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

In 1995, the game journal Electronic Game Software (then called "Game concentration Camp") published an article entitled "Crow Crow".

The article quoted a letter from a playmate of Wuhan University as saying: "your strategy is good or good, but it is a Japanese game!" the color pages you posted are beautiful, but they are Japanese advertisements! when on earth can we see games made by the Chinese themselves in your magazine! I wait from ten to twenty years old, will I wait for the second decade, the third decade? "

The article concluded: "as for the cure for revitalizing China's game industry, we cannot prescribe it; we cannot see the 'bright' future of the mainland's game industry."

These words still seem poignant today. Indeed, for a long time, the level of game research and development in China is far from that of the first echelon in the world. There are always some skin-changing products on the market, and some even codes are copied over, and the core games are more or less the same. monster upgrade, tower defense strategy, three elimination training, shooting speed …...

In the eyes of many people, the game is synonymous with "making quick money". Making a fortune and leaving has even become the core goal of some teams. on the contrary, people who make products seem to be very precious.

Later, stand-alone works by Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft and EA began to appear in domestic Internet cafes, and with the rise of online games such as "Stone Age" and "Legend", Chinese game developers began to face the competition from the top international giants.

If someone wants to "break in", someone will naturally want to "kill" out.

In 2012, Chinese game makers earned only $570 million overseas, but by the end of 2021, the actual sales of Chinese indigenous R & D games in the overseas market climbed to $18.013 billion, a more than 30-fold increase in nine years.

For quite a long time, Tencent founded by Ma Huateng and NetEase founded by Ding Lei have faced each other fiercely in the domestic and foreign game markets, and now it seems that the two are still half the sky of domestic games. "Houlang" Mihayou, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, Lilis, FunPlus and other companies have also blossomed, while more start-ups have long since vanished.

The 2021 China Game Industry report jointly released by the Game work Committee of China Music and Digital Association and the China Game Industry Research Institute shows that the general trend of Chinese games going out to sea has become, with a marked increase in the number of countries and regions involved in going out to sea, and more diversified product types.

According to Sensor Tower, there are eight mobile games with global revenues of more than $1 billion (including App Store and Google Play) in 2021, with Tencent's "PUBG Mobile" and "Arena of Valor" and Miha's "original God" in the top three.

The most important reason why Chinese games have changed so much is that mobile games bring Chinese game manufacturers a brand-new opportunity, an opportunity that can really compete in the global game market.

For those who eat crabs, in fact, in the earliest era of PC games, Chinese self-developed games have already tried to go out to sea, including "Fantasy Journey to the West", "A Chinese Odyssey", "The Demi-Gods & Semi-Devils" and "Perfect World".

But the earlier one was actually one of the three swords made in China-- "Jianxiaqingyuan online version."

The "Jianxiaqingyuan" series of Xishanju has a huge user base in China, and it quickly won the love of domestic players after the launch of "Jianxiaqingyuan online version". However, in 2004, with the influx of a large number of European, American and South Korean online games into China, resulting in more and more fierce market competition, Xishanju decided to export overseas in advance and turned its attention to Southeast Asian markets.

Facts have proved that Xishanju's decision is quite correct. Southeast Asia, which is deeply influenced by oriental culture, has a very high acceptance of the martial arts background of "Jianxiaqingyuan online version". On the first day of the public test in Vietnam, "Jianxiaqingyuan online version" flooded 120,000 players, and in just three months, the number of people online broke through the million mark, setting off a martial arts craze throughout Southeast Asia.

In the subsequent operation process, "Jianxiaqingyuan online version" once occupied 70% of the Vietnamese online game market, and even contributed more than 95% of the income of the Vietnamese online game market all the year round.

With Zhuyu in the front, more game companies begin to enter overseas markets.

In 2005, Perfect World released MMORPG "Perfect World". Compared with other domestic game companies, "exporting overseas" was Perfect World's important strategy from the very beginning, and even became the online game company with the highest overseas income among domestic online game manufacturers.

