[Text/Observer Network Columnist Liu Siyuan]
On January 26, the website of the National Press and Publication Administration announced the approval information of domestic online games in January 2024, and a total of 115 games were approved.
Although these are all drop in the bucket, in the face of the game industry that urgently needs to boost confidence, there are some policy-oriented expectations. In 2023, the game industry at home and abroad has spent a magnificent year, and the Chinese game industry has also occupied a position on this stage.
01. From Mobile to Triple-A: A big production on the move
It's common sense that China is a gaming market where mobile games dominate absolutely, but the implications are not set in stone. Although the overall impression of Chinese mobile games on players still has many traces of the old era, the recognition that "it is good at producing two-dimensional games" and "can develop world-class mobile games" is gradually forming. Honkai: Star Railway, which won Best Mobile Game at The Game Awards 2023, is one example.
The comprehensive quality of "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" is obvious to all, but since the beginning of the game's launch until now, there has been a saying that "miHoYo fights left and right, and the two games compete for each other's income", which can be said to be a misunderstanding for a long time. For a game company that wants to become bigger and stronger, it is impossible to rely on a major game for a long time to win the world, even from the perspective of long-term free-to-play games, it will always face the problem of declining attention and player loss.
This means that it's even more important to maintain full and strong development capabilities, which have been a major cause of internal and external difficulties over the past few years, due to the lack of development capacity and the inability to produce new titles, even as they continue to roll out new updates for World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Overwatch.
Moreover, "Genshin Impact" is a game launched in 2020, and it has gone through 3 years of operation before you know it, and you can't ignore the impact of the passage of time. Genshin Impact itself has created a demonstration effect of gaining popularity and high profits with a blockbuster production spanning mobile, PC and game consoles, and it is unrealistic to expect Genshin Impact to stand tall in the face of eager imitators.
Also at the TGA Awards ceremony, there were two domestic games that attracted attention in the form of trailers, they are "Black Myth: Wukong" and "Limit Solving Machine".
Since its announcement in 2020, "Black Myth" has finally ushered in a large-scale offline trial in 2023, announcing the release date. This is a reassuring pill for the player group who are afraid that they are dreaming. Success or failure aside, it seems that playing the first real domestic stand-alone 3A game is just around the corner.
And "Limit Solving Machine" is an unexpected robot-themed game, and it is also unexpectedly from the hands of Xishanju. Judging from the closed beta some time ago, the experience evaluation given by players is quite good. Even if it can't compete with the top masterpieces, it has the potential to be a surprise. This move can also be seen to some extent, some domestic manufacturers are trying to be unfamiliar with the field.
This is a great encouragement, but we can't forget that there are also disappointed people behind the winners, just look at the "Border" that has been expected by many players and has made a lot of effort to publicize. After a not-so-smooth debut, few people now mention that there was such a game in 2023.
From this point of view, China's game industry is indeed moving towards bigger productions (and of course, the development of independent games cannot be ignored), but if a series of failures do occur, how will the market perceive it? This seems to be a problem that will cause panic once it is raised, and single-player players are looking forward to the arrival of large domestic single-player games, and always avoid the possibility of failure when they are looking forward to it. But the author does not think that if "Black Myth", which has become a symbol of the current domestic stand-alone spirit, goes to the worst ending, the domestic stand-alone machine will instantly return to the half-dead state of 20 years ago.
Console and PC stand-alone games, which have returned to the public eye after the era of online games, are in a different position. It can be seen from the sales boom of consumer graphics cards in the past 10 years that people's pursuit of large-scale games has always been consistent, and such an environment will always give birth to the next large-scale domestic single-player game. The big productions represented by "Genshin Impact" are actually still products in the context of mobile games.
02. Big Manufacturers: Competitors and Exiters
Competition between large manufacturers is the eternal theme of the industry, and in the case of China's game industry, it is Tencent and NetEase. In December, the open and secret battle between NetEase's "Egg Boy Party" and Tencent's "Yuanmeng Star" once again detonated a direct confrontation between giants. However, it is not the first time that Tencent and NetEase have fought in the ring, and it can have such a big communication effect this time, in addition to the development of social media, NetEase's marketing style since "Against the Cold" is also a factor that cannot be ignored.
