The tug-of-war over Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which began at the beginning of last year, finally came to an end in October this year, and the struggling Xbox finally had a glimmer of hope for a turnaroundFor gamers, Game Pass offers more and fewer choices, and it doesn't matter how Blizzard goes out in the future, but it is true that there are so many high-quality games played on different platforms. In addition to the disputes of the "Royal Three", in this 2023, the game peripheral industry, which is a game carrier or auxiliary force, was born as a different "star", bringing epoch-making new changes!Let's review it today!
Handheld and host: Many large manufacturers have entered the handheld market, but the "Royal Three" has no new ideas.
With the launch of the Steam Deck last year to detonate the handheld game market, this year, ASUS, Lenovo and other traditional PC manufacturers have also laid out their layouts, ASUS ROG Ally is much stronger than the "V Club Explosion" in terms of performance, screen, and heat dissipation.
The Lenovo LEGION GO can not only be used as a handheld computer to meet the needs of games, but also unplug the handle as a tablet, and then use it with a Bluetooth keyboard to make a portable notebook, creating more easy-to-use scenarios through practicality. However, the flaws of the win handheld are also very obvious, except for Microsoft itself, there is no way for the handheld manufacturers to skip the lengthy activation process of Windows.
The emergence of these two handhelds still put more or less pressure on the V Society, and at the end of 2023, a new generation of game handhelds, Steam Deck OLED, in addition to the processor, the screen, heat dissipation, weight and other aspects have been comprehensively improved.
In 2023, the global shipments of the "Royal Three" consoles are expected to increase by 14% to more than 46 million units. According to the latest report released by market research agency TechInsights, the total global game console shipments in the third quarter of 2023 reached 9.1 million, an increase of 11% year-on-year, making it the strongest third quarter since 2017. The momentum of the "Royal Three" is that on the one hand, triple-A blockbusters have sprung up, and on the other hand, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, Microsoft completed the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for an incredible $69 billion, expanding Xbox's first-party offerings to cover everything from Call of Duty to World of Warcraft in one fell swoop to strengthen Xbox's market position. However, Sony also launched a new version of PS5, but the response did not make a big splash. On the contrary, Nintendo is expected to release a new console early next year, which has made many players look forward to it.
As for the PC gaming market, handheld consoles provide gamers with more opportunities to play games on the PC platform, which has significantly increased the revenue of the PC market.
Monitors and keyboards and mice: E-sports have entered Asia to drive market growth, and the bottleneck period "Volume King" ushered in the explosion of magnetic shafts and the birth of stars.
This year has undoubtedly been a year of excitement for esports players. In September, the "e-sports into Asia" symbolized the gradual standardization of e-sports events, the improvement of social identity, and the increase in the policy and resource tilt of various cities for the e-sports industry, which also drove the growth of the e-sports display product market. According to Ovirivo data, during this year's Double 11, the sales volume of the display category in China's online retail market was about 914K, a year-on-year increase of 4%, and the sales volume of e-sports products accounted for 57%, and the TPV brand in the domestic brand, the total sales volume during the promotion period was about 202K, of which AOC occupied the top sales volume, and its 2K e-sports product Q27G2S D performed particularly well, with sales of 168K during the promotion.
The keyboard and mouse set with the display,After the "volume kings" finished the lightweight、RGB、battery life、** and other core elements,It actually ushered in the sudden rise of the magnetic shaft,The key switch revolution brought by the peripheral manufacturer Wooting has become popular from the private domain fans to the public perspective。 0.1mm can be triggered by pressing it, and the rebound is 0The 1mm button reset is undoubtedly an excellent physical plug-in in the eyes of e-sports enthusiasts and customized gamers.
The magnetic switch keyboard is able to do 0. from start to finishThe accuracy of 1mm detects the entire switching motion, the main reason is the shaft body, which changes the traditional mechanical shaft, and is also different from the capacitance and optical shaft, as a magnetic shaft (also known as Hall thruster, Hall effect sensor) has 0The 1 mm actuation stroke is the shortest of all shafts. The common mechanical shaft is triggered by the contact, which needs to be directly welded to the PCB or inserted into the shaft seat to press the trigger, while the magnetic shaft is triggered by a contact directly in contact with the PCB, and the design of the shaft body, driver, algorithm, hardware, and PCBA is indispensable in order to achieve the rapid response and customized experience of Feifan, no wonder it can cause a boom in the e-sports player circle.
And the biggest change on the mouse side comes from the birth of Huawei Starlight. Before the advent of Starlight, if you want to achieve a high rate of return on the mouse, you can only change the private protocol to achieve it, and even if the rate of return of the competitive mouse can reach 1000Hz, which means that the mouse can only be recognized once for continuous clicks within 1 millisecond, but the SLE mode of Starlight is 250 microseconds, and it can also send and receive more, which can easily realize the wireless mouse crossing between multiple screens or a device to link multiple wireless devices with low latency.