In the second year of launching "Perfect World" in China, Perfect World launched the "Perfect World International Edition" and officially entered the overseas market.

At the scene of the fourth ChinaJoy, perfect time and Space jointly held a signing conference with the Japanese copyright agent of "Perfect World International Edition" with C&CMedia, a famous Japanese online game operator. The signing amount was as high as 2 million US dollars, setting a record for the export of an original single online game in China at that time.

In 2007, Sohu Changyou launched The Demi-Gods & Semi-Devils, which is adapted from Jin Yong's novel of the same name and officially authorized by Mr. Jin Yong. After the success of the domestic market, "The Demi-Gods & Semi-Devils" landed in the Vietnam market. With the influence of Jin Yong's jianghu, it became popular quickly and firmly occupied the top three seats. Then, in the annual game selection ceremony held by professional game media in Vietnam, he won the highest award-"the most successful online game in 2007".

After that, "The Demi-Gods & Semi-Devils" continued to expand its market share, successively landed in South Korea and Japan, and Changyou set up a US branch in 2009, pushing "The Demi-Gods & Semi-Devils" to the North American game market.

In January 2008, Perfect World officially exported to Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, landed in Japan in April and South Korea in December, and set a record for the highest number of people online at the same time.

While these enterprises are advancing by leaps and bounds, a number of foreign high-quality masterpieces began to sweep the domestic Internet cafes. From the earliest "Miracle MU" to the later "Legend", "World of Warcraft", "Magic Baby" and "Dungeon & Fighter", about 70% of the popular styles in the Chinese market come from overseas, especially in South Korea, which emptied a lot of pocket money for the post-80s and 90s.

Market share has been squeezed, so that more enterprises have the idea of "going out to sea". Before 2010, domestic page games began to appear popular seafood in Europe and the United States and other regions.

In February 2009, the cool farm game "Sunshine Ranch" moved to Facebook America, entered China's Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan regions through Facebook, and entered France, Italy and other European countries, with a new language version launched almost a month.

As a result, Hot Cool got the first wave of game dividends and made a lot of money.

Subsequently, the "Divine Comedy" on Seventh Avenue and the "Goddess Alliance" of the travelers have both harvested tens of millions of dollars overseas, while North America is their important market, among which "Goddess Alliance" has been named the best new game of the Facebook.

After page games gradually opened up overseas, companies such as tourists, Panax notoginseng and Kunlun Wanwei, which had previously focused on page games, have made outstanding achievements overseas. Take tourists as an example, the overseas revenue of tourists reached 1.968 billion yuan in 2017, accounting for more than 60% of the total revenue.

Although page games have made some achievements overseas, with the development of the times, smartphones are rapidly sweeping the world, and a new opportunity appears in front of all game research and development teams-mobile games.

In 2014, Tencent plugged in games such as "Aixiaochu" (Craz3 Match) and "WeChat Dash PvP" into the international version of Wechat in Southeast Asia. In the same year, Zhiming Xintong's new product, "the dispute of Kings" (Clash of Kings), was launched. The game has achieved amazing results around the world, ranking in the top five in 50 countries and in the top 10 in 80 countries.

Guochang, a game practitioner, recalls that "the dispute of Kings" has made a lot of innovations in the traditional SLG game. first, iOS, Android, and PC data synchronization, players from all over the world play on the same server, multilingual real-time communication, and stronger social attributes. Second, the free VIP system, players get started quickly, up to 100 alliance members form a team to launch a real-time war, a real "real-life war". Finally, there are different modes of adding points in the game, which directly affect the experience and trend of the game behind the game, which can highlight the personality of the players.

As for why it was so successful, Tang Binsen, chief executive of Zhiming Star, said: when others are still in China, I go to Russia; when others go to Russia, I go to Brazil; when others follow to Brazil, I have been to 16 countries. This is the law of "seizing no man's land" and "fast without breaking" that he emphasized.