NetEase continues to have some things that express its competitive attitude towards Tencent, and Tencent has added the word "genuine" to the promotional slogan of "Yuan Dream Star", which is quite inexplicable if you think about it carefully - it is obviously a self-developed game, how can there be any statement that it is not genuine. If you advertise yourself with this, then what is a "pirated game" on the market?
Soon after, NetEase Cloud Music put "Yuan Dream Star" on the opening screen advertisement. In connection with the recent rumors that NetEase may re-cooperate with Blizzard and reintroduce games such as "World of Warcraft", when the news of the termination of the national server cooperation was announced, NetEase's attitude seen by the outside world seems to be very different. This undoubtedly reminds people outside the environment of large factories that a giant enterprise with a large number of departments and employees is never a uniform whole, and each department has its own goals and ways of doing things. Tencent and NetEase, their main business scope is far beyond games.
Judging from NetEase's actions, even though its position in the domestic Internet industry is no longer what it used to be, ranking tenth in the "Comprehensive Strength Index of Chinese Internet Enterprises (2023)", at least in the game field, only Tencent can exist as its competitor of similar size. On Tencent's side, most of the perception will be the same.
On the eve of the battle between "Egg Boy Party" and "Dream Star", it was another big factory that attracted people's attention. At the end of November, it was reported that ByteDance's game division would shrink massively and lay off a large number of personnel. Given ByteDance's current size in China's Internet industry and its investment in the gaming industry over the past few years, this level of change is bound to cause an earthquake in the industry.
It's not uncommon for big companies to suddenly enter or exit a field, and Amazon's big foray into the gaming industry with the idea of cloud gaming in the early years has now become quiet. Large companies that covet the profits of the game industry can naturally invest large sums of money in a short period of time to attract everyone's attention, but the formation of game studios, the development of new games, the determination of development routes and other matters often take a long time, and early investment will not pay off quickly. And all kinds of giant companies rarely show their patient side.
There are barriers to entry into any industry, and if the decision-makers decide that the game is not the right direction for the company to move forward, retreating early can at least reduce some losses. And under the stroke of the pen of the senior management of the enterprise, there are countless practitioners who are running for life. After losing the high salary of a large factory, where the next job will fall will greatly affect each and every one of them. What's more, the Byte incident is just a typical case of a concentrated outbreak, and layoffs are widespread in the industry, and they are being staged all the time.
The saying of "industry winter" can be traced back to the version number winter period in 2018. In the past five years, legends of wealth from the game industry have often appeared, but I have never heard that the cold winter has passed, which is a visual summary of the current state of the industry. In a volatile environment, companies large and small are also exposed to risk, especially for new entrants who have not yet established their roots. Coupled with the various changes in the real society in the post-epidemic era, the crisis has always been unsettled and rising again and again.
03. Going to sea: can you go out?
The game going overseas has gradually become a familiar topic in the past two years, which is essentially a high-intensity competition in China, "rolling" to overseas markets. The aforementioned "Genshin Impact", "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", and "Black Myth: Wukong" and "Limit Solving Machine" appeared in a bunch at the year-end gathering of the global game industry such as TGA, which is a concrete manifestation of the game going overseas. The author is abroad, and I have a deeper feeling about going to sea.
In Akihabara, the representative of Tokyo's two-dimensional culture, prominent advertising spaces at train stations and Chuo Avenue have been occupied by domestic games such as "Azure Route", "Ark of Tomorrow", "Genshin Impact", and "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" for several years. Visitors who visited this year will also easily feel the presence of Back to the Future: 1999. At the Tokyo Game Show, Chinese was heard frequently in the venue, and it was easy to find exhibitors from large and small countries.