The most obvious perception of the starlight mouse for players is probably that the sensitivity of shooting and grabbing red envelopes in the game is obviously higher than that of traditional mice. If you want to try it first, you can consider the first three-mode wireless mouse equipped with "Starlight" technology, such as Raytheon ML903 not only shortens the device delay from the mainstream 1-4 milliseconds, to wireless 250 microseconds, wired 125 microseconds of high-performance standards, the pre-sale price is currently only 300 yuan, and the trial experience is very good.
VR AR: Mutual integration technology, waiting for AIGC to break the game.
And gamers who love headsets can feel that this year's headset wearables seem to have ushered in a new wave of craze. Apple is worthy of being the leader of the industry, and after the release of Vision Pro, many new AR forces have entered, such as Meizu, which just announced the mass production of AR glasses some time ago, and so on.
According to IDC data, in the first half of 2023, China's AR VR headset shipments will be 3280,000 units, of which 6 were shipped by AR80,000 units, a year-on-year increase of **142%. The market outlook can be said to be very good. On the contrary, the sales of VR equipment are almost in a state of halving year-on-year, on the one hand, because people have come out of the state of home, on the other hand, because the product experience is weaker than AR, although the two have obvious track differentiation to a certain extent, but AR is also gradually increasing some functions of VR, the future of VR AR is actually the maturity of AR technology on VR hardware.
At present, only a month after the launch of the VR all-in-one VR all-in-one in consumer products, Meta Quest 3 has become the fifth most commonly used VR headset on the SteamVR platform, and the proportion of Meta Quest 3 jumped to 5 in Steam's hardware and software survey data in November20%（+5.05%), showing a skyrocketing momentum, with SteamVR 2The 0 update and the launch of the official streaming software will also usher in a new wave of VR users. In addition, Meta has also reached a preliminary agreement with Tencent to start selling Meta's affordable VR headset by the end of 2024.
In terms of content, in the recent annual gaming festival TGA's best AR VR game, Capcom's "Resident Evil 8: VR Mode" beat many games and successfully won the crown, and the immersive survival horror experience brought the gothic horror world to life with a headset. Old game manufacturers, such as V Society, not only develop their own VR games, but also develop their own VR headsets, and also open a Steam play channel for Meta's headsets. However, in the field of AR games, many games have failed, only "Monster Hunter Now", which is also from Capcom, is still relatively bright in terms of market performance, and the main attraction points for users are still in the game IP, the innovation in the gameplay experience, and the reasonable interaction with the real world and social methods.
However, with the development of AI technology and the integration of VR AR equipment, the human-computer interaction scene will be presented by a variety of dynamic storylines and more natural and credible game characters, presenting an extremely realistic virtual world.
Games: Triple A game masterpieces blow out, E3 goodbye no date.
For single-player gamers, 2023 can definitely be regarded as a "triple-A game year". Major studios that haven't launched mainline titles for many years have launched high-impact and successful IP sequels this year, including Zelda, Baldur's Gate, Mario, Diablo and Final Fantasy, among others. "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" and "Baldur's Gate 3" both set new series sales records, among them, "Baldur's Gate 3" won this year's TGA Game of the Year, and also swept 5 annual awards including Best Performance, Best RPG Game, and Player's Voice. Although "Hogwarts Legacy" has strong fan attributes, it has also set a new record for the number of people on Steam at the same time on the PC platform, and the sales volume exceeded 15 million copies in less than two months. In addition, there are Microsoft's "Starfield", "Diablo 4", "Resident Evil 4 Remake", "Cyberpunk 2077: Shadows of the Past" (DLC) and other masterpieces, which make players cool at once.
Behind the explosion, the overall sales of the console and PC game market have also increased significantly, and the console and PC market analysis report released by Newzoo, a game industry market research agency, is estimated to usher in an astonishing 74%, the total revenue will reach $95.2 billion, accounting for 51% of the total share.
However, the top game exhibition "E3" ushered in the "End of an Era" from the "Game Spring Festival Gala", which was completely cool. In the tide of Internet development, E3 has always firmly followed the traditional ** and offline dealer model, the public**, gamers, and ordinary audiences are turned away, and the method of adjusting the operation strategy for the sake of the situation is also because the experience is too poor and the players are crazy to complain, coupled with the high "threshold fee", it is to dissuade a lot of developers and exhibitors, so that the attraction of E3 is straight **, it can be said that E3 has today, completely made by itself, only one sentence to E3, that is, "My lord, times have changed!" "You don't see, Chinajoy next door is getting hotter and hotter.
Epilogue. Although there is such a small haze as E3 in 2023, it can't stand the frequent release of excellent works, allowing players to enjoy the wonderful journey brought by different games, and also driving various game platforms to take advantage of the momentum. Huawei's star flash has brought new possibilities to peripherals such as keyboards and mice and even more industries, and virtual world travel may be just around the corner. Therefore, actively embrace new technologies and new ideas, so as not to be left behind by the wave of development, and what kind of development will the game industry have next year, let's look forward to it!