On December 22, an official document from the Press and Publication Administration made the entire game sector of A-shares and Hong Kong stocks fall to the limit, and the stock prices of AI, media, big data and other related companies plummeted, and the funds evaporated by the two shares on the same day are estimated to have exceeded one trillion. There are many remarks about online games being further controlled or even banned like the "double reduction" back then!
I especially remember that in 21 years, a media article "'Spiritual Opium' Grew into a Hundreds of Billions of Industries" exploded like thunder, and domestic games were criticized by all kinds of mouths and writes. There are scolders, reflectors, and speculators, and giants such as Tencent and NetEase and related founders have become the spearhead of public attention.
As a veteran of the Internet industry for more than ten years and a practitioner in the online game industry, I would like to talk about why domestic game countries need to encourage rather than ban them from the perspective of being as objective as possible.
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I will explain from three perspectives: cultural communication, technology industry chain, human nature and anti-addiction.
(1) About culture
There is an opinion that games belong to the ninth art, and the ninth art refers to a certain art form outside the traditional eight arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry (literature), dance, drama, and film). It can be seen that games are a kind of cultural and artistic works alongside literature, film, and theater.
The game industry has many similarities with the drama and film and television industries, both of which require a grand narrative background, are based on visual arts, and give people "sensory enjoyment", which is an important carrier of "leisure and entertainment to meet spiritual needs". Film and television dramas bear the important obligation of cultural dissemination and export, and of course the same is true for games.
For example, taking "Genshin Impact" as an example, the domestic APP "going out" to speed up - economy and science and technology - People's Daily Online, because of its excellent plot design and excellent game quality, on overseas social media, the cultural output of "Genshin Impact" has become a hot topic. The song "The Goddess Splitting the View" has made a large number of users re-realize the beauty of Chinese drama.
Another example, taking NetEase's "Against the Cold" mobile game as an example, the development team has very carefully restored the historical scenes of the Song Dynasty, the life of the people, and even the old gentleman is popularizing historical knowledge to everyone through the cold and has accumulated a large number of fans. At the age of 60, he started a second life in the mobile game "Against the Cold"_Tencent News
All of the above is about the positive side of games in cultural transmission. Let's look back at foreign games dominated by Western countries, a large number of their game works are full of Western values, and even a large number of war-themed works have the behavior of smearing competitors. To take one of the most famous examples, in the classic game "Red Alert", there is a lot of smearing and despising the design and plot of the red Soviet Union. The Allies are always full of science and technology, highlighting the high, while the Soviet Union is stupid, coarse, polluting, and has no human rights. And some careful designs that promote the superiority of the West, belittle the yellow race, and the mainland are also quite common in some old games, so I won't repeat them here. (It's much better now, after all, no one wants to offend the world's largest game market)
The cultural struggle between countries and between civilizations is a battlefield where the smoke of gunpowder cannot be seen. If we don't occupy it, the enemy will occupy it, and no one wants our young people to eat KFC, binge American dramas, play the game of white people hunting zombies, discrediting communism, or hunting terrorists. It is said that science and technology are strong, and culture must also be strong. Game works, like film and television dramas and literature, bear the important responsibility of "Chinese culture going global"! And in this regard, we have a long way to go!
There will be people here.,The game can be made for foreigners to play.,It's forbidden to play games in China.,Whether it's domestic or foreign.,It's all banned.,It's the same as anti-pornography.。 This brings us to humanity and anti-addiction, and I'll say it last.
(2) About the science and technology industry chain
Here, I'll start with a concept. In the current TOC (for the people) Internet industry, the biggest "cash cows" are in two fields, one is games and the other is e-commerce. This has also given rise to a large number of giant enterprises. Why Ali wants to make a game and set up "Lingxi Interactive Entertainment", it is because when the growth of e-commerce has reached a bottleneck, as the helmsman of a large group company, it must seek new revenue growth points for the company, and games are the most stable and controllable growth points! It also includes Byte later invested heavily in making games.,Although I gave up later.,The specific reasons won't be repeated here.,We'll talk about it in a later article.。
To sum up, the game industry plays a pivotal role in the Internet industry from the perspective of making money. Here I will first assert that the game industry is a high-tech-intensive industry, and in the future, if it does not have a certain amount of technical strength and accumulation, it will not be able to do games well in the future, and the future game battle is a dispute between several major powers in the East and the West. So let's go back and analyze, from the development to the operation, now and in the future, what high-tech will be associated with a game, I will take a few key points.