"when we generate 2 billion yuan of revenue, we dare to spend 1.8 billion yuan on advertising and brand exposure in central cities such as New York, London and Moscow. This practice of fighting from high to low, rather than the other way around, has made the dispute of Kings a very successful export game in Chinese history." Tang Binsen said.

At the beginning of 2015, the game went out to sea to enter a period of rapid development, and the protagonist officially changed from "page tour" to "mobile game".

In the following two years, Tencent and NetEase launched a number of phenomenal mobile games, such as "Arena of Valor" and "Onmyoji", which have been active in the list of various mobile games.

In 2018, the game industry ushered in an inflection point, this year, many game manufacturers began to gradually swim to the vast sea of countries around the world.

The reason is, on the one hand, because the game version number audit is stricter, on the other hand, because the total number of domestic mobile game users has reached the ceiling, the growth rate is declining year by year.

At the beginning of 2018, the number of users of mobile games in China was about 500 million, and the total number of mobile games has reached more than 9000, resulting in serious overcapacity. In the same year, the growth rate of China's game market as a whole has slowed, with the 2018 China Game Industry report revealing that the growth rate of mobile games has dropped from 246.9% at its peak to 15.4%.

For small and medium-sized enterprises, the domestic market is more cramped. The total revenue of Tencent and NetEase mobile games together accounts for 76% of the entire mobile game market, and the remaining 10, 000 enterprises can only compete fiercely for the remaining less than 30% market share.

At the same time, benefiting from the popularity of smartphones, the global distribution of products has become the norm and other factors, a number of domestic issuers have emerged, such as Miha Tour, Tap4Fun, IGG, Funplus and so on.

Today, the sails of Chinese games have spread all over the world, covering Europe and the United States, Japan and South Korea, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and other regions. Judging from the proportion of the market structure of domestic sea-going income sources in the past three years, the United States and Japan are still the top two countries of China's self-research hand-travel income.

Liang Xing, director of the Quantification Investment Department of Cathay Pacific Fund, said that domestic games going out to sea is mainly driven by a number of factors: first, Chinese mobile game manufacturers have global competitive strength, providing competition barriers for going out to sea; second, there is a wide space to explore overseas markets, sustainable mining of demographic dividends in emerging areas and mobile increments of games in mature markets; third, policies to encourage high-quality games to go out to sea to provide support for the spread of high-quality culture. Therefore, going out to sea is also expected to pull the entire game industry in the next few years, to maintain a relatively steady performance growth.

At the same time, she also believes that in the short term, the overall product reserves of listed companies in the game industry are rich, which will be concentrated in the second and third quarters, and the superimposed base effect will fade, which is expected to lead to strong growth in the industry. In the long run, the game goes out to sea to maintain high growth, 5G, cloud games, meta-universe and other new technologies and new business type will bring more imaginative space to the game.

A game called "PUBG" and "PUBG" (PUBG) is a competitive shooting game developed by South Korea's Krafton. He has a more popular name in China-"eating Chicken".

In this game, players need to collect all kinds of resources on the game map and fight against other players in the shrinking security zone to survive to the end.

The same is true of the game going out to sea, every opportunity for "PUBG" is reserved for those who are prepared.

When the 2018 edition "tightening" began, Yu Jiu, the founder of an independent game development company, was the one who was "caught off guard". "We were only a few days away from being able to launch smoothly, thinking that it would be our turn when the version was reissued nine months later, but we still didn't get the favor of Lady Luck," he said. "

This game is a work in which he and his team worked overtime for half a year. It is a kind of shooting stand-alone game in which the player acts as a hunter and defeats the opposite BOSS by using crossbows (guns) with different attributes.