The pace of Chinese games going overseas is unstoppable, but going overseas is never something that can be done. It's not easy to step out of the familiar environment and compete with great games from around the world. Despite the success of individual games, there are many more manufacturers and titles that are in a dilemma.
In addition to the quality of the game itself, going global means localizing and marketing the target market. Different languages and different cultural environments require domestic manufacturers to be careful. The estrangement and misunderstanding that arise in cross-border collaboration often lead to a decrease in work efficiency. The aforementioned games, in addition to their own standards, are also because Youxing and miHoYo have stable branches in Japan, so they can steadily promote the work of Japanese server operations.
In fact, looking back on the overseas experience of these games, it is not difficult to find that the companies behind them have more or less used publicity funds to smash advertising space overseas to spread out publicity after obtaining huge profits in the domestic market, and the same is true for some of the previous "Girl Frontline" and "Placement Girl". This is obviously something that only a few companies can do.
However, this does not mean that latecomers have no way out, with some independent games going to the European and American markets, and some lesser-known games going to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, it can also be seen that the market with consumption power is not only developed countries, and the games that can go overseas are not only works with a "sense of luxury".
However, after many years of going to sea and domestic companies flocking to the city, new problems are also emerging. Due to the development history and environment of the domestic industry, the large-scale popular game types in China are quite limited, which means that the R&D capabilities of most game companies generally do not exceed this range. When the sight of going to sea together happens, you may first have to face competition from home abroad. The solution of this problem can only rely on the improvement of the overall level of the domestic industry.
As opposed to going to sea, it is imported. The newly launched imported games in 2023 are quite predicament. The "Shine! Youjun Girl" and Youxing's "Azure Archive" introduced by Station B are both two-dimensional style mobile games that have achieved great success in Japan before, but the response to the national costume can only be said to be quite average.
Affected by different environments at home and abroad, domestic companies can make games go online globally after the version number is in place, while imported games often have to wait for the game to prove its profitability in overseas markets, and then obtain the version number through the introduction process before it can be launched and operated in China. Not to mention the revisions that need to be paid for the version number, the time required to wait before going live can be so huge that it is almost impossible to catch up with the current version in overseas operations. The triple-A game "The Division 2" introduced by Tencent, when the public beta was opened, the overseas version was updated for the fifth year, and there was no novelty at all.
Since there are a large number of similar works to choose from in China, players will be specially waiting for an imported game that can be expected to be updated in the next year or two when it is launched, and the motivation will continue to decrease.
04. Trend: Emerging from controversy
For more than 10 years, consumer graphics cards have been given features that don't match their jobs. What started as cryptocurrency mining, and since the explosion of AI in 2022, graphics cards have become productivity tools in another sense. In 2023, a large number of "works" such as AI paintings, AI dubbing, and AI texts continue to appear in front of people's eyes, and it has long become a topic that cannot be avoided.
In fact, in 2023, many games using AI painting technology have emerged in various corners. Regardless of the legal and ethical issues involved, AI technology can help small and medium-sized developers create game content in a way that was previously unimaginable. Large game companies can also better cope with rising development costs by leveraging AI in the face of expanding game scale.
It's just that the development of technology will inevitably affect the work of practitioners, and when AI technology develops further, the number of companies that think it can reduce the number of art designers and plot text writers will naturally increase accordingly. In modern society, many jobs require long-term training to be competent, and most of the artists and artists of game companies have entered the industry after a long period of study and drawing practice, so it is inevitable to worry about the possibility of "AI replacing humans".
Although AI painting seems to be full of mistakes and omissions today, it will always improve as the technology continues to advance. In the same way, the works of the best artists are far superior to those of AI, but in the future, when the gap narrows, further changes will come.
Outside of AI, advances in consumer graphics have been fueled by large-scale video games, whose core function is to perform graphics calculations for large-scale 3D video games. Therefore, at this level, even if I am not interested in the development of an industry for a specific purpose, the importance of video games needs to be recognized.