【Technology Industry Chain 1 - AI】
AI。 This year, the concept of AI is very popular, from Chat-gpt to stable diffusion, midjourney has been widely used. As mentioned above, gaming and e-commerce are the two heavyweight cash cows in the Internet industry. In the same way, for suppliers of AI-related technologies, game companies are a pivotal Party A, which is what we jokingly call the father of the gold owner. Why, a large number of AI image generation applications such as midjourney have been widely used in game development to generate game concept maps, vertical drawings, etc.
Now giant companies including openAI, NVIDIA, Google and other companies are actively researching AI generative 3D modeling, and if this technology matures, it will also be widely used in the development and design of 3D next-era games. Chat-based AI such as chat-gpt is also applied to the game's intelligent and realistic NPCs.
Having said all this, everyone must understand a truth, as an AI company, their investment is huge, and they need to make a profit in the future. Suppose that the group of game companies with cash owners are gone, what about some AI companies related to image processing? Suppose we take down the domestic games, then a large number of domestic AI companies will fall, and the final result will be that they will be overtaken by the United States in some areas of AI. (Why do I say that in some fields, AI is very wide-ranging, and games are just an application.)
【Technology Industry Chain 1 - Chips】
Some people here don't understand.,Your game development has a hairy relationship with chips.。 The stakes are very high. Why do mobile phone manufacturers want to roll high-end chips, is it to solve the call problem, or to solve the network speed problem, or to let us brush Douyin faster?
No, the high-end chip volume is computing power. High computing power exists for applications that require high computing power like games. The average user who does not play games has a serious excess of performance on his mobile phone/computer. Game applications, especially large-scale games such as the next era, have high requirements for GPUs and CPUs of mobile phones and computers. This is also why, some low-end mobile phones will freeze when playing games, get hot, etc.
Some people here must say that this is too arbitrary, and high-end chips are not only for games. But you must know that for most ordinary people, whether it is to buy a mobile phone or a computer, the main reason for the high configuration is to play games more smoothly. Take the computer as an example, if it is just for office, with the performance consumption of office, there is no need to configure a high-end graphics card. There are also some people here who have extremely high performance requirements, that is, game development workers, especially developers of 3D games, art rendering, modeling, etc., who need GPUs with high computing power.
In other words, for chip companies, games are an important application field on the C-side. Assuming that everyone stops playing games and there is no game industry, I can say that the market value of a large number of chip companies, computer companies, and mobile phone companies will be reevaluated. It would be a tsunami-level disruption to the entire field.
[Technology Industry Chain 3 - Web3 and Metaverse]
These two are two concepts that have been very hot in recent years. At present, they are all in the embryonic stage, but some people believe that the fourth information technology industrial revolution is related to these two goods.
Web3 and supporting virtual currencies and related applications have formed a large-scale industry in foreign countries, which cannot be implemented in China because of legal and regulatory issues and financial security. But there is no doubt that the concept of web3, compared with our current mainstream web2, will be a huge revolutionary breakthrough. Let's take a simple example, in our web2 applications, such as games, our virtual assets are worthless and cannot be legally realized, just a string of code. In Web3, our virtual assets can be converted into digital currency, and digital currency, like Bitcoin, has purchasing power.
Like the web2 world, games are also a pivotal role in the web3 world. If you are interested, you can learn about some foreign web3 games.
The metaverse is a completely virtual digital world built through 3D modeling. And the construction of this world itself, in terms of technical path, has the same effect as the development of 3D next-era games. In other words, to make the metaverse, it must be done by this group of development teams that make 3D games. Through them, the construction of 3D virtual worlds can be realized, including but not limited to, virtual sky weather system, plant and vegetation system, terrain and landform design, virtual real decoration, virtual houses and homes, gravity and acceleration, and NPCs played by AI in the virtual world.
Assuming that our domestic game companies are killed, if we want to develop the metaverse in the future, and various countries enter the competition of the metaverse, do we want to hire foreigners to do it with high salaries and make people stuck?
【Online Game Economy】
Finally, I will talk about the online game economy, in fact, in addition to the above related industries, there are many related industries that are closely related to online games, which is a relationship of both prosperity and loss. Let me give you a few examples.