In their vision, players need to "recharge" to get more powerful crossbows and upgrade different additional attributes. Not getting the version number means the game cannot be officially put on the shelves, and even if it is put on the shelves, it can only be "tested" and cannot be charged. If you want to activate the charging function, you may be forcibly removed from the shelves or even fined.

In order to recover the cost of the previous investment, Yujiu is ready to put its products on the Vietnamese market. He took a colleague in charge of marketing to the area for a special inspection, but when they arrived in Vietnam, they found that there was a similar "version number" audit procedure in Vietnam, and a process would take about 12-18 months to come down. Obviously, they can't wait that long, and in the end, most people on the team have to put up with the result of their own efforts.

Photo Source: Guohai Securities, of course, there are many enterprises that know early on that they can't put eggs in the same basket. They are the best in the industry in China, and they are still the leaders after going out to sea.

In 2017, nine of the top 10 mobile games in the world were related to Chinese companies. Of these nine, five are led or acquired by Tencent. Apart from "Arena of Valor" and "The Demi-Gods & Semi-Devils", the rest of "Royal War", "Tribal conflict" and "Candy crushing Legend" are all from Supercell, a Finnish company acquired by Tencent.

Relying on the investment layout of "buy and buy", Tencent has set up a huge overseas game territory.

Since 2012, Tencent has spent at least 97.867 billion yuan on 33 overseas game companies, including the fist company for League of Legends and Supercell for Wars Royale, according to a research report by Citic Securities. Considering the omission of the sample, the overall investment may be hundreds of billions.

In the global market, Tencent Games earned $32.2 billion (224.8 billion yuan) in 2021, surpassing Sony and Apple, according to Statista. According to IT Orange, Tencent Games's market share is as high as 16.7%. In other words, 16% of the world's game revenue goes to Tencent.

Unlike Tencent, NetEase, another big game maker, takes the form of self-research. In 2015, "Journey to the West 2" and "Mobile Journey to the West" entered the seafood series one after another, but due to the strong cultural attribute of IP, these games were mainly aimed at overseas Chinese-speaking users. Although they opened the precedent of heavy games to go to sea, they did not contribute considerable income to NetEase.

With the launch of "Onmyoji" in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan in China in the fourth quarter of 2016, as well as in South Korea, Japan and other East Asian countries, NetEase made its first significant contribution to the sea in 2017. At the end of 2017, with the rise of the domestic mobile game market "Chicken eating War" and the subsequent suspension of the version number, NetEase began to expand the overseas Battle Royale Mobile Games market, and achieved success in the Japanese market and the American market through "Operation Wilderness" and "Rules of Survival". Going to sea has officially become an important source of income for the company's mobile game business.

In the third and fourth quarters of 2018, NetEase released "the Fifth Personality" and "after tomorrow" overseas. After a climbing period of about three quarters, he began to contribute steady flow in mid-2019 and continues to this day.

According to the global App Store and Google Play revenue rankings of Chinese mobile game publishers released by Sensor Tower in April 2022, Tencent and NetEase are firmly in the top two places.

Image source: Sensor Tower has Tencent and NetEase Zhuyu in front, overseas has become the "cake" that almost all game manufacturers want.

In 2018, Lilith, who recovered from a lawsuit with Blizzard, launched "Universal Awakening" and "AFKArena" overseas. Among them, "Universal Awakening" has set a new revenue record for "domestic SLG". Since 2019, it has repeatedly topped the list of China's go-to mobile games, and won the first place on the best-selling list of iOS games in 65 countries and regions.

Lilis is not all. In December 2019, App Annie released the ranking of overseas income of Chinese publishers in December 2019. FunPlus fun plus games ranked first, surpassing NetEase, Tencent and IGG.

This achievement is due to the excellent performance of its product "State of Survival". Data show that "State of Survival" revenue rose sharply to $7.9 million in December of that year, an increase of 53.6 per cent from the previous month. At that time, the top three markets for the game's revenue were the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, contributing 41.6%, 11.7% and 5.2% of revenue, respectively.

