Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

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Many Switch players have gone through the process from admiration to dust, and Switch ranks second on the list of the most ash-prone electronic products.

For the players of the national version, in addition to the pain of eating ash, there is also dissatisfaction with Tencent, the introducer of the national version. Only 20 or 30 games have been introduced in three years, which is in sharp contrast to thousands of overseas games. Some players say that their own Bank of China Switch has become a Mario starter.

It has been nearly three years since Tencent introduced Switch into China, but the national version of Switch is still a long way from the expectations of players.

Because there are too few games and some features have been castrated, Switch players have been ridiculed as "national warriors" or even "national martyrs". One national bank player complained that he blindly believed in Tencent and was charged IQ tax by Tencent.

Switch was also on the list in a Weibo poll on the most ash-prone electronics. Experts pointed out that although the scale of China's game market is huge, it is dominated by PC games and mobile games, and console games have always been a niche market, and its ecological cultivation in China will be a long process.

"it's time to recharge your Switch." Nintendo recently posted a battery health tip on its social platform to remind Switch players who haven't recharged for too long that it's time to recharge their long-dusty handset.

This is a true portrayal of Switch players, especially those of the Bank of China.

Handheld game consoles, represented by the Switch, ranked second in the Weibo vote on one of the most ash-prone electronics. One netizen commented in the vote that the easiest person to eat ash is Switch, which is bought and sold to classmates, who find it not funny and Xianyu sells it, and the game card is given away directly.

There are not a few people who have experienced this. Yang Jing (a pseudonym) told Caichi that she bought Switch because of the fitness ring adventure and was interested in this novel way of exercise. She didn't have to go out to exercise, which just solved the laziness that she didn't want to go downstairs when she got home from work. " When I first bought it, I studied it for most of the day. I thought this fitness ring was really good, and I wanted to stick to it, but for a while I was so busy at work that I got home at about 10 o'clock. I really didn't want to move for a while. I didn't want to move for a while. I really didn't want to move, and the fitness ring was covered with dust when I put it on the sofa. "

She also wanted to regain her Switch, but it didn't work out. "one day I saw that there was a little bit of ash, so I picked it up and wiped it, but I still put the fitness ring in the box. When I didn't exercise for too long, I just gave up when I saw that it was just a heartbeat." She said.

There are also players who have experienced a fresh period of Switch, frequent use of the period, and finally came to the insipid period.

Chen Ming (a pseudonym), a moderate gamer, bought Switch two years ago, driven by friends around him. At first, I envisioned being able to play double games on TV with my girlfriend after work or on weekends. To this end, he bought a number of games, and the two men did go through several months of freshness and frequent use.

However, men and women still have different preferences for the type of games, and they disagree from time to time about what games they want to play. Later, his girlfriend simply gave up the mainframe games and pulled him to play mobile games in her spare time, and Switch gradually ate ash.

"now I still play alone once in a while, but if there is no one together, I may only play two or three times a year."

Players complain about the national version: in fact, in addition to the low frequency of use, there have been some problems with the sales of Switch in recent years.

Globally, in May, Nintendo announced that global sales of Switch consoles were 23.06 million units in 2021, down 20.0% from the previous year, the first year-on-year decline in Switch since its launch in 2017. Nintendo cited the reason for stagnant production due to semiconductor shortages, and there may also be a lag in semiconductor supply in 2022, with sales expected to fall to 21 million units.

In august, Nintendo reported that sales of Switch consoles fell 22% from a year earlier to 3.43 million units, down from 4.45 million a year earlier.

From a domestic point of view, the sales volume of Switch is also tortuous.

In 2019, Tencent and Nintendo reached a cooperation to jointly open up the Switch Chinese market. In December 2019, the Bank of China Switch game console was officially launched. At that time, the outside world was full of expectations for the combination of the two game giants. Nintendo could provide high-quality equipment and products, and Tencent could provide marketing capabilities in the Chinese market, as well as a huge user base. Both sides can get what they need.