Going back to the game itself, those who follow the discussion among the player community should have seen a lot of the words "ML game" in 2023. To put it simply, "ml" stands for "master lover", which is a derivative of Destiny - Title Designation (FGO), which refers to the affection that in-game characters have for their players. In this way, "ML games" generally refer to games in which the obtainable characters in the game have a strong love for the player, and the scope of the discussion is basically limited to two-dimensional style games in which characters are obtained in the form of gacha gacha.
Players who demand "ML" for all kinds of games generally believe that they have spent time and money in the game, and the main motivation for them to keep playing is for these characters, and the characters and the creators behind the characters are the right thing to do. Opponents argue that even if a player draws a card and obtains a character, the character is not an appendage to the player in terms of plot and personality, which is a bit overkill. The recent controversy over "Girls' Frontline 2: Pursuit" is the standard embodiment of this contradiction.
Again, video games have the dual attributes of entertainment industry products and artistic creations, and at the same time, the developers behind the scenes are also industrial workers, content creators, and service providers. Which side has more weight, the market will give the answer. At this point, it is a question of whether to create a more popular game in the market by adhering to the identity of the company's employees (or even bosses), or whether to put one's own desire for expression in a higher position, which can be somewhat confusing for some developers.
In fact, the feedback from the market has arrived. In October, an interactive skit game called "I'm Surrounded by Beautiful Women!" quietly launched on Steam. A game priced at 42 yuan, without any pre-announcement, has become the focus of the topic, and the social reality it reflects is regrettable. Players have said that it is precisely because of the lack of care of the opposite sex of the same age and the fact that they have never experienced being actively pursued by the opposite sex of the same age that "It's over! I'm surrounded by beautiful women!" has won the popularity.
From the way of gameplay and interaction, from the way the plot background is set, there is nothing wrong with saying that it is "low-level" and "cliché". However, consumers are not all looking for high-end and elegant products, and if they are not their audience, they may be more concerned about the root causes of the current situation. The two-dimensional ML game and "I'm Surrounded by Beautiful Women!" are just outlets for emotions, but the question is, what causes such emotions?
Video games are a reflection of the real world, and everything in the virtual world is created by people living in the real world. It's just that at the moment when public opinion on the Internet is extreme, the players of the "ML faction" have developed to the point where the behavior of the opposite sex character is almost "abiding by the woman's way" enough to establish a chastity archway, which is another topic.
The imitators of "Finished" will appear in the next two years, and their share of the market will be determined by their quality and the development of future trends. By the way, "The Interpreter", which was caught in the whirlpool of public opinion in 2020 due to the relationship between the protagonist and the opposite sex, will be suspended on January 22, 2024.
05. The Future: No one can predict
Generally speaking, this is the time to move on to the closing session and look forward to the new year. But at the beginning of 2024, it is extremely difficult to look forward. The "Measures for the Administration of Online Games" (draft for comments) quickly evaporated the market value of a large number of game-related companies, and then in December, the number of new domestic games that passed the version review reached 105, a record high. No one knows what will happen tomorrow or how these things will affect the industry. There are those who are pessimistic with investors, and there are also those who are excited to see the results of the new version review.
The unknown is not only from the outside, just like the adjustment of ByteDance, and the rumored Bilibili to cut the game department, all belong to the scope of the company's internal operations. Outsiders seem to be holding high salaries from large factories, but in fact, there are not a few people who are trembling and walking on thin ice. As a modern emerging industry, the instability of the game, and even the broader Internet industry, is significant, which can provide opportunities to get rich overnight, and can also allow leading companies to make layoff plans for thousands of people.
Joy in sorrow, joy in sorrow is the norm of life, rejoicing in progress, preparing for possible crises at the same time, and at the same time looking for new development opportunities when crises come - everyone understands the truth. Thinking about it from another angle, after an epic year of masterpieces and bad works, people who love games can at least have some expectations for the new works in 2024.
In the midst of stumbling and stumbling, China's game industry as a whole is becoming more and more internally rolled, going overseas more and more, and the plate is getting bigger and bigger, and like many other industries, it is going a difficult uphill road.
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