 2023 is really the so-called "worse".
In the environment where technology companies have reduced costs and increased efficiency through layoffs, game mobile phones have never met expectations due to sales, and the trend of gradually being "swallowed" due to homogenization from products, has naturally become an outcast in the smartphone industry. (This article was first published in Titanium Media App, author/Wu Honglei, editor/Zhong Yi)