Game industry outlet: micro-short dramas have become the focus of transformation, and party games have built metaverse socialization

As we enter 2024, the gaming industry is ushering in several new trends.

The short video + game trend set off by "I'm Surrounded by Beautiful Girls" a few years ago attracted a group of game companies to compete to enter the game, some people built their own short drama platforms, and some people started from the plot to create a product matrix for their game IP customized short dramas;Mini program games, which are regarded as the new hope of the game industry, will generate 3 times more revenue in 2023 than a year-on-year increase, attracting game companies to flock to the layout, and a battle for small program games will also start in 2024. High-quality mini games will become a new trend in the development of the industry;The "battle of geese and pigs" competing with Tencent and NetEase party games will start at the end of 2023, and some securities companies have proposed that party games are still a blue ocean situation in the mobile game track;It is worth mentioning that for the game + AI track, in addition to more AI games will be launched in 2024, some industry insiders have proposed that with the development of AI technology in the industry mature, the cost becomes lower, and the efficiency becomes higher, game companies may face more fierce competition and the possibility of going out.

趋势1:

Short videos and game ecosystems are further integrated

During the year, "I'm Surrounded by Beautiful Women" became a dark horse in the game industry, shocking the attention of countless people. Although the game producer told the reporter that "I'm Surrounded by Beauty" is an "interactive film and television work" rather than a game work, this work does attract a large number of gamers.

The game "I'm Surrounded by Beautiful Women".

Immediately afterwards, the news about the start of filming of the sequel came out, although it is no longer the original cast, but the popularity of the work can also be seen. According to SteamSpy's calculations, the game sold 832,000 in mid-November last year, in addition to the 9% discount in the first week, according to the official price of 42 yuan of "Finished", the game's revenue has exceeded 34 million yuan, which is very high compared with the cost of several million revealed by producer Chen Yurong to Nandu reporters.

The upsurge of the integration of short videos and games set off by "I'm Surrounded by Beautiful Girls" has attracted a large number of game companies to enter the game. The integration of short videos and games has not only become the direction for game companies to enter the game, but also the boom caused by short dramas has also become an attempt by a number of small and medium-sized game manufacturers to transform.

In terms of the integration of short videos and games, in November last year, CMGE announced on its official Weibo that its "Legend of Sword and Fairy" series will be licensed to INTINY Studio, the original production team of "It's Over! I'm Surrounded by Beautiful Girls", and will work with Hippo Games and Strange Trees and Fish to create an interactive video product "Oh my God! I'm Surrounded by Sword and Fairy!" based on the IP of Legend of Sword and Fairy. Kaiying Network also said on its interactive platform that due to the low development cost of interactive video games, it is easy to spread on social media such as live broadcasts and short videos, and there is an internal project team to explore the layout of short dramas and interactive video games; Shengtian Network said on the investor interactive platform that the company has completed a cooperation agreement on the content of the copyright of a short drama with a love theme that has been filmed, and has begun to develop a multi-ending live-action interactive entertainment game based on the short drama work.

In addition, a number of game manufacturers are also trying to focus on the short drama track that emerged at the end of the year. According to the recently released December 2023 planning and registration of "Online Micro Short Drama", game companies such as Perfect World and NetEase have recorded short drama works. Among them, Perfect World has filed "Please Don't Be Moved", and NetEase has filed "Please Defend My "Adoptive Father of Human Traffickers".

In fact, not only large manufacturers, but also many small and medium-sized game manufacturers have also taken short dramas as a major transformation track for the company's key layout. According to media reports, among them, Thunder and Easy Play want to build their own short drama platforms to help their game products accumulate a user pool with lower unit prices, while Shiyue and CMGE plan to start with the plot content and customize themed short dramas for their products/IPs.

Wang Xu, co-founder and chief analyst of Gamma Data, said that the integration of games with other industry chains will bring new growth opportunities to the game market, and short dramas may be fusion products that are realized earlier, and short dramas can integrate the narrative characteristics of short dramas in game interaction to bring users a more immersive sense of substitution than ordinary games, stronger interactivity than short dramas, and then attract fusion users with cross-preferences.

趋势2:

Mini program games are developing towards medium and heavy, high-quality products

Mini program games were once considered the biggest hope for the gaming industry in recent years. Due to the advantages of more accurate distribution, higher user conversion rate, lower R&D cost, and stronger applicability to scenarios, Mini Program games are gradually growing into a new major growth pole. According to the data, the revenue of the domestic mini program game market in 2023 will be 20 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 300%. At this stage, the monetization model of Mini Program games mainly includes three types: in-app purchase payment, advertising monetization, and hybrid monetization. At present, due to the rapid increase in the proportion of in-app purchase payment, the scale of the mini game market has grown rapidly.