In 2020, Chinese games threw a blockbuster "original God" into overseas markets in the two-dimensional field.

In the expression of the media, "the original God" is a masterpiece that makes all the game bosses feel like a pain in the throat. Before that, the two-dimensional category is very small, and it is an embarrassing field in front of the bosses of overseas manufacturers. However, Mihayou has opened up the two-dimensional international blue ocean with "original God" and has accumulated $3.7 billion in player income in the more than two years since its launch, of which $2.5 billion comes from outside China, ranking second in the world.

As the so-called "generation version, generation god", different cultures, regions, and ages have created different preferences and tastes for gamers, Chinese game companies have also used "iterations" again and again to gradually find the knack for domestic games to become popular all over the world.

Photo Source: Guohai Securities's latest October 2022 data show that a total of 42 Chinese manufacturers have been listed in the TOP100 list of global mobile game publishers, attracting a total of US $1.86 billion, accounting for 38.4% of the global TOP100 mobile game issuers' income.

According to the China Game Industry report from January to June 2022 released by the Game working Committee of the China Music Association and the China Game Industry Research Institute, the actual sales revenue of China's independent R & D games in overseas markets reached 8.989 billion US dollars from January to June 2022, an increase of 6.16% over the same period last year.

The emergence of popular games such as "Universal Awakening", "State of Survival" and "original God" is not only proof of the improvement of China's game research and development level, but also affected another revolution in the industry.

In the early days, domestic games were mainly "buying volume" when they went out to sea, that is, game manufacturers or publishers concentrated exposure in various major channels within a certain period of time in the form of advertising, so as to achieve the purpose of guiding players to download and register games. Because of this, the traffic on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms has gradually become "popular".

Liang Fan, head of product strategy and user research at Qiandian Interactive (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., shared three growth paths of overseas games driven by buying volume to Xiaguang Society: first, through the expansion of new users, on the premise of stable ROI, continue to increase the purchase budget and then achieve growth; second, content-driven payment, that is, increasing experience content, so as to increase players' resource consumption and stimulate payment demand. Third, commercial-driven payment, to put it simply, to sell more things, including all kinds of gift bags, discount coupons, BP delivery and so on.

Through the action of "buying quantity", a game can quickly achieve volume, and from the "little transparency" to the "list of big brothers". But as the price of traffic rises and the effect is discounted, the matter of "buying volume" is becoming less and less cost-effective.

App Growing's "2021 Global Mobile Game purchase White Paper" mentioned that although the number of global mobile game advertisements increased significantly in 2021, it was mixed with a lot of problems such as content violations, false propaganda, promotion material infringement and so on. Twitter in the release of "boundless Journey: 2022 Twitter Game Global Insight White Paper" also mentioned that forward-looking issuance and branding operations are indispensable, "the industry's understanding of UA (User Acquisition, user access) has changed, no longer blindly apply 'buying thinking', but began to carry out fine brand operation."

In other words, with the development of the game market to the stage of growth and burnout, players have higher and higher requirements for the quality of the game, the competition of game manufacturers has begun to intensify, and the era of pure buying has passed. Game marketing is changing rapidly, moving towards diversification, short video, live broadcast, position management and other marketing methods are rising, becoming an important way for game manufacturers to obtain increment.

In addition to "buying volume", another problem that has to be mentioned when the game goes out to sea is "localization".

'our products are global from the very beginning, so we took into account the acceptance of different countries and regions when designing characters, 'said Wu Qi, a light casual game developer. Although it is a cartoon character, it also takes into account the color of the image, clothing and name.

Even though Wu Qi made full preparations in the early stage, he still stepped on the "pit" in the translation process. " We first translated Chinese into English and then into other languages. The translation team charged about 300 yuan for every 1000 words. I thought it was cheaper at that time, so I gave it to them to do it. The game has been lukewarm since it was launched in the Spanish-speaking area, and we couldn't find the reason internally, until once when we showed our products to a Chinese who had worked and lived there for many years, he pointed out that there was a big problem with our translation. that's not how locals talk. I just realized the importance of translation. " Wu Qi said.

