The development of the game industry has always been accompanied by category rotation and product change.
In 2023, when the industry recovers and new products surge, mainstream tracks such as shooting and MMORPG are still fiercely competitive. Tencent Games has launched products such as Valorant and High Energy Heroes, and continues to expand its share on the shooting track. Although NetEase has also tried, but the effect is not as expected, it still leads the strong MMO category, and even goes to the next level. At the same time, the two are also simultaneously deployed in multiple sub-categories such as racing, sports, and party games.
What was once a garden of escapism and growth in the gaming industry has now become the Somme and Verdun of the gaming industry. In the face of the pincer attack of "Genshin Impact" before miHoYo and "Crashing Iron" after it, as well as the continuous oppression of established manufacturers such as Eagle Horn and Kulo, the breakthrough of the new products of the second game suddenly came to hell difficulty.
The competition of heavy mobile games is becoming more and more fierce, but fortunately, outside the vision of major manufacturers, the small game track has sprung up. It has brought imaginative growth space to the industry, and has also nurtured small and medium-sized teams such as Xiamen Yanqu and Guangzhou Huoyu. Interestingly, behind these small game manufacturers, there are actually old manufacturers such as Sanqi Mutual Entertainment and 4399. In addition, manufacturers such as Thunder Games with a keen sense of smell in traffic measurement have also joined this emerging track.
As we look to the outgoing 2023, there are opportunities and challenges. Maybe we should start from the product and see how 2024 goes.
The explosion of large factories promotes the growth of **
According to the "2023 China Game Industry Report", the actual sales revenue of the domestic game market in 2023 will be 30296.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 1395%, breaking through the 300 billion mark for the first time. User scale 66.8 billion people, a year-on-year increase of 061%, a record high.
Among the 300 billion **, the mobile revenue increased significantly, and the actual sales revenue reached 2268600 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 1751%, a new record. At the same time, it accounts for a whopping 74 percent of overall revenue88%, continuing to dominate.
The reason why mobile game revenue has been able to increase year-on-year should be that many negative factors related to the epidemic have subsided, and users' willingness and ability to spend have rebounded. Starting from subjective feelings, the normalization of edition numbers promotes the release of manufacturers' stock products, and the number of new products this year has increased dramatically, and they use their new experiences to attract players to continue to try and consume.
It should be pointed out that while the number of new products has surged, the total number of users has only increased slightly, and it is becoming more and more difficult to compete for existing users. With the product quality and resource advantages of leading the industry, the leading manufacturers have become the first group of people to eat meat. And their fierce competition in the mainstream track has also become a footnote to the growth.
Tencent Games has come up with a total of 16 new products this year, making it the manufacturer with the largest number of new products among major manufacturers. Of the 16 games, 11 are mobile and 5 are client. From the perspective of game types, there are 7 products with shooting as the main gameplay, and there are 3 MMORPG types, which are still Tencent's strong areas.
As shown in the picture, in addition to the just-launched "Yuanmeng Star", "Metal Slug Awakening", "Adventure Island: The Legend of Maple", and "Stone Age: Awakening", the three classic IP adaptations, are the ones with more eye-catching performance. Among them, "Metal Slug Awakening", which was launched in April, is the most outstanding. After the game was launched, it reached the second place on the best-selling list of iOS in the country, and the turnover exceeded 500 million in the first month. It has remained in the top 20 of the list for 2 consecutive months, and is still stable in the range of the best-selling list [40,80].
And "retro nostalgia" seems to be one of the market trends this year. Products such as Lilith's "Xiaoice Ice Legend Nostalgic Suit", Luyou's "Neolithic Age", and Giant's "Primordial Journey" have achieved very good flow performance.
However, it should be pointed out that although Tencent's three products have reached the explosive level, objectively speaking, they have not yet reached the level of suppressing the category. Especially when NetEase and miHoYo successfully ran out of phenomenal products, the contrast became more obvious.
In terms of quantity, NetEase has launched a total of 5 new games this year, which is basically the same as the 4 products in 2022 and far less than Tencent's 16. But to the surprise of the market, NetEase's new game this year has a high hit rate.
