In January 2021, ByteDance Game Studio and Kuaishou Game Business Department were busy in different ways, expanding recruitment, intensive cooperative publishing, and high capital investment, revealing the pursuit of game monetization by the two small traffic giants.
However, the voice from the game industry told the first financial reporter that the game companies in the circle pay more attention to the game business of Kuaishou and Byte, but at the specific business level, they pay more attention to game studios with a scale of 100 to 200 people, and the "dark horse" game project developed by the latter may have greater offensive damage. "The game industry has developed to the second half, and the real rise will be those small factories that have been deeply polished in the field of technology and game culture for many years." The person said.
For the Byte and Kuaishou game divisions, it has not yet taken competition with game manufacturers as a goal. Liao Xuhua, an analyst in the interactive entertainment industry at Analysys, told the first financial reporter that the byte is aggressive and fast and steady. ByteDance is holding high in the game investment layout, mainly considering the transformation of its own company positioning from a single advertising traffic company to a diversified integrated Internet manufacturer, and Kuaishou Games is mainly based on revenue improvement and commercialization.
Byte Games big-scale ambitions
In December 2020, a screenshot of a conversation in which ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming complained in the Feishu group that employees had been talking about games during working hours spread across the Internet, and also revealed Zhang Yiming's research and ambition in the game field.
Byte's layout in the game implements Zhang Yiming's strategy of holding high and playing high and blessing with large amounts of funds. ByteDance's Odyssey Distribution Studio, which was established in Shanghai in 2020, has accelerated the recruitment speed of the industry, and its recruitment poster shows that the team members are mainly from the internal short video core operation team and the head game company. Yang Dongmai, head of ByteDance Shanghai Game Studio, has left because the team's performance did not meet the company's expectations, and his work will be taken over by another colleague, who will report to Yan Zhi, the general manager of Byte Games and vice president of the company. ByteDance confirmed this part of the information to the first financial reporter.
In June 2019, ByteDance started the Oasis project (Oasis Project), which focuses on self-developed games. Unlike the company's previous small games and casual games, the Oasis Project is mainly aimed at the development of heavy games, led by Yan Zhi, the head of ByteDance's game business, and the strategy and investment department is responsible. Wang Kuiwu is the head of Oasis and reports to Yan Zhi. Previously, Yu Jia was the head of Oasis and is currently the head of the key project Rgame, which is a synonym for the game under development.
At present, ByteDance's games are divided into three business segments, which belong to three different departments: mini games belong to the product department, casual games belong to the commercialization department, and self-developed games belong to the strategy department. The exclusive agency business, which previously belonged to the strategy department, is now planned to be commercialized. In August 2020, the recruitment scale of the game business jumped to the forefront of each business line in the byteDance social recruitment position and the autumn recruitment position.
In terms of specific business structure, casual games including Huge Engine, You Xiaobang and Ohayoo are under the jurisdiction of Zhang Lidong, chairman of ByteDance (China), and other medium and heavy games are managed by Yan Zhi, including game studios distributed in Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hangzhou, Chaoxi Lightyear, Youyi Technology, Shenji Intelligence, etc. Among them, The day and night lightyear mainly promote the release of medium and heavy games, and some MOBA and ARPG mobile games will develop in the direction of e-sports to make up for the shortcomings of the byte game business. The fair PVP fighting system, including "Voyager King" and other products, provides a possibility for the development of e-sports.
The domestic part of ByteDance's game housekeeping was built by Natuo, the former assistant general manager of Tencent Interactive Entertainment Qiankun Product Center, in charge of the construction of Byte e-sports business, and overseas by ByteDance and CSL, the North American university e-sports alliance, launched the e-sports brand "TikTok Cup", intending to reserve e-sports users to feed its products. Yan Zhi said, "Will patiently continue to invest in (game direction)" and "games are the content industry, as long as there is patience, the content industry is difficult to monopolize.".
Liao Xuhua told the first financial reporter that ByteDance's early investment in the field of game business is very large, including game product distribution, investment and research and development, etc., the game team is also in the process of construction, the initial scale of the team needs to make a little achievements, so that the industry can see the ability and market achievements of ByteDance game publishing, and the cooperation between the two sides will be more and closer in the future.
At this stage, ByteDance has a lot of game products, public information shows that on June 12, 2020, Caissa Culture announced that it signed a "Strategic Cooperation Agreement" with Beijing Sunrise Lightyear Information Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of ByteDance, which means that Caesars Culture will become an important game product customization developer and long-term product supplier of ByteDance, and its game "Naruto: Pinnacle Showdown" in China has also been exclusively represented by ByteDance. However, Liao Xuhua said that the first wave of cooperation between game developers and traffic platforms is based on platform traffic advantages and promotion capabilities, but whether the future will continue to cooperate depends on the game release results, which is also one of the main pressures of byteDance's game team at present.