Later, Wu Qi's products began to be launched in the Middle East Arabic region, and a large number of colloquial expressions were used in the translation process. Before the official launch, he specially asked a group of local players to do a blind test, in order to be close to the local expression habits. Try to make users feel friendly. It worked. Their synthetic Mini Game was well received in the Middle East and once topped the list of casual games.

With this experience, Wu Qi and his team tried to bring the product to more countries, paying more attention to localization as well as translation problems. For example, he said, "because our game is easy to use, there is basically no room for breakthrough, so we can only pay more attention to the details." for example, in Brazil, our game background is the huge statue of Jesus; in Japan, when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, we change the background to the cherry blossom sea; in the United States, we have pumpkins and wizard hats in the background before Thanksgiving, and we will replace it with Christmas decorations early next month. "

Wu Qi concluded that through the packaging of this overall atmosphere, we can make the game content cater to local users, make them feel that this is a product tailored for my differentiation, and then be recognized by the players.

The big waves sweep the sand, and the new story begins, but what many domestic game companies have to face is that when the tide becomes popular, challenges follow. This challenge comes from two aspects: one is that there are more and more opponents, and the other is that the quality is mixed.

Xiao Jian, executive director, chairman and CEO of China Mobile Games, believes that overseas mature markets have become saturated. Although Chinese mobile game manufacturers have made great achievements in overseas markets, in the long run, under the background of domestic mobile game companies actively going to sea, it is inevitable to intensify competition.

Another game practitioner also told Xiaguang, "overseas markets are also very popular, with big factories and small factories turning into a pot of porridge." He believes that the overseas game market is not an easy market to develop. On the one hand, with more and more overseas manufacturers, the threshold becomes higher, and the competition becomes more and more fierce; on the other hand, the homogenization of offshore products is becoming more and more serious, and it is more difficult for products to break through.

The above practitioners said that some small and medium-sized teams, with the idea of "making a fortune" quickly, directly copy the game products of other developers by means of plagiarism, skin change, code ripping and so on, which has had a negative impact on the whole Chinese game going out to sea.

Geng Jian, who once worked as a master strategy for a domestic medium-sized game company, revealed that under the pressure of ROI, his team did copy a product of a company and earned a certain amount of income after it was launched overseas. However, the plagiarized product was soon discovered by the "original" company and taken to court, and the case is now under further proof.

Because of this, Geng Jian has also communicated with the founder of the company many times, but the founder's attitude is also very clear: "only when you make money can you play the game you want to play." the implication seems to be that this strategy of plagiarizing overseas to make quick money may still exist for some time.

Later, Geng Jian offered to leave, and now he is devoting himself to developing his own games. In his spare time, he also uploaded the development process and some core character images to Youtube, where his account has accumulated thousands of fans and the maximum number of videos viewed is close to 100000.

Geng Jian believes, "it is certainly impossible for us to start a small team to buy tens of millions of dollars. We can only accumulate some fans from some social channels, and finally gain recognition by product quality."

Geng Jian's idea sounds good, but it is an indisputable fact that the threshold for game research and development has become higher and higher in recent years. It is still possible for a small team of three people like him to make a Mini Game on their own. If you want to make a popular style, it is almost impossible.

Zeng Rui, an independent game developer, is good at developing card games. according to him, card games on the market are now played in much the same way, and teams have turned to work on art, and the company's investment in art has increased almost tenfold in the past three years.

"in the absence of IP endorsement, the beauty of the card is the key to attracting users. Now it takes one of our artists two or three weeks to make a card. Coupled with the cost of distribution and operation, each card costs nearly 10,000 yuan." Zeng Rui said.

