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

Take the lead, recover, return, start

It is believed that the newly released version number has made many players feel the warmth of the Spring Festival.

After this year, I think we can also say goodbye to the cold winter, pack up and start all over again.

What will the gaming industry look like in 2023? We don't know, but at least there are always some trends that can guide us in some direction.

On the occasion of bidding farewell to the New year and welcoming the New year, the Competition editorial Department has selected four key words that may become the trend of the industry in 2023, in order to find out the development track of some industries.

Q1: "AIGC" leads the tide of science and technology. Among the top ten scientific breakthroughs selected by "Science" in 2022, the only one related to the Internet and the gaming industry is AIGC (artificial Intelligence automatically generated content).

Starting with AI's painting the Space Opera House, AIGC officially "detonated" the technology market in the last four months of 2022.

In the game industry, AI painting is also hot for a long time. Some art workers are worried about being robbed of their jobs by AI, while some companies have begun to try to incorporate AI painting into the workflow.

However, although the AI painting station on the tuyere, but in the field of practical application can only stay in the field of conceptual design to provide some basic functions. In the article "how to integrate AI painting into workflow, which is the answer of Timi Rubik's Cube Longyuan Network", Jingcore analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of integrating AI painting into the project production process from the point of view of practitioners.

To put it simply, the advantage is that the conceptual artist's early design can quickly improve the accuracy, but the drawing effect is not guaranteed, the artistic conceptual design is difficult to land, and the design ideas are difficult to form a system, which are all defects in the practical application of AI painting. It needs to be considered before deciding whether to use it or not.

After AI painting threatened the work of art, the conversational AI ChatGPT released by Open AI in early December began to snatch the jobs of planners and programs. Microsoft, a technology and gaming giant, is also interested in it and plans to invest $10 billion in Open AI for a 49% stake at the beginning of this year.

However, after the trend of AI painting, this time people quickly came out of the initial consternation to objectively examine the development and upcoming changes of AIGC.

There is no doubt that with the continuous increase in the volume and quality of the game, whether it is art, planning or programs, its workload will increase accordingly. From a personal point of view, more work is bound to squeeze more private time; at the corporate level, labor and production costs are also rising.

In the field of game production, compared with improving work efficiency from the human resource side, AI technology is more used in natural language processing, computer vision, speech synthesis, data mining and other aspects of the game. After model training, it is used to generate similar content modules on a large scale.

For example, in natural language processing (NLP), Tencent NetEase and other big companies have deep accumulation in generating plot dialogue through text input, synthesizing facial expression animation resources and so on. On GDC 2022 last year, the AI labs of Tencent and NetEase also shared the "AI algorithm automatic generation level" and the "AI real-time action completion system" respectively.

It can be said that game companies began to incorporate AIGC into the game production process a long time ago, and this will be a long-term development direction.

At the upcoming GDC2023 in March, we will also see a lot of developers sharing more deeply about the application of AI in the game field.

Experts from Tencent Timi Studio Group will share topics in the field of AI: how to develop AI in tactical competitive games to help players; experts from Nightingale developer Inflexion Games will talk about how they achieve the biological movement in the Nightingale world through AI; and sharing from Square Enix-using NLP to develop adventure games with free text input, and so on.

When the meta-universe craze fades, some cutting-edge technologies with more practical significance and more landing prospects come out, of which AIGC is the most dazzling one. Although it will take a long time for a truly mature application, it is indeed promising.

Q2: in the final analysis, the game industry still has to fight for products. In the past two months, many players and practitioners have begun to look forward to the domestic game market in 2023.

In the second quarter of each year, Tencent NetEase two big factories will hold their own annual game conference, NetEase's time is very fixed, usually on May 20. Although Tencent does not have such an exact time, it is basically concentrated in May and June.

Considering the release time of the version number and the Spring Festival holiday, most teams will not begin to prepare for the launch of the game until February. For many agent games and games with a high degree of completion, the second quarter is indeed a good node for product launch.

For example, Tencent recognized the blockbuster product "Dauntless contract". Game International Service was launched in 2020, and Tencent officially announced its agent in September 21. The game itself is already a finished product, and localization work is likely to be going on all the time. The conditions for launch are already sufficient.

Due to the powerful e-sports attribute of the "fearless contract" itself, the big e-sports event is naturally the most suitable node for its launch. Therefore, the author speculates that after several tests, the "intrepid contract" is likely to go online in May with the east wind of the "League of Legends" mid-season championship, using League of Legends to promote the "intrepid contract".

At the same time, the 2023 Valorant Masters will be held in June, just to continue the popularity of League of Legends's mid-season championship, to cultivate the "fearless contract" game e-sports double ecology in one fell swoop.