Kuaishou relies on traffic to be busy monetizing
Different from the ByteDance style, Kuaishou is more relaxed in the game business, and its strategic goals are more focused on monetization and commercialization.
According to the Kuaishou prospectus, live broadcasting and online marketing services account for more than 95% of Kuaishou's revenue, while other business revenue accounts for only 3.2%, other businesses include e-commerce business, online games and other value-added services, and the Kuaishou game business, which has not yet been fully developed, has great room for improvement, and may even become the next growth engine.
On January 8, 2021, in the Kuaishou Mini Program Open Class, the Kuaishou Mini Game business was singled out for key publicity. The person in charge of Kuaishou Mini Game told the first financial reporter that small games are relatively simple and lighter for heavy games, and there is a better adaptation to fragmented time, and small games as a carrier of point-to-point games also have the ability to carry heavier gameplay, and may also constitute the mental carrier, data source and conversion pipeline of the user's conversion process from light casual game users to heavy game users. WeChat and QQ mini games currently have a heavy trend, light and heavy in the middle of a lot of gray, from top to bottom there is room to fill each other.
In fact, as early as 2019, Kuaishou launched the "Million Game Creators Support Plan", and in August 2020, Kuaishou launched the "Open and Win-win Plan" to connect the game and e-sports industry chain through policy support, innovative gameplay, and integrated operation capabilities. For the game guild and MCN institutions, Kuaishou will also launch 5 billion capital support and 100 billion traffic exposure plan. In the first half of 2020, the daily active daily active video of Kuaishou Games has exceeded 90 million, and the number of game creators with more than 100,000 fans has reached 135,000.
People close to the Kuaishou game told the first financial reporter that at present, in addition to small games, the game short video live broadcast is closely related to the Kuaishou main station business, has a good user base and content reserves, and is also a relatively mature section of development. In addition, game self-development and game publishing are also key areas of attention. However, at present, the high cost of buying in the industry and the bottleneck of conversion efficiency are common problems in the entire game distribution. Kuaishou has tried to carry out game intermodal transportation through private domain traffic since 2019, using short video live content as the carrier to help the new path of game distribution in a lower cost and more efficient way, in the future, private domain traffic has a lot of imagination space for the change of the status quo of game distribution, and it is even possible to form a new business model. Taking the online release of "Wild Wild Fight" as an example, the first week of the Kuaishou platform played 500 million short video content around the game, relying on the platform's content-based traffic, effectively driving the game to register 350,000 users.
Kuaishou and Byte do have obvious traffic advantages in the game business, and game live broadcasting has also become an important means of game promotion and distribution. In the first half of 2019, the live broadcasting platform with tencent capital relationship accounted for 88.7% of the market share; Tencent's two major platforms, Douyu and Huya, became the double giants in the game live broadcasting industry, accounting for more than 60% of the market share; Kuaishou, bilibili, and Watermelon Video also laid out the game live broadcasting industry, forming a pattern of "two super and many strong". In 2020, Kuaishou continued to increase the live broadcast of the game, and carried out three rounds of game anchors: in July, 11 tentacle game anchors such as Blue Smoke, Yihan, and Old Dream officially settled in Kuaishou; in September, PDD led the "Sunset Red Team" to all enter Kuaishou; in October, more than 50 players and anchors such as Dream Tears, Cat God, and Yinuo collectively settled in Kuaishou. According to the data released by Kuaishou in ChinaJoy, as of May 2020, the monthly active users of Kuaishou Game Live have exceeded 220 million, in August 2020, the number of monthly active game anchors of Kuaishou exceeded 1.6 million; in October 2019, Kuaishou broadcast the League of Legends S9 global event live; in January 2020, Kuaishou became the official partner of the King of Glory Professional Event, obtained the KPL event live broadcast rights, and the total number of broadcasts of the 2020KPL Spring Tournament in Kuaishou reached 2.61 billion.
But the game industry in the final analysis to land on the product itself, Liao Xuhua told the first financial reporter, traffic is only used as an auxiliary means to accelerate the development of the game business, only through traffic can not expand the territory of this thing has been missed by many Internet giants have been missed, such as 360, Baidu, millet, Ali and other giants of the past. At present, Byte and Kuaishou lack their own core strength in game products, Liao Xuhua said that the game market is very fair, although it values traffic, channels, IP, art resources, and technical capabilities, but the core is the game product itself.