As the world's top platform company, the core of Byte's business model lies in advertising revenue. The first party of advertising is mainly concentrated in several major fields such as e-commerce and games. I don't have bytes of internal data, so I don't know how much the game is advertising, and how much it accounts for its total revenue, but it's definitely not less.
Taking cloud service companies such as Alibaba Cloud as an example, game companies need to lease a large number of high-computing power servers to carry user data every year.
There are many examples of the above.
If the game industry can't do it, as powerful as Byte Interactive, it will also be a very big pain. And the industries related to the game industry, not to mention that. The rise and fall of domestic game companies is not only a question of whether or not the 600 million Chinese game players can play domestic games, but also has a bearing on the jobs of a large number of workers in related industries, and is a real national economic issue. His influence on social stability will be far greater than that of the "education and training" industry in those years.
If the income of a large number of relevant workers is declining and unemployed, will it be good for you and me, as a member of the national economy? Unless, we are holding a golden job bowl such as tobacco.
(3) About human nature and game addiction
Speaking of which, it's all for the sake of the children. After all, it is the flower of the motherland! A large number of friends born in the 80s and 90s should know that 20 years ago, when the game industry was in the ascendant, we knew about computer games through magazines such as "Popular Software" and other magazines, or the word of mouth of some residents of black Internet cafes.
At the risk of being leashed by our parents, we secretly gathered in the black and evil Internet cafes, secretly playing games or watching others play games. Not to mention playing games, you can stand all afternoon watching others play games. Since then, there has been the concept of "Internet addicted teenagers", and even electroshock therapy was ridiculously born. At that time, electronic heroin = games were already being advertised in society.
Therefore, from its birth to the barbaric development of the game in China, it was carried with "original sin", and it was like pornography, gambling and drugs. In such a social context, the hat of "the game is guilty" cannot be dragged off. As soon as this hat was worn, it has been worn to this day. So let's talk a little bit about human nature and addiction!
According to Maslow's pyramid model of human needs, games meet people's high-level needs for exploration and self-realization. Especially for self-realization, in the virtual world, through role-playing, you can fully obtain the psychological needs of being respected, valued, and cared for, which may be more expensive to achieve in reality, especially for some people who are sensitive and lack love. And games are precisely the best medium to meet the high-level psychological needs of human beings at low cost. This is the key reason why some people become addicted to playing games!
In other words, it is part of human nature to get psychological satisfaction from playing games. Some people don't need to play games, or don't like to play games, because they have a way to get the above psychological needs from other channels, while some people love to play games, because they get a high level of psychological needs through games, and this satisfaction makes him addicted to them.
Therefore, in this world, as long as there is such a thing as a game, he can't ban it. Even if domestic games are killed, a large number of gamers, the so-called addicted teenagers, will go through various methods such as circumventing the wall and piracy to get overseas games to play. Unless we rule the world and play a game of eradication like smallpox!
What parents and friends may not know is that overseas games, even the so-called 3A masterpieces, are not suitable for us to play under age. Anyone who has watched the American drama (non-harmony version) knows that overseas cultural creators are very good at doing physical sensory stimulation. This is true for movies, and even more so for games. For example, in the triple-A masterpiece of "The Witcher 3", the erotic links of the male and female protagonists in it are no less than those of small Japanese movies. Games such as Western Dead Redemption involve a lot of violent and bloody content that can only be played by adults.
And sadly, many parents don't know much about domestic and foreign games. I don't know which games are not suitable for my own children, and which games are suitable for children, and then have to be anxious.
Therefore, we should not blindly clamoring for the state to ban games, but correctly guide the healthy development of the game industry, prevent minors from becoming addicted, and guide minors to establish a correct concept of consumption. Playing games is like watching TV, the family should be supervised but not a flood beast! In the recent article, such as setting a limit on player consumption and not having continuous logins, the relevant regulations not only hurt the game and related industries, but also cannot solve any problems at all to promote reasonable gaming for minors!
Finally, I want to say that online games are not electronic opium, the so-called opium, his addiction is drug-based, based on the nerves, it is difficult to quit, and it is extremely harmful to the body. Games are similar to novels, movies and other cultural works, and his addiction is based on people's psychological needs. This addiction can be easily stopped. For example, if you don't play a game for some reason, you won't be interested in playing it after one to three months. Therefore, for children, positive guidance is more important than anything else!