However, sales of Switch in the Chinese market are not as good as expected.

In May 2020, in a conference call after the release of Nintendo's fiscal 2020 annual report, investors asked about the sales performance and future plans of Switch in China. Nintendo President Toshitaro Furukawa admitted that sales of Nintendo in China in the last quarter were not very large.

In 2021, the national version of Switch finally ushered in a few good news. Tencent said it had sold more than 1 million Switch consoles in China and released more than a dozen popular Switch games by the end of 2020. This is also the first time that Tencent has disclosed the sales results of the national version of Switch, and it is also the only time so far.

In the domestic console game market, the annual sales performance of 1 million units is already good, but this figure accounts for only a single digit in the global annual sales of Switch, which is obviously not the target level at the beginning of the cooperation between the two sides.

The national version of Switch has also been complained by many domestic players that there are too few games to play and some lack of functions have become the main pain points.

At first, there was only one BOC game launched with the Switch national version of the device, but now it has reached 20 or 30, but there is still a huge gap between this and the overseas version of thousands of games; in addition, although the Switch national version can run overseas game cassette, it does not support DLC (extended content of the game).

In this situation, users who bought the national version of Switch were ridiculed by the outside world as "national warriors", or even "national martyrs".

"in fact, it's nice to call Bank of China users martyrs," one Switch user complained on social media. "it's a schadenfreude from people who didn't buy Bank of China. We Switch users don't call ourselves that. Generally, we call ourselves idiots and are charged with IQ tax by Tencent. It's because I was ignorant and blindly trusted Tencent, and Switch is now my Mario starter."

Domestic console games are difficult to break niche? From the overall scale of the game market, China is undoubtedly a big game country.

According to the 2021 China Game Industry report released by the China Game Industry Research Institute and others, the scale of Chinese game users maintained steady growth in 2021, reaching 666 million users, an increase of 0.22% over the same period last year. In 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's game market was 296.513 billion yuan, an increase of 17.826 billion yuan over 2020 and an increase of 6.40 percent over the same period last year.

However, Gao Dongxu, founder and chief analyst of China Entertainment think-tank, told Caizhi that looking back at history, national conditions and the development history of China's game industry, Chinese gamers are PC players and mobile game players, and console games in China do not have a user habit base that has been cultivated with the West and Japan.

It is true.

In terms of revenue, the actual sales revenue of China's console game market in 2021 was 2.58 billion yuan, an increase of 22.34% over the same period last year. Although it grew rapidly, it accounted for only 0.87% of China's game market. By contrast, the proportion of mobile games in China's overall game market is absolutely mainstream. In 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's mobile game market is 225.538 billion yuan, accounting for 76.06%. The actual income of the client game market is 58.8 billion yuan, accounting for 19.83%; the actual sales revenue of the web game market is 6.03 billion yuan, accounting for 2.03%.

Compared with other countries, China's console game market is pitifully small.

According to Zhiyan, the global console game market reached $45.76 billion in 2021, including $20.78 billion in North America, $15.15 billion in Europe and $4.9 billion in Japan. The agency believes that China's console game market is expected to reach the same level, or will stimulate more enterprise layout.

Tencent's partnership with Nintendo has also made new moves this year.

In May this year, Hong Jiahua, head of IT distributor, announced that he had signed a cooperation agreement with Tencent to become the general agent of Nintendo Bank of China's full range of Switch products in Chinese mainland region. The two sides will carry out marketing, channel development, terminal development and consumer empowerment in the Chinese mainland market.

This move is considered to complement the offline channel layout of the national version of Switch. However, people in the industry are not optimistic about this, because the current sales problem of Switch national version is not a channel problem, but the number of games that can be played is too small.

Gao Dongxu also believes that console games are a hardware + software ecology, and the ecological cultivation of domestic console games will be a long process. "without a mature user base, the entry of new manufacturers will not change this situation." He said.

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