High-end Interview丨Gamma Data Wang Xu: AIGC will revolutionize the game industry, but it will take time

At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, Nandu Bay Finance Society launched a series of planning of "Keywords of the Year in Science and Technology Innovation", aiming to further look forward to the new trend of scientific and technological innovation and development by reviewing the major events of national science and technology innovation in the past year, focusing on the new models and highlights of related science and technology segments. This article focuses on the game field, and invites Wang Xu, co-founder and chief analyst of Gamma Data, to conduct an exclusive interview to review the development status of the game industry in 2023 and look forward to the new development trends of the game industry in 2024.

Xu Wang, co-founder and chief analyst of Gamma Data

"In 2023, the main keywords of the game industry can be summarized as market recovery, model expansion, e-sports entering Asia, scientific and technological development, application exploration, and cross-border empowerment. In Wang Xu's view, AIGC can significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency, but it may take some time to change the process and method of game development. At the same time, in 2024, trends such as IP, mini program games, integrated development of games and short videos, and the boom of open-world games will continue.

AIGC is in the exploration stage, and it will take time for the production pipeline to change

Nandu Bay Finance Society: For the game industry in 2023, what keywords do you think can be used to summarize?

Wang Xu: The main keywords are market recovery, model expansion, e-sports entering Asia, scientific and technological development, application exploration, and cross-border empowerment. Among them, the market is picking up, such as the growth of mobile games and mini program games, technological development such as AIGC, and business model exploration such as the hybrid monetization model of in-app purchase + advertising, props + plot or character fees, etc.

Nandu Bay Finance Society: At the beginning of 2023, AIGC has become the hottest topic in the game industry. Looking back now, has AIGC met the expectations of the outside world to "change the process and way of game development", what progress do you think AIGC has made in empowering the game industry, and what challenges and obstacles still need to be solved?

Wang Xu: Judging from the current application situation, AIGC can significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency, but it may take some time to change the process and method of game development. Second, AIGC will accelerate the development of game industrialization, and if game companies can make full use of AI tools to generate content, it will greatly shorten the development cycle of games, and provide users with a large number of new game content in a timely manner after launch, improving retention rate and extending the commercial life cycle of games.

From the application level, the use of AIGC by game companies is still in the process of exploration, even at the level of art resource production, it has not yet reached a high-level stage, and in the maturity and popularity of AIGC tools, it also needs to develop the process, even after popularization, the solution is repetitive work, replacing ineffective manual positions, and the creative work of gameplay still needs to be realized.

At the same time, there are the following challenges in the application of AIGC in the game:

First, according to the gamma data statistics of the game company AIGC job demand, it can be divided into two categories: AIGC art and AIGC algorithm research, the former aims to improve the production efficiency of art content, and promote the popularization of related models, and even apply them to the user's content production level, reduce the threshold of creation, and speed up the process of creative realization. The latter is to produce and optimize AI tools suitable for game content production to meet the specific needs of collaborative projects in terms of visual, audio, and text generation, which shows that the application of AIGC is currently mainly at the art level, and others are still in the exploration or development stage.

Second, the research of AI technology requires a lot of resources and costs, and many game companies, especially small and medium-sized teams, find it difficult to develop their own AI tools, and can only use common products in the industry to re-research, which will involve many problems and take longer to popularize. At the same time, the question of how to truly embrace and harness AI tools for existing talents, especially for positions that require creative work, how to use AIGC to improve efficiency.

In addition, problems such as engines, copyrights, and algorithms encountered in the process of application gradually developing to a high level.

Nandu Bay Finance Society: At the same time, what are the substantive opportunities and challenges that the AI model represented by ChatGPT will bring to the game industry?

Wang Xu: AI will promote the innovation of game development and distribution, for example, in game research and development: first, improve the production efficiency of virtual reality content, the efficiency of 3D content production is the key to the development of the game industry, and AI technology can greatly reduce the threshold for the generation and interaction of 3D virtual content, such as the combination of cutting-edge 3D reconstruction technology, graphics computing and rendering technology, knowledge graph and speech semantic recognition technology, to achieve efficient virtual image intelligent generation, editing and intelligent interaction solutions, greatly reducing the threshold of virtual content production.