In addition to fist products, Timi and Photon also have products such as "Pokemon assembly", "Alloy warhead: awakening" and "Dawn Awakening: vitality" and other products have basically entered the final testing stage. In addition, CNPC learned that the "extreme Speed" IP mobile game jointly developed by Timi and Microsoft Xbox may also be launched within 23 years.

For NetEase, the end of May is a good node to undertake the heat of the game press conference. For example, at the end of May 2022, NetEase launched two games, "War Roar" and "Egg Party" one after another.

In terms of the reserve of the version number and the completion of the game, the product that NetEase is most likely to launch after the press conference is probably the racing game "Top Speed," which has been tested in December, which has been tested overseas for four rounds and basically has the mature conditions to go online. Secondly, there are "against the cold" mobile games and "Takef-like" game "extraordinary Pioneer".

Mihayou may move faster, and Mihayou announced today that it will start three trials of recruitment on January 24 after the version of "collapse: star Dome Railway" was approved this week. Players speculate that since the first character PV of broken: star Dome Railway is March 7, the game is likely to be launched on March 7 this year or the seventh day of March of the lunar calendar (April 26).

In the overseas console market, the biggest console games of 2023, Legend of Zelda: tears of the Kingdom, and the E3 game show will be officially unveiled with players in the second quarter, when more console games will emerge.

Q3: with the return of the offline "exhibition", the global appearance of domestic manufacturers is subject to the impact of the epidemic, and the E3 mentioned earlier by ChinaJoy has not been able to go offline or even cancelled. As the impact of the epidemic gradually fades, there is a good chance that the game exhibition will be able to restore the lively scene of the past.

This year also coincides with the 20th anniversary of ChinaJoy. On the basis of 2022, ChinaJoy2023 has retained the form of online exhibition, adopted a diversified carnival model of online and offline parallel carnival, and has begun to attract investment.

In addition to a number of meta-universe-related science and technology exhibitions, a new e-sports-themed pavilion was added to ChinaJoy in 2023, and the upcoming Hangzhou Asian Games to be held in September 2023 also declared e-sports an official event.

It can be said that with e-sports 's entry into Asia and the launch of the national server of the phenomenal e-sports game "Dauntless contract", the e-sports industry is expected to usher in a new policy and market dividend period this year.

When we look overseas, although the summer game festival and E3 have chosen to fight head-to-head in June, most of their announced products will be launched in the third quarter, and the Cologne Game Show and Tokyo Video Game Show will also be held in the third quarter. It will be "a lot of feasts" for hosts and PC players around the world.

Since globalization and cross-platform have become a major trend in the gaming industry, Chinese manufacturers have also begun to appear at major exhibitions. Combined with the development progress, a number of domestic high-quality open world games will also be focused on the global launch in 2024, so the 2023 Q3 game exhibition will also be an important way to promote them.

For example, the martial arts open world game "Yan Yun Sixteen Sound" developed by NetEase was first exposed at last year's Cologne Game Exhibition. In addition, games such as Tencent's "Arena of Valor World", "all sides" and "Infinitely warm", Eagle Horn "tomorrow's Ark: the end of the Earth" and the high-profile "Black Myth: Wukong" will all be released in 2024. So in this year's game exhibition, we will most likely see them frequently.

Q4: Apple is finally in the game, and the "XR" ecology is expected to be established. Q4Magee XR is likely to enter everyone's field of vision again, that is because Xiaoza is coming with his Quest 3.

Although there is a saying about the first year of XR every year, the XR industry seems to be in such a lukewarm state.

But 2023 could be a turnaround.

Apple, the biggest variable in the XR industry this year, is going to do it. After years of speculation, there are signs that Apple's first AR / VR headline will finally be released this year.

Although the final date has not yet been determined, according to foreign media reports, Apple's first AR / VR headline will be officially released at an event before WWDC this spring, after which the official will introduce its operating system xrOS to developers on WWDC. Most likely, the product will go on sale in the fall of 2023.

In other words, the release time of Apple's AR / VR head display is likely to be directly opposed to the release time of Quest 3, by which time Apple's head display should already have some basic ecology.

During the 2022 XR special report in the nuclear editorial department, many VR-related practitioners generally believed that, combined with the game development cycle and hardware cycle, the end of 2023 to the beginning of 2024 will be a window period for VR and VR games.

On the other hand, core competition learned that many VR developers have been waiting for Apple to enter, and as soon as Apple's hardware is released, they will immediately follow into the development of Apple's XR ecosystem.

Hardware, ecology, products, the three major elements seem to be gathered together at the end of 2023, perhaps in this year of recovery of the game industry, we will really welcome the arrival of a new form of game era.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:Coreesports, author: Qian Hongyan

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