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

Apple fans harvested Apple's paid gift package in September as scheduled. In the Persuasion Krypton series, Apple Arcade, a game subscription service, can play all the games under the Arcade category for $4.99. at present, there are more than 100 games, including exclusive works from Ubisoft, Wanda Namenggong, Sega and other well-known game companies.

At present, Apple Arcade has made many people feel that there is nothing wrong with buying shares, and foreign media have called it "one of the most cost-effective deals in the game field."

Faced with this situation, Google, another big camp, is naturally a little uncomfortable.

Not long ago, Play Pass, a game subscription service developed by Google, was leaked. It looks like Apple Arcade, including a range of game apps, including Monument Valley, Starbucks, and Knights of the Old Republic, which are priced at $4.99 a month. This is naturally seen as a counterattack by Google against Apple.

In fact, Google's intention to subscribe to the cake by game has long been there. Google launched the console version of its game subscription service Google Stadia in 2018, but under pressure from traditional console manufacturers such as Sony's PS Plus, Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, and Nintendo's Nintendo Switch Online;, as well as some gaming companies with first-party works, such as Ubisoft and EA's own subscription services Uplay+ and EA Access, Google Stadia is controversial from subscription model to price.

So is it possible for Google to succeed this time back at home on smartphones?

If you want to become the Netflix of mobile games, take down Apple first.

With the globalization of smartphones, Apple and Google, the two giant "family bucket" products, have always been able to achieve invincible rapid growth.

Looking at the content industry alone, Apple Music and Google PlayMusic All-Access compete with streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify in music subscription services. Apple News+ and Google streaming services have attracted many established news media. In the field of video, Google's YouTubeTV and Apple's Apple TV+ can not be ignored.

Now, unsurprisingly, the flames of war have spread to the game field. This time, Apple clearly has a first-mover advantage. Google Play Pass has not released more details, but as a standard Apple Arcade service and with reference to previous Stadia operations, Visual Play Pass will also choose to work with game manufacturers to package all ecological games to attract users to pay.

However, there are three bright spots worth locking in ahead of Google's launch:

1. Content barriers. Exclusive games are the core competitiveness of the industry, and in the past autumn conference, Apple Arcade won the support of many game manufacturers and introduced more than 100 high-quality games, including "Sonic Racing", Beyond a Steel Sky, Lego Brawls, Hot Lava, The Pathless and other independent games, which can not be transplanted to the Android platform. In other words, Apple has won the "mobile monopoly" of a large number of games, Google Play Pass "Jackie Chan" or "adult", this battle is crucial.

two。 Fee and share. For a long time, the mainstream mode of mobile games is "free download + internal purchase payment". If you choose to enter the platform's paid subscription channel, the games in Apple Arcade will no longer appear on App Store, which means that the traffic that "free" can attract will be directly exhausted.

In order to balance the interests of mobile game developers, Apple intends to tilt resources towards buyout games and small and medium-sized game developers, investing $500 million as guaranteed income to ensure that the first batch of developers involved in the project can get enough revenue. There are no advertisements and no internal purchase for the games provided in Apple Arcade. At the same time, the games participating in the Apple Arcade program will be distributed across platforms such as iPhone, iPad and Mac, and the game progress will be synchronized, thus improving the retention and stickiness of users.

Android's pay environment is a little worse than App Store, which has been promoting paid games. In order to balance the interests of the platform and game makers, Google Stadia still needs to buy some games on the basis of giving games every month, which caused some players' dissatisfaction at that time. And its awkward situation in the tablet and other hardware, and most users are locked in the mobile phone this platform.

In the game of game subscription, the interests of the platform, developers and players depend on each other and restrict each other. So on the mobile side, how Google handles its relationship with game developers may determine the future of Play Pass.

3. New technology. Google is trying to clean up the jagged hardware of Ping an Zhuo through cloud games, bringing more mobile users into the high-quality gaming experience.