The second is to improve the authenticity of the virtual world environment, which is also a key element in the development of the game, taking character generation as an example, AI can improve the authenticity of the character by continuously training with human dynamic data, language, reaction and other information, so that the expressions and movements of the virtual character in the game are more smooth, and the autonomous behavior ability of the character can be improved through AI.

The third is to improve the efficiency of product testing, the continuous development of AI has enabled it to imitate the behavior of players in the game field and generate a large amount of behavioral data, and the use of AI for game testing in the game development process will help improve the product development process.

The four major trends will continue, and the competition for games going overseas will intensify

Nandu Bay Finance Society: The urgency of "going out if you don't go to sea" is still being transmitted in the game industry. In your opinion, compared with the past, what are the new changes and achievements of games going overseas in 2023, and what new trends and developments will appear in 2024?

Wang Xu: The new changes are mainly reflected in the exploration of new channels to acquire customers other than buying volume, such as opinion leaders (KOLs), long and short video platforms, In addition to channel exploration, game companies are also actively using the advantages of game content to explore more customer acquisition models, such as using brand or IP linkage to cross-acquire customers from other fields, and through platform challenges, fusion stickers/ Innovative gameplay modes such as filters promote user interaction with ads, and then achieve better conversion and communication effects.

In 2024, multi-platform development will become one of the main trends in game going overseas, and the products developed by enterprises based on mobile terminals can be logged in on the PC and console terminals, which can open up the customer acquisition space without affecting the original product development logic. At the same time, compared with commercial revenue, accumulating feedback and commercialization experience from multi-platform users is also the core focus. In addition, multi-platform login also helps game companies to pay attention to more global game innovation opportunities, such as borrowing the open world of the console side from the mobile game field, using multi-platform login to explore market opportunities in more ports, and then realizing the integration and innovation of gameplay. Multi-platform login means that Chinese game companies have the opportunity to open up a broader space to go overseas and explore product innovation in depth, and then open up the perspective of their own product development to the level of developing global high-quality products.

Nandu Bay Finance Society: In your opinion, in 2024, what development trends of the game industry will continue to extend or even further amplify, and at the same time, what new changes, new trends and new challenges will the game industry usher in?

Wang Xu: At the product level, the following trends will continue: First, IP-based is a global trend, and in 2023, among the top 100 mobile game products, products with IP will contribute more than 47% of the increase. In fact, the number of products with IP accounts for about 45% of the top 200 games in the domestic mobile game market by revenue, and the number of IP games accounts for about 20% of the top 200 best-selling games in the US market this year, and about 37% in the Japanese market.

Second, there may be more new open-world RPGs coming out in '24. In open-world RPGs, the proportion of open world in role-playing games with an increment of over 100 million yuan has been close to 40%, and the proportion of open world has also reached the first place in user demand.

Third, the integration of games and short videos is integrated. Contemporary game users attach importance to the plot, and can integrate the narrative characteristics of short dramas in interaction, which can bring users a more immersive sense of substitution than ordinary games.

Fourth, the growth trend of the Mini Program game market will continue, and users will gradually accept and cultivate the habit of paying for Mini Games, and more Mini Game products will be launched on the market in 2024. In 2023, the revenue of the domestic mini program game market will be 20 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 300%.

At the user level, combined with last year's user data, the difficulty of the game to attract users to pay is increasing, from the actual product of this year, the price of the game made according to the user's short video usage habits is limited, and the game made for the age group users who are prone to impulsive payment will face great policy risks and public opinion pressure, and the trend of stricter policy management will not change easily, so the growth of the domestic market will be more difficult next year.

At the market level, going overseas is still an important trend, but the competition will become more and more fierce, from our survey data of enterprises, the fierce competition in the overseas track is the most important reason for enterprises to affect their overseas business. On the one hand, Canada, Germany, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other countries have begun to pay attention to the development of the local game industry and have increased their support;

Curator: Wang Ying

Co-ordinator: Ren Xianbo

Written by: Chen Peijun, reporter of Nandu Bay Finance Agency