Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Due to a series of problems based on the version number, it is a remarkable phenomenon that China's mobile game market is not as expected in the past year. According to a survey by App Annie, the total usage time of global App users has increased by 50% in the past two years, while the proportion of games has been increasing steadily, but the spending of game users in the Chinese market has dropped sharply. In 2018, the average revenue per user of mobile games increased by only 5.6% compared with the same period last year, which is very different from the overall global situation.

With the low tone of the market as a whole, another area affected is Mobile e-sports. Compared with PC games, it is obvious that the life cycle of the former is relatively shorter and global is also relatively worse; when the mobile game market is unstable, capital is also easy to have risk aversion to Mobile e-sports. So we can see that also e-sports, PC e-sports has a good scenery, not only enjoying the double waiting of policy and capital, but also enjoying the fans' pursuit of 5000 yuan a TI 9 ticket. By contrast, Mobile e-sports is much more bleak. For example, FEG e-sports, who once received nearly 100 million yuan A round financing, has hardly made any move this year. Nowadays, only a head project such as KPL can remain in a relatively good state of operation.

In this situation, we can not help but begin to care about the game mobile phone at the lower end of the industrial chain, what kind of fate are we facing?

An ill-timed game phone

If we look at the development curve of the mobile game industry, the emergence of game phones is somewhat "untimely". As the name implies, the game phone is a mobile phone product that mainly meets the needs of mobile games, specifically manifested in that the product can sacrifice the needs of some traditional mobile phones, such as reducing the requirements for cameras in order to balance costs, and sacrificing the thickness and weight of mobile phones to enhance battery capacity and heat dissipation capacity, and so on. At the same time, these phones will also be equipped with accessories similar to external handles / joysticks.

The birth of the black shark in 2018 can be seen as the first shot in the game phone, when the growth bottleneck of the mobile phone market has been hanging for a long time, when the novel concept of game special machine + e-sports mobile phone, coupled with the endorsement brought by Xiaomi investment, let the black shark and Nubia Red Devils, who were also game phones, gain a lot of attention. But in fact, do these game phones sell well?

Black shark public data show that the two mobile phones launched last year accumulated sales of hundreds of thousands of units, so that black shark "achieved a break even." As for Red Devils 3, which Nubia has promoted heavily this year, JD.com 's flagship store has about 17000 reviews at present.

In the face of such figures, we can compare with Meitu mobile phones, which are also in the vertical field. Meitu shipped 720000 phones in 2018 and even 1.57 million in 2017. But the end result is still delisting after a loss of 500 million.

In contrast, the already stunted development of mobile games and mobile e-sports is obviously not comparable to the power of the beauty economy. This year, both OPPO and vivo have launched cost-effective sub-brands rather than game phone brands, as many people think.

The two futures of short-range and long-term vision of game mobile phone

However, at present, there are Meitu, Hammer, Jinli and other brands of failure cases, game phones are not unprepared for the status quo and the future.

From the perspective of long-range and close-range, the game phone has found two ways out for itself-- going to sea and 5G games.

From a close-up point of view, the mobile game market is not bright in the east and in the west. When the global demand for mobile games is on the rise, Chinese game phones can go out to sea with Chinese mobile games. Especially in Southeast Asia, India and other countries and regions, users may be more sensitive to mobile phones than China, and game phones can accurately hit mobile game enthusiasts by virtue of the higher performance-to-price ratio under the same game experience.

For example, Nubia's Red Devils have begun to enter Malaysia and India, and it is believed that the layout of Xiaomi in India can also be used by black sharks.

Of course, embarking on the journey to sea is just like all domestic mobile phones to find a new release outlet for their own production capacity. The focus of the development of game phones is still on the "vision"-the changes brought about by the 5G era for mobile games.

With 5G commercial gradually falling into reality, more and more people begin to imagine the change of 5G game experience. With more powerful data transmission speed as support, the direct impact on the game is the overall improvement of the screen, rendering, the number of people online and other modules. In particular, the increasing popularity of cloud games means that in the 5G era, players can run 3A masterpieces on their mobile phones, or at least the form of mobile games can make a qualitative leap. For example, integrate more AR effects into mobile games, or transplant a large-scale multiplayer online game model like Warcraft to mobile.

All this means that the mobile game market is likely to usher in another boom. Game phones launched in response to the game demand can naturally usher in a wave of dividends.

Blocking of future dividends: game phones can, but game phone manufacturers can't.

But this does not mean that today's game phone manufacturers such as Nubian Red Devils and Black Sharks can become dividend sharks.

In fact, judging from the product performance of these game phones, it is not difficult to find that the so-called game phone manufacturers do not actually master the key technology to enhance the mobile game experience.

The hard conditions that affect the mobile game experience probably depend on computing speed, heat dissipation, battery life, and network connection stability. There is no doubt that these indicators almost equally belong to the performance subset of ordinary mobile phones, except that the two focus on different points. However, like photography and appearance materials, these innovative breakthroughs in performance are also in the hands of head manufacturers. For example, Huawei uses GPU Turbo to improve the speed of image computing and Link Turbo to improve the stability of network connections. Even 5G and cloud games, it was OPPO who first demonstrated the use of Reno to play League of Legends at the exhibition.

As for Black Shark, Red Devils and other brands, their backing Xiaomi and Nubia are not in the first echelon of mobile phone technology research and development. The end result is that game phone manufacturers can only go astray in technological research and development-such as Blackshark's own liquid water-cooled technology, and minimum delay touch and pressure screen functions that better meet the needs of gamers, reducing the need for more than two fingers in some games through similar 3D Touch pressure sensing.

But for head manufacturers, are these technical capabilities really a barrier? In the absence of technical barriers, the immediate result is the lack of bargaining power of game phones. The best example is that the recently launched Black Shark 2 and Red Devil 3 are almost comparable in hardware configuration, but the price of Red Devil 3 starts at 2799 yuan, while the price of Black Shark 2 is 3199 yuan and 3999 yuan. Since the game phone is mainly about performance, it is inevitable to fall into a strange circle of competition to test the floor price infinitely.

Another significant problem is that with the cooling of the game market, mobile game players are showing a trend to focus on mainstream games, coupled with the tightening of version numbers, the quality of mobile games is an inevitable phenomenon in the future. This means that mobile phone manufacturers have the opportunity to dock with game manufacturers one by one and optimize them one by one.

This kind of opportunity is also beneficial to the head manufacturers, whose strong R & D capability means that they can extend their hands longer and undertake more work in cooperation with game manufacturers. Similarly, game manufacturers will also give priority to those mobile phone brands with more users to cooperate. So we can see that Huawei, OV and other brands have joined hands with Tencent to cooperate in the game AI sound effects, AI shock feeling and so on. So when exploring the new species of 5G games and cloud games in the future, it is clear that it is the head manufacturers rather than mobile game manufacturers that can help game developers.

As a result, even in the future of 5G games and cloud games, it is the game phones launched by the head manufacturers that can earn dividends, not today's game phone manufacturers. Although the future is there, it has nothing to do with game phone manufacturers.

Perhaps what game mobile phone manufacturers can do now is to preserve their strength as much as possible, do not fall into a bottomless price war, and safely get through the hibernation period of the mobile game market. Maybe more opportunities will be found when spring comes.

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