The mini games that will become popular in 2023 include "Seeking the Way" by Sanqi Mutual Entertainment and "The King of Salted Fish" by Beijing Haoteng Jiake. Among them, "Seeking the Way" has dominated the best-selling list of WeChat mini games for nearly 4 months, and according to industry insiders, the average monthly turnover of "The King of Salted Fish" will exceed 400 million at the beginning of 2023.

The "popular" mini-game "King of Salted Fish".

At the Game Growth Trend Sub-forum of the Game Industry Annual Conference held in December 2023, Wang Xiangbin, founder and CEO of DataEye, proposed that at present, the theme gameplay of mini games is more casual gameplay such as chess and cards, puzzles, etc., but in the future, mini program games will gradually develop into medium-heavy and high-quality games.

Wang Xiangbin believes that the breakthrough in the supply-side technology of game products will affect the development trend of mini games. "In terms of product supply-side reform and breakthroughs, the main technological breakthroughs will affect the future development of mini games, such as breakthroughs in APP and mini game interactive technology, including engine technology for the overall export of H5 game packages, and breakthroughs in local cache online, which can make mini games accommodate more and richer gameplay and even further improve picture quality. Wang Xiangbin said.

In Wang Xiangbin's view, the theme of the game, the gameplay, the needs of users are cyclical, the first two or three years of the APP market has seen a large amount of new product investment, very involution, player needs are also changing. Judging from the survey data it has done, 84% of the respondents believe that the fatigue of users in games is rising, and everyone wants to seek more lighter, lighter, and more diverse gameplay, and Mini Program games are just in line with this player mentality.

Mini games drive not only industry investment and layout, a Guangzhou game practitioner pointed out to the reporter that due to dissatisfaction with the high proportion of channel providers, between traditional channel providers and small programs, many game manufacturers have turned to small programs. He said that the mini program market is actually eaten from the purchase volume and channels, which is also a good thing for manufacturers to share and cost less. "Compared with traditional channels that rely on hardware, Douyin and WeChat have a complete ecology and have cultivated user habits, so there is still a chance to do this. Now, some mobile games will also be converted to H5 and go through the channel of mini programs," he said.

In addition to Douyin and WeChat, more platforms are also entering the mini program game. At the Meituan Game Developer Platform Conference held at the end of December last year, Meituan said that the current platform ecosystem is developing well, with more than 300 games included, covering 8 major categories such as role-playing, casual puzzles, cards, and action fighting, and has established cooperation with 100 manufacturers. Alipay announced in August last year that its official mini game platform "Game Center" can help game merchants attract users in various traffic entrances, and provide in-app purchases and media blessing functions to attract users to pay and consume ads.

趋势3:

"Party games" continue to gain popularity

In December 2023, Tencent said that the family party game "Dream Star" will link up with multiple game IPs of Tencent, and announced that it would spend 1.4 billion yuan in the first phase to spare no effort to stimulate the ecological development of the game. Subsequently, the war between Tencent's "Yuan Dream Star" and NetEase's "Egg Boy Party" was on the verge of breaking out. In the 1.4 billion traffic support, many people have begun to enter the pit "Yuanmeng Star".

Tencent invested heavily in the party game "Yuan Dream Star".

In the 1.4 billion traffic support, the battle called "Battle of Goose and Pig" by netizens is about to start. Recently, the well-known game UP master of station B "Ghost Uncle Huang" posted a video saying that 80%-90% of the Up owners of station B have received the promotion invitation of "Yuan Dream Star", "but no one is looking for themselves". Later, he received advertising invitations from "Egg Boy Party" and "Yuan Dream Star" one after another.

On Weibo, Xiaohongshu and other platforms, "Yuan Dream Star" and "Egg Boy Party" are also constantly appearing. In addition to the two major game giants, more and more domestic game manufacturers are also following suit. At the end of last year, Lilith opened a test of a party product "Life Party", which Lilith defined as a "game social APP", although the product was only opened in the development and testing of "Best Friend" and "Never Thought of Knife" two gameplay methods, the former is a text social form, and the latter is similar to the werewolf killing gameplay. In September 2023, Eagle Point Network released a teaser of the upcoming party game "Bom Boum".

Comparing multiple party games, it is not difficult to find that most of them provide players with UGC tools and allow players to create more ways to play on their own. On the one hand, this is because of the slow content update problem of party games, and on the other hand, manufacturers want to enhance the social attributes of the game, because the multiple gameplay and strategy exchanges drawn by players' UGC also further promote the sociality of party games. In addition, party games also strengthen the attributes of communication platforms in the game, for example, "Yuanmeng Star" tries to use pan-entertainment resources such as film and television, music and other pan-entertainment resources to enrich the entertainment scene in the game to create an online common entertainment model, making the game community not only a single entertainment form community, which is tantamount to creating a metaverse-style online social platform.