Guohai Securities pointed out in the research report that in 2021, the major game companies as a whole increased investment in research and development. Among them, a total of 16 companies increased their R & D expenses compared with the same period last year, and the R & D expenditure rates of 16 companies increased, with Xinxin and Perfect World having the highest increase.

Under the inner volume, high-quality games have become an inevitable trend to go out to sea, especially in the major game markets such as the United States, Japan, South Korea, Britain, Germany and so on. Therefore, whether the game is interesting, whether the picture is beautiful, and whether the content is enriched or not all determine the success or failure of the game after going out to sea to a certain extent.

Guo Ding, senior director of Shennuo Interactive Games, believes that compared with the past, the product quality of China's offshore games has been greatly improved, but from a global point of view, there is still a lot of room for improvement. At present, there is still a lack of good products that can be operated for a long time, word-of-mouth and stable sales.

The Securities Daily recently pointed out that with the increasing maturity of the overseas mobile game market, the road of Nuggets for major game manufacturers has become more and more difficult. For small and medium-sized manufacturers, higher costs lead to fewer and fewer opportunities for trial and error, while for big companies, the real competition has just begun.

For domestic offshore game manufacturers, after entering the "second half" of the game, how to meet the diversified needs of overseas users and tap new increments in the global market has become the key to break the situation.

In terms of category distribution, strategy, role-playing and shooting are still the main types of overseas revenue distribution of China Mobile games in 2021, and continue to be recognized by overseas markets, accounting for more than 60% of the total.

Among the rest of the market share, there are different types of games with outstanding achievements every year, such as the placement of cards in 2020, the high proportion of cards and cards, and the high proportion of elimination, MOBA and simulation operation in 2021, indicating that China's games go out to sea showing a multi-type development trend. In addition to traditional strengths, other categories also continue to enhance their competitiveness.

An industry source concluded that from 2014 to 2020, the key words for Chinese games to go out to sea were old games going out to sea, IP changing hands, and vertical breakthroughs. During this period, overseas popularity was accumulated mainly by SLG and shooting advantage categories. After 2021, the key words of the industry have become 3A boutique mobile games, category integration, theme and technology, and the main strategy for manufacturers' development is to consolidate superior categories, make up weak categories and enhance product distribution. Only in this way can enterprises find the "second curve" overseas.

At present, the game companies are coincidentally moving infinitely closer to 3A-level production.

Last year, "Black Myth Wukong" with two real-machine demonstration promotional films, formed a global worship scene, and domestic audiences even looked forward to tears. This is inseparable from Tencent, who earlier bought a stake in Black Myth Wukong and is likely to lend a hand in future global offerings.

The two major studio groups of Timi and Photon have set up studios overseas to develop 3A-level cross-platform games full-time. Earlier reports showed that the number of game developers on Tencent's console and PC had reached 3500 by the end of 2021.

NetEase also believes that 3A masterpieces and PC games have not fallen, and its current 1/3 overseas share has come from the mainframe game business.

In 2021, NetEase's action game "Forever robbery" was launched and was successfully selected into the "2021 Steam best-selling game list". This year, NetEase hired Nagoshi Toshihiro from Sega, a Japanese game developer, to run the Tokyo-based Mingyue studio, which "will focus on developing high-quality console games for the world".

From fast money-making "skin-for-skin" games to high-quality mobile games to high-quality 3A PC games and mainframe games and even cross-platform 3A masterpieces, Chinese games go out to sea, and we must strive to occupy the high ground of global game quality in the future.

