Per editor: Dong Xingsheng
As one of the most well-known and influential annual events in the field of digital entertainment in the world today, the 19th China International Digital Interactive Entertainment Exhibition (ChinaJoy) was officially opened at the Shanghai New International Expo Center on July 30, 2021. As the only in-depth financial media cooperated by the conference, "Daily Economic News" witnessed this year's ChinaJoy grand event.
2021 ChinaJoy takes IP as the core, covering digital entertainment fields such as games, animation, e-sports, trendy toys, intelligent entertainment software and hardware, and presents a grand development of the digital entertainment industry driven by new technologies.
The scale of exhibitors in this exhibition is grand, with a total of more than 300 B TO C exhibitors. In China, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Sheng Qu Games, Perfect World, Heartbeat & TapTap, Xishanju and other well-known digital entertainment companies all participated in the exhibition. Internationally, bandai Namco, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Intel and AMD and other world-renowned companies also actively participated in the exhibition.
This year's exhibition also added a number of theme exhibition areas for the first time, aiming to focus on the new potential growth points of the industry, including: Chaopin Pavilion exhibition area, VR/AR theme exhibition area, science fiction theme exhibition area, digital human theme exhibition area, etc., to bring a more comprehensive and richer new digital entertainment experience to the audience
Interestingly, ChinaJoy, who has young people as the main audience, actually attracted the boss to play e-sports this year, and also attracted the aunt to dance square dance, which became a highlight of this exhibition.
Image source: Courtesy of Sheng Qu Games
<h2>IP Pan-entertainment: a new growth point for game companies</h2>
Tencent Games' "Glory of kings" launched in 2015 confirms the commercial value and long-term operation behind the self-developed game IP. Every reporter observed that with the prominence of the value of self-developed game IP, more and more enterprises have begun to increase investment in self-research, and this type of IP has become one of the most core own assets of more game companies.
"Dawn Awakening" debuts Image source: Courtesy of Tencent Games
In the IP-themed interactive exhibition area, Tencent brought a new game "Dawn Awakening", which is also the first appearance of the game. As an ultra-realistic open-world survival mobile game, the game focuses on the three core experience elements of exploration, combat and construction under the open world. This time, Tencent directly moved the game scene and gameplay to the offline, and created the first offline survival camp in ChinaJoy.
Game companies are committed to creating a more commercially valuable IP universe. "2021 China Self-developed Game IP Research Report" shows that in the TOP50 self-developed games, all IP has an epitaxial layout, of which music, peripherals, animation, etc. have more than half of the enterprise layout, and some enterprises even invest tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to carry out deep ploughing in specific fields, trying to create head cultural products in other fields.
Sheng Qu Games also brought a number of IP games to this year's exhibition, among which the mobile game "Qing Yu Nian" adapted from popular novels has attracted much attention. The TV series of the same name based on the novel has been broadcast in 2019, achieving a double harvest of word-of-mouth ratings. According to the news, the second season of "Qing Yu Nian" will start filming in the fourth quarter of this year, which once again proves that it is completely feasible for high-quality IP to do cross-border development.
ChinaJoy exhibition area Image source: Courtesy of Sheng Qu Games
Cultural linkage is an important form of game IP layout in the field of pan-cultural entertainment. In the field of linkage, museums, music and opera, intangible cultural heritage and other fields are all popular linkage objects. In terms of linkage depth, some IP is not in the form of simple brand cooperation, but deeply integrates relevant cultural content into game content, and launches special game content such as props, skins, and characters.
Xishanju's famous martial arts duanyou "Sword Man Love Online Edition III" (referred to as "Sword Net 3") has diversified attempts in cultural linkage. In addition to integrating a variety of elements with traditional Chinese cultural characteristics such as poetry, song and dance, tea art and music into the game, "Sword Net 3" also cooperates with many intangible cultural heritage projects, for example, at this year's ChinaJoy exhibition, Xishanju exhibited the character costumes made by the national intangible cultural heritage technology silk reeling process, which not only restored the game characters, but also empowered more potential energy with the help of traditional culture.
According to the relevant survey of gamma data, 85.1% of users have re-downloaded games that have been abandoned because they have seen related pan-entertainment layouts or linkages. From the perspective of long-term operation, the layout of more pan-entertainment areas also helps the return of old users.
<h2>Cloud Gaming: Build a point-and-play future across platform boundaries</h2>
Among the many game "black technology" shown by ChinaJoy this year, cloud games are one of the most wanted technology applications for many viewers. One of the biggest features of the 5G era is "low latency", which also constitutes the underlying technology of cloud gaming. Through the cloud server, players can play in any client, without the need to be equipped with high-end processors and graphics cards, nor do they need to download and install any games, they can play AAA games in one second.
Guo Rongchang, founder and CEO of Nissho UBTA, said at the "Global Cloud Game Industry Conference": "I believe that the framework of cloud games will be more flexible and flexible, and the optimization space will be greater, because complex computing work can be handed over to the cloud processing. From my point of view, the present and future of the game industry, that is, from the traditional game to the cloud game 1.0 process, the game industry is optimizing and improving, and more importantly, we can better predict the market stock and increment of players, I think this is the biggest advantage of cloud games in the future. ”
The uncle who plays e-sports Image source: Huya courtesy of the picture
Huya brought YOWA cloud games based on the self-developed cloud game engine. Through the deep ecological nesting with Huya Live, YOWA Cloud Games has realized the trinity of host-user-cloud games, creating a new game distribution model with one touch. It is reported that YOWA cloud games have been authorized by dozens of large game companies at home and abroad, and have actively entered the world game market through the global layout of Huya.
In addition, Xishanju's cloud game application masterpiece "Sword Net 3 Origins" that took 3 years to build also officially opened the unlimited number undeleted file test on July 23. As a strategic project of Xishanju this year, "Sword Net 3 Origin" is equipped with its self-developed DX11 engine, which greatly reduces the need for the game for host configuration; on the basis of the computer PC cloud, "Sword Net 3 Origin" is customized for mobile phone and tablet users to configure the mobile cloud, and the logic and UI are redesigned, breaking the device shackles.
Gui Jingjing Image source: Courtesy of Fast Disk Technology
Gui Jingjing, co-founder and chief operating officer of Kuaipan Technology, said: "There are three points that cloud games cannot get around in terms of business landing: one is computing power; the other is content; and the third is commercialization. From the perspective of computing power, it boils down to eight words: understanding computing power and controlling computing power. Today there are a lot of games, both like "Glory of Kings" and "Peace Elite", which have been popular for many years, as well as new masterpieces such as "Light Encounter", "Heavenly Oracle", and "Devil Cry". The hash rate required behind these different games is different. From a content point of view, "Light Encounter" can reach a length of nearly 90 minutes on some platforms, and the retention can reach nearly 50%. We judge that the future of cloud gaming must be the general trend of online play. ”
Wen Bin, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Dalong Cloud, said at the above-mentioned industry conference: "In the future, most people's lives and work will rely on the Internet, so the future of cloud gaming is actually to build an ecosystem, so that everyone can live in a virtual space in the 5G or later 6G era." But this requires companies to work together to create a virtuous ecosystem like infrastructure. ”
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