Sitting on 4With 8.8 billion users and a market size of 10 billion, the e-sports industry is quietly giving birth to a new impetus to activate consumption. The turnover of hardware products**, cost-effective equipment with both performance and "appearance" has become the direction of hardware manufacturers, and "competition-level" keyboards, audio, mice and gaming chairs are selling well, driving the transformation and upgrading of traditional digital hardware manufacturers. 2023 is destined to be an extraordinary year for the esports industry. E-sports stadiums and e-sports hotels have gradually become new places for consumers to spend their time, and the e-sports industry is rapidly penetrating into related industries such as cultural tourism, giving birth to more and more new consumption scenarios.
E-sports stadium: Nearly seventy percent of Internet cafes have been transformed.
E-sports+" is gaining momentum, and the e-sports consumption scene has also extended from online games and offline arenas to more life scenarios, first of all, the e-sports stadium has become popular in the market.
According to incomplete statistics from a reporter from Beijing Business Daily, there are more than 40 e-sports halls in the Beijing market in operation, of which the average price of seats in the hall is 8-14 yuan per hour, and the box is based on the number of people that can be accommodated in the room, hardware configuration, catering and other additional services, the low one is 15 yuan per hour, 50 yuan overnight, and the high price can be as high as 3,600 yuan a day.
However, a reporter from Beijing Business Daily noticed that most of the e-sports halls were upgraded and transformed from Internet cafes, and in a small-scale survey of the e-sports halls, seventy percent of the e-sports hall staff said that their stores have been engaged in Internet café services for many years, and in recent years, they have purchased equipment and renovated them as e-sports halls. "The focus of the two services is different, the Internet café mainly provides Internet access services and simple meals, and the e-sports hall is a comprehensive place, which can meet the basic needs of entertainment and catering, and serve e-sports enthusiasts with more professional hardware equipment, and has the ability to host small-scale e-sports events. Guo Ruiqiang, manager of Hengda E-sports, said.
Consumers' demand for online consumption has undergone a qualitative change, Yang Bo, the manager of the e-sports hall, pointed out that the customer network pastime scene is diversified, fragmented, if you can't keep up with the market rhythm and consumption trends, the Internet café will only have a sense of existence lower and lower, transformation is the trend of the times, and e-sports is equivalent to a new engine to pull the industry.
E-sports hotels: The number of e-sports hotels nationwide exceeded 20,000.
The e-sports hotel burned three delivery robots within a month", which confirms the popularity of the e-sports hotel. As a new type of hotel relying on e-sports games, e-sports hotels can be described as the "top stream" in the new e-sports consumption scene, and their market size has also risen with the popularity of e-sports.
According to Ctrip, as of September 2023, the number of e-sports hotels in the country has exceeded 20,000, an increase of about 9,000 compared with June 2022, and the total number of rooms has exceeded 100,000, and the market size of e-sports hotels is expected to reach 19.2 billion yuan in 2023.
At the same time, chain brands such as Wanyu E-sports Hotel, Ai E-sports, and Green E-sports Hotel have also emerged in the market. Among them, Wanyu E-sports Hotel and Wanyu Internet Cafe are of the same origin, while Green E-sports Hotel is a new brand of Green Hotel Group, positioned in the middle and high-end.
Since the beginning of this year, the room rate of the e-sports hotel has been 40-100 yuan, and the holidays are 10%-40% compared with weekdays, especially during the Asian Games, the room rate with a projector is still about 200 yuan, and there are many e-sports players who watch the live broadcast of the game together. Zhu Tao, the person in charge of the e-sports hotel, introduced.
During the field visit, the Beijing Business Daily reporter noticed that the Beijing market has more than 100 e-sports hotels, including more than one four-star hotel, and the room rate on weekdays is 218-704 yuan, it is worth noting that at present, more than half of the rooms in the hotel across the Chinese New Year's Eve have been booked, including 788 yuan of high-end computer rooms.
In order to meet the different needs of consumers, the room types of e-sports hotels at this stage can generally meet the needs of three types of players at the same time: 1 person, 2 people, and 4 people, and the room rate of e-sports hotels below four stars ranges from 210 to 780 yuan.
Due to the intensification of competition in the hotel industry, it has become an inevitable trend to capture the audience segment, especially the e-sports room, which has been popular in recent years. In fact, the main cost of the room is in the hardware, because the players are relatively professional, so it provides 16G memory, 11th generation i7 processor, 3080 independent graphics card hardware configuration, and is guaranteed to be a dedicated line network. Not inferior to the e-sports stadium at all. The person in charge of a chain brand hotel in Beijing introduced.