Among the 5 products, the mobile game "Peak Speed", "Against the Cold", and "All-Star Street Ball Party" have all achieved very bright performances. Among them, "All-Star Street Ball Party" quickly won the top position in the sports category after its launch, with nearly 30 million turnover in the first week of iOS alone.
Like "Peak Speed", it has reached the third place on the best-selling list, and has formed a direct confrontation with Tencent's "QQ Speed" on the racing track. And after the game was launched in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, it also maintained the top position on the list. According to Diandian data, as of October, the game's dual-platform turnover in the three markets has exceeded 75 million, becoming NetEase's top 2 game products in overseas market revenue contribution, second only to "Wilderness Action".
As for the most important mobile game "Against the Cold", it received more than 45 million pre-orders before it was launched, and once it was launched, it became NetEase's new flagship and remained at the top of the best-selling list for a long time. According to SensorTower data, the iOS side of the game in July was about 7700 million yuan. Many industry insiders believe that the first month turnover of the whole platform is likely to exceed 3 billion yuan.
Judging from the rhythm of new product launches, NetEase Games also seems to have encountered challenges, that is, there is a window period in the product launch schedule. It can be seen that many of NetEase Games' products this year are basically concentrated in June, and "Street Ball Party", which was launched in the third quarter, has also experienced a postponement of its launch, and no game has been launched in the entire fourth quarter. Adjusting the rhythm of product release deserves more attention from NetEase Games.
Taking into account the total revenue of the three categories of role-playing, multiplayer tactical competition, and shooting according to the industry annual report, it accounts for 61 of the total revenue26%。It can be said that the competition of large manufacturers led by Tencent and NetEase on the mainstream track is one of the important drivers to promote the growth of ** income. As for the third pole of the industry, miHoYo will continue to ride on the second tour track.
The two-dimensional mobile game can be said to be the track with the largest product density and competition intensity this year. Driven by dozens of new games, the actual sales revenue of the second game market this year has also reached 3170.7 billion yuan, a significant increase of 31 percent year-on-year01%。
However, it should be pointed out that the revenue concentration of the second-game market is relatively high, and the growth of category revenue is actually more of the revenue growth of head products. Especially after miHoYo's "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" took the lead out of the circle in the first half of the year, all subsequent products are facing a high-pressure start to compete with it for users.
According to Sensor Tower data, Honkai: Star Dome Railway's first-week turnover surpassed Genshin Impact's performance in the same period. As for the first month of the game, there are various claims in the market, such as 2 billion, 3 billion, and 5 billion. But even the lowest level of 2 billion is already the revenue level of the top product.
It can be seen that before the launch of Honko, the monthly flow of "Genshin Impact" was in a cliff-like lead, almost 5-10 times that of the second place. After the launch of Crash Iron, the number of frontrunners increased to 2, and although the turnover of a single product has decreased, the overall income of miHoYo has still increased significantly.
However, in the case of the total number of users being flat, a considerable part of the revenue increment of Mijia Games is siphoned from the waist tail products. These two games also basically occupy the free money and time of most second-game players. This also makes the user cost of other new games continue to rise, and many new products with high expectations do not meet the expectations of the market and manufacturers.
For example, products such as "White Night Aurora", "Dust White Forbidden Zone", and "Fog Sequence" were highly anticipated by players before they were launched, and the number of game pre-orders also reached millions or even millions. But most of them have now disappeared from the top 200 best-selling charts, and many more games have been cut due to poor numbers before they even make it to launch.
Of course, there are also some second-game products that have withstood the pressure. For example, "Back to the Future: 1999", which was self-developed by Deep Blue Interactive, faced a wave of rapid decline in turnover after the traffic peak at the beginning of its launch.
However, the game is in 1Version 2 of Nightmare in Green Lake has reversed the downward trend and achieved a rebound in player word-of-mouth after the update. To put it simply, it is to retain the most core loyal players by increasing the investment of gacha resources, increasing character building and plot stories.
In a way, returning to the future is a more extreme case. Because it won a polarized player reputation with its excellent plot interpretation and relatively thin combat gameplay during the test. But this also shows that by increasing the quantity and quality on the content side, it is possible to survive under the pressure of giants and capture users in the role-driven second game track.