Google Stadia has completed the early exploration of the streaming media game service platform, and this field has a strong relationship with cloud services. For example, Huawei focuses on cloud services, adding cloud connection to EMUI 9.0 system to make mobile phones "PC" in seconds. Back in 2017, Google launched the streaming gaming service Test Project Stream, which allows users to play 3A games such as Assassin's Creed Odyssey via a PC device with a Chrome browser.

Once users sign up for an account on Google's cloud service platform, it will become a new force in the game industry, which means more opportunities for developers to accurately reach the audience, and players can also try games that they missed in those years without cost. this is undoubtedly an advantage for Google to establish the game ecosystem.

From this point of view, the cloud computing services that Google has accumulated over the years clearly have more leverage than Apple.

Another special advantage of Google is the steady growth of the basic Android smart terminal disk. According to the Q2 global mobile phone shipments survey released by Strategy Analytics in 2019, global smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2019 were 341 million, down 2.6% from the same period last year, with Samsung, Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi and OPPO occupying the top five market shares. Among them, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi and OPPO all increased in varying degrees, while Apple's shipments and market share declined. This gives Google an opportunity to catch up with and surpass in service revenue.

However, at a time when Google is getting farther and farther away from the Chinese market, the Apple Arcade service can be launched in China, and whether Play Pass will do anything about it may be uncertain.

Whether it is possible for Play Pass to beat Apple will not be known until Google's press conference.

It is better to keep an eye on the scenery: the common enemy of Apple and Google

For now, though, both Apple and Google inevitably need to be attached to traditional game makers. For example, in the first batch of Apple Arcade exclusive games, many of the masterpieces are actually porting to other platforms on the iOS side. For example, "Team Sonic Racing" has already landed on PS4 and NS platforms, while "Projection" has also appeared on PS4, Xbox, NS and Steam before Apple's release.

Therefore, with the rapid spread of new technology, the mobile giant battle is bound to face some unexpected competitors.

On the one hand, 5G + cloud changes the current competitive and cooperative relationship. Not only will Google and Apple be unable to make peace with console games, but they will also face containment from cloud service providers.

Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and others all have a layout in the field of cloud games, not only with strong financial strength, but also with their own exclusive policies in terms of content. For example, Microsoft has demonstrated the use of Project xCloud cloud game service to play "Ultimate Speed: horizon 4" on mobile phones, and announced that 3500 games on Xbox One will be seamlessly integrated into xCloud. Google, by contrast, has only one first-party studio, which pales in terms of content ecology.

When mainframe manufacturers launch new portable terminals to attract core players, do mobile phones have special advantages to attract players to buy services?

On the other hand, cloud computing manufacturers such as Amazon have also built a game ecosystem with cloud service AWS, video streaming platform Prime Video and game engine Lumberyard. It is said that it will also launch its own streaming game service by 2020. This also shows from the side that neither Google nor Apple can take the initiative by relying on new technology.

On the other hand, the game industry is essentially different from video and music, and the cost of switching and relearning is high. Therefore, the decision point of players when buying members is bound to shift from certain games to "one game", which leads to two results:

First, the mobile platform pays more attention to quantity than the quality of games, in order to attract users to pay by "being able to play more". I am afraid this will produce a series of "title party" and "theme party" in the game circle, which will make the situation of "assembly line 3A" more severe.

In such a content environment, it is naturally difficult to meet the needs of core players. A survey by Deloitte, a consultancy, found that although the subscription system has room for imagination, 48% of people find it difficult to choose what they want to watch in their subscriptions, and will give up search and leave the platform within minutes. This "subscription fatigue" is bound to become more prominent in the gaming field, leading to a variety of uncertainties in the Apple and Google models.

Today, the streaming media subscription model has been recognized and accepted by consumers through a variety of content forms, and the video subscription rate even exceeds that of traditional cable television. Game subscriptions, which Apple and Google are scrambling to bet on, may also become a huge variable that upsets the industry. As ordinary people, we no longer know whether it is happiness or just the opposite when we are trapped in the vast ocean of content.

Too much choice is becoming the unbearable light of this era.

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