However, some players said that party games have the problem of shallow gameplay and boring play. In fact, "shallow gameplay" is the reason why party games can reach family fun.

China Securities proposed that the essence of party games is a light multiplayer competitive game, and due to the low threshold and fission propagation characteristics, it is easy to give birth to phenomenal large DAU games. In addition, the party game has also harvested many post-70s and post-80s players. Taking "Yuanmeng Star" as an example, according to the calculation of DataEye, a third-party research institution, its user composition is 22.53% of the post-00s, 28.12% of the post-90s, 30.11% of the post-80s, 15.94% of the post-70s, and the rest account for 3.3%.

China Securities also pointed out that at present, domestic casual games have reached more than 800 million users, but the supply of party games is small, and it is still a blue ocean in the mobile game segment.

趋势4:

The game AI team is fighting fiercely

In 2023, when AI is the talk of it, game companies are racing to deploy artificial intelligence. For the upcoming 2024, George Ng, co-founder and CTO of AI solution platform GGWP, said in an interview that in 2024, the first generation of games that truly leverage AI will be launched, and these games will have features such as dynamic companions, personalized stories, and more.

A number of domestic game companies have announced in 2023 that they will launch their own AI games. Combing the information disclosed by various game manufacturers in public channels, during the year, the first domestic AI game "Club Koala" developed by Kunlun Wanwei, which launched the Tiangong model, has been unveiled at the Cologne International Game Show in Germany, and the Electric Soul Network has applied AI robot battles and other related technologies in the reserve product "Barbarian Wars 2", and the game "Space Kill" (formerly known as: "Space Action") launched by Giant Network last year to further lower the threshold for players to speak during the game, and explore AI inference gameplay with a stronger sense of substitution and close to real human dialogue.

Kunlun Wanwei's self-developed domestic first AI game "Club Koala".

In addition, according to public reports, NetEase has deployed functions such as competitive robots, intelligent NPCs, dialogue robots, AI painting, and human-machine collaboration in the mobile game "Against the Cold", while Tencent has added competitive game AI, intelligent NPCs, and AI animation art in "Honor of Kings". miHoYo has laid out AI voice, 3D modeling tuning, NPC lines, and AIGC tools in Honkai: Star Dome Railway. Lilith has invested in Qiyuan World in her games "Awakening of Kingdoms" and "Sunset Sunset", focusing on game values, intelligent NPCs and other fields.

However, players have mixed reviews for the addition of AI to the game. On social platforms, some people think that the difficulty of AI robot battles is too high, and some people think that the current dialogue mode of intelligent NPCs is too simple, which breaks the immersion of the game, and looks forward to more intelligent NPCs. In 2024, AI+ games need to be further adjusted in terms of robot battles and NPC dialogues.

It is worth mentioning that chip giant Nvidia also recently announced that it will cooperate with game companies such as miHoYo, Tencent, and NetEase in the AI digital human business. It is reported that NVIDIA's ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) microservice is a technology platform that uses generative AI to make virtual digital humans, allowing game, tool and middleware developers to add generative AI models to virtual digital characters in games and applications. This may be able to promote the effect of domestic games + AI.

At the same time, in terms of reducing costs and increasing efficiency through AI, it seems from the financial reports of various game manufacturers and investor interaction records that AI is currently used in game research and development lines such as scene modeling, AI painting, AI plot, and AI dubbing, such as operation and distribution.

Luo Peiyu, a game technology expert and the author of "unity3D online game practice", told reporters in Nandu that the opportunity of AIGC is obvious, just like "30 years ago domestic PC, 20 years ago the Internet, 10 years ago mobile Internet", now is in the mobile Internet growth bottleneck, stock competition, AI may have the potential to become the next wave of trends, but the current game industry may face AI landing cost performance, the weak are more likely to get out of the game and other challenges.

"Although everyone expects the transformative power of AI, most of the current games can be implemented with novel small features or some detailed optimizations in the R&D process, and R&D and deployment are relatively expensive, which requires game companies to have a long-term determination to follow up. However, the good news is that as the software and hardware become more mature over time, the cost will be lower and lower in the future. Secondly, the industry will be more competitive. In the Internet era, the entire market can support dozens of large Internet companies, but in the AI era, because of the improved efficiency, a few large companies may be able to support the entire market, and the number of practitioners needed has become smaller, which requires game companies to have strong R&D capabilities in order to occupy a place in the future competition. ”

Producer: Nandu Political and Business Data News Department

Written by: Nandu reporter Lin Wenqi