In addition to the beautiful girl card drawing, "Sword of the Lily of the Valley: For This Peaceful World", which focuses on pixel art and JRPG plots, also provides another feasible idea for the second game product. The biggest feature of the game is the composite gameplay of stand-alone + online games, providing more than 100 hours of high-quality stand-alone experience content, which is quite friendly to low-krypton and zero-krypton players. Based on this, after the game was launched, it remained in the 12th place on the best-selling list for many consecutive days, and is currently in the middle of the best-selling list.
However, it should be pointed out that the improvement of content quality is inseparable from the improvement of team capabilities, whether it is Deep Blue or XD, it is a medium-sized manufacturer with a large team size. For more small teams, in the case of product volume and visual presentation, it may be more and more difficult to grab a foothold in the second game track with gameplay innovation alone.
Mini games lead a new growth direction
What was once a blue ocean is already a Shura field, so are there new growth opportunities in the industry?The answer is yes, looking at the various segments, the rise of mini program games has excited the entire industry. This can also be intuitively felt from the number of offline participants, and it is no exaggeration to say that the small game sub-forum of this annual meeting is definitely the one with the largest number of people in all venues.
According to the annual report, the revenue of the mini program game market this year was 20 billion yuan, a huge increase of 300% year-on-year. At this stage, the monetization model of Mini Program games is mainly in three categories: in-app purchase payment, advertising monetization, and hybrid monetization. However, due to the rapid increase in the proportion of in-app purchase payment, it has also driven the rapid growth of the Mini Game market.
In terms of specific products, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment's "Seeking the Way" may be the most well-known, the game has dominated the best-selling list of WeChat mini games for 3 consecutive months, and the monthly turnover has easily exceeded 100 million. From "The King of Salted Fish", "Crazy Knights" to "Seeking the Way", and then to the recent hot "Modification Battle" and "Three Kingdoms Brothers", the popular products in the field of small games are not limited to the top manufacturers. Including Beijing Tuyue behind "Modified Battle", Changsha Youpin behind "I Raise You", and Guangzhou Huoyu behind "Phoenix Scheming", many emerging teams have dug gold mines in this field.
In addition, from the perspective of product types, chess and card billiards, elimination, simulation management and other types with few operations and simple gameplay have become the favored choice of many manufacturers. Compared with client products, the lower R&D difficulty and customer acquisition cost also provide opportunities for small teams to land on the beach. It is foreseeable that more and more teams will enter the follow-up, and there will be no shortage of leading manufacturers to enter the game, and the mini game will quickly enter a new stage of development.
In addition, it should be pointed out that in addition to the revenue growth of mobile games and mini games, this year's terminal game market is also surprising. The actual sales revenue reached 6628.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 8%. This is mainly due to the stable revenue of the MMORPG category, the continuous growth of the revenue of head e-sports and two-dimensional games, and the simultaneous release of more new products on the PC side.
Interestingly, we can find that almost all of the most popular terminal game products in the market this year come from Tencent. Tencent has maintained a large investment in the mobile game market to continue to consolidate its leading position in this field.
It launched 5 terminal game products around this year: "Valorant", "Ark of Destiny", "Cala Picchu", "Edge of Rebirth", and "The Division 2". They are in a high position in the online game hot list released by Shunwang. In particular, Valorant and Ark of Destiny have remained at the top of the list since their launch.
It should be pointed out that relying on the mature gameplay and existing player base, the mobile game versions of these games may become the next batch of popular reservations. At present, it is reported that the international server version of the Valorant mobile game will start testing in January next year, and the mobile game "Ark of Destiny" was also first ** at the recent G-Star Game Show, and is expected to continue to be introduced to China.
In addition, the fastest progress of the mobile game "Naraka: Bladepoint" opened an offline trial for the public last weekend, and the on-site queue was extremely hot. The fact that the game can face players directly also indirectly shows that the product has a high degree of completion, and there is a high probability that it can be launched next year. And the high-quality end represented by these products may also become a new trend in the industry.
Time flies, and 2023 has come to an end with one new product after another. We have also witnessed the success and loneliness of products, the development and death of manufacturers, which is the objective law of industry development. Even if there are still thorns in the road ahead, I hope that we who love games can finally reach the other side of the ideal.