Zhang Jun, founder of Changkuang Interactive, believes that under the increasingly fierce competition, Chinese offshore game manufacturers have also begun to seek new development paths, in addition to product innovation and upgrading to cope with the competition, looking for new subdivision tracks, and shifting their attention from mature Japan, South Korea, Europe and the United States to the emerging Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia are all corresponding measures. In contrast, the economically developed markets such as Japan, South Korea, Europe and the United States, which have been developed for many years, have become stable. Although the users are of high quality, the payment power is strong and the market scale is large, they are facing the weakness of growth. Emerging markets, which are developing, have begun to erupt in recent years. The rapid popularization of network infrastructure and mobile devices has brought huge population growth dividends, while economic development has also further improved the quality of users. In particular, the Southeast Asian market, which used to be known as the "back garden of Chinese online games", has long been incomparable with the original.

On November 16, the people's Financial Review published the article "Don't lose the opportunity to deeply tap the value of the video game industry", which points out the importance that Europe attaches to the game industry. It also puts forward the view that "the entertainment attribute of games always makes people ignore the scientific and technological significance behind them", and holds that under the premise of perfecting and landing anti-addiction regulations, games "can become an online tool for Chinese cultural inheritance and exchange and innovation."

Zheshang Securities believes that with the recovery of the economy, games as optional consumption, the willingness to consume will be enhanced, and the game industry will achieve excess growth. And the game sea track, from the industry point of view, the overall market decline cycle has passed, from the competition pattern, the domestic share is low, the growth is abundant.

Summing up and reviewing the past five years of the game sector, we have experienced two major pressures: policy tightening and industry clearance.

The game industry has experienced PC games and page games in the PC Internet era, and mobile games in the mobile Internet era. The number of players in 2017 and the ARPU value in 2018 all peaked. The regulation of the fading and superposition policy of traffic dividends continued to be strict, and the plate valuation continued to decline in the past five years. Since 2017, the successive dividends of going out to sea and buying volume have led to the expansion of major companies in the industry. affected by the epidemic and the tightening of version numbers, they have been under pressure to clear the industry since 2022.

On the other hand, the more crisis, the more full of opportunities. A research report pointed out that film, television and games are expected to reach the end of the policy in 2022: games, as the most scientific and technological content in the content industry, play an important role in promoting the development of advanced technologies and industries such as 5G, chip industry and artificial intelligence. With the improvement and landing of anti-addiction regulations, the market's understanding of the game industry has gradually returned to objectivity and rationality, and the voice of authoritative media represents the recognition of game science and technology and cultural attributes at the policy level.

Wu Yuefeng, author of Yuefeng Investment Notes, said that if you stand on a three-or four-year dimension, it is very acceptable for the game to go out to sea. In fact, misplaced competition or misplaced game is not only applicable to games. In the future, if many domestic manufacturers want to go to sea, they can refer to the game as a form of misplaced competition, and when the advantages of foreign manufacturers are contained, there is a chance to give full play to their own advantages.

There is a huge opportunity in front of us, more and more bystanders are becoming participants. when a group of game companies are playing inextricably overseas, byte beats and bilibili follow. Some investment institutions are also intensive to capture the game "unicorn". If going out to sea is a game, then the "difficult mode" of this game has been opened.

As Ma Huateng once said in a speech: "getting the so-called ship tickets, tickets, may not be able to reach the end."

Reference:

[1] report on China's Game Industry in 2018

[2] report on China's Game Industry in 2019

[3] "China Game Industry report 2020"

[4] report on China's Game Industry in 2021

[5] report on China's Game Industry from January to June 2022

[6] "Game going out to sea special report: the pattern is uncertain, the wind is thousands of miles", Guohai Securities

[7] "China Mobile Game Navigation depth report (1): space, pattern and trend", Guohai Securities

[8] "China Mobile Game Navigation depth report (2): direct attack on five Major problems, Review and Prospect", Guohai Securities

[9] "Unbounded Journey: a White Paper on Global Insight of Twitter Games at Sea in 2022", Twitter

[10] A brief History of Chinese Games at Sea: journey and overlooking, 21st Century Economic report

[11] "the game goes out to sea is to attack rather than escape", Securities Daily

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Xiaguang Society (ID:Globalinsights), author: Tang Fei, Editor: song Han

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