Event spending: The ticketing market is now at a 10x premium.
This season, I chased from home to abroad and ran 5 cities. As an old fan of e-sports, Zhou Yi has traveled to many cities to "chase the scene" after the gradual resumption of offline viewing of the event. However, Zhou Yi reluctantly added, "The cost of cross-city is actually controllable, and this year I obviously feel that the tickets are too difficult to grab, more difficult than the concert, whether it is a match point game or an ordinary qualifier, the tickets are sold out in minutes."
Another e-sports enthusiast, Yang Jiachen, also told a reporter from Beijing Business Daily, "I remember the first match after UZI's comeback in the first half of the year, with a ticket of 88-238 yuan, many fans are willing to pay 10 times the ** acquisition, but the market has been speculated to 1200-3000 yuan."
The tickets for the Hangzhou Asian Games, which went on sale in mid-August this year, are the only items that determine the eligibility for ticket purchase through a lottery. The person in charge of ticketing previously pointed out in an interview with a reporter from Beijing Business Daily that the large-scale node of e-sports registration lottery needs to be centrally guaranteed. According to the official Weibo of the Hangzhou Asian Organizing Committee, there are at least 5 million users who apply to purchase tickets for e-sports events, and the maximum number of spectators for each session is no more than 4,000.
Derivative track: the downstream market gathers to grab users.
Different from the "Moutai Fishing Archaeopteryx" in 2022, with the release of the consumption data of "Double 11", the new three treasures of male consumption show a younger trend, and "e-sports riding Lego" has become a new keyword for male consumption.
According to public reports, during the "Double 11" period, there was a surge in users searching for keywords such as "e-sports", among which gaming chairs, gaming tables, mice, graphics cards, and game laptops all sold well. Taking TGIF, the official gaming chair manufacturer of the Hangzhou Asian Games, as an example, in the first hour of sales, the turnover increased by more than 3,590% year-on-year.
Capturing the trending hashtag is about capturing a young audience, and traditional furniture manufacturers are also well aware of it. In a home furnishing city in Haidian, furniture manufacturer Li Bin said, "In fact, only from the appearance, we already had the idea of creating a cool appearance to attract young people around 2012. We have our own technological foundation, and after the concept of e-sports became popular, the transformation also came with the trend."
However, for the reason for the increase in the production line of gaming chairs, Shu Ying, an independent designer, also mentioned a situation, that is, to enhance the competitive strength of differentiation. In her view, the expansion of e-sports application scenarios has given manufacturers that rely on individual customers more cooperation objects, e-sports halls and e-sports hotels can often complete low-end product cooperation, and individual customers' high-quality demand for e-sports has derived high-end and customized chair-making services.
From e-sports stadiums to e-sports hotels to mass consumer goods, e-sports continue to intersect with more life scenarios. Coffee brand Tims has created an "e-sports coffee" scene, movie theater owners have opened special live broadcast events, luxury brand Louis Vuitton and Riot Games have announced a partnership for the "League of Legends" World Finals, and Hechuang Auto has officially announced a strategic cooperation ...... with the team EDG
New thinking on commercialization after breaking the circle.
After the Asian Games broke the circle, the urban business scene continued to introduce e-sports derivative content, showing more possibilities for development, and the integration of e-sports and urban industries also fed back the industry's business model. According to the data, in 2023, the actual revenue of China's e-sports industry will be 263500 million yuan, and the scale of e-sports users reached 48.8 billion people.
In the view of Wei Mingye, an analyst in the game industry, the release of relevant industry support policies will also produce corresponding social value, but the development of the industry depends on the continuous adjustment and optimization of development strategies by affiliated enterprises to achieve sustainable long-term development.
At present, the global e-sports events are booming, and e-sports is also showing the development of sports, which requires more talents with an international vision. The relevant person in charge of Perfect World pointed out.
Against the backdrop of slowing user growth, e-sports must not only consolidate the coverage of existing industries, but also develop more industry revenue channels. In Wei's view, the esports consumer market will continue to develop in the direction of more diversification, technology and specialization, and some of these trends may be intertwined to jointly promote the progress of the esports industry. He also said that with the continuous advancement of VR and AR technology, esports is expected to develop towards a more immersive experience, and create more win-win opportunities through cross-border cooperation with the entertainment industry, sports industry, educational institutions, etc.
Beijing Business Daily reporter Lu Yang Han Xinyuan.