At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, most people try to slow down, review the lessons learned from the past year, and plan for the year ahead.
As a record-keeper in the esports industry, I have been thinking about the gains and losses of esports in China in 2023 these days. Olympics, Asian Games, and champions are the first three sets of keywords that come to mind. This year, we saw the International Olympic Committee (IOC) establish an Esports Committee and host the inaugural Olympic Esports Week in Singapore with esports games. A series of positive signals have shown us that the Olympic Committee has moved from easing to actively embracing e-sports, and the entry of e-sports into the Olympics has gradually become clear. Even if we are still on the long way to the Olympics.
In contrast, the Hangzhou Asian Games e-sports event has 4 golds and 1 bronze, which undoubtedly brings a stronger shock. It marks that e-sports has stood on the stage of continental competitions, and has been shoulder-to-shoulder with traditional sports in the land of Asia. Although the failure of some projects has brought disappointment, it cannot cover up the glorious moment that Chinese e-sports people have spent more than 20 years to win glory for the country.
Gold medals and championships are equally important to e-sports and traditional sports, which is the fate of competitive sports. This year, in the professional arena, Chinese e-sports have won the championship in 9 projects such as interstellar, DNF, and LOL mobile games, which is not bad from last year. It is a pity that the top event, Chinese e-sports, can only be used as a foil, and has not become a well-deserved protagonist like the Asian Games.
Applause, flowers, anger, puzzlement, this year's Chinese e-sports have tasted almost everything. However, between the gains and losses, I can still feel the vitality of Chinese esports.
Their growth has made the Asian Games shine with new light
When young e-sports faces appeared at the opening of the Hangzhou Asian Games;E-sports gold medals appeared at the award ceremony of the Hangzhou Asian Games;After the floats, elements of the Glory of Kings, League of Legends and other items appeared at the closing ceremony of the Hangzhou Asian Games.
I don't think anyone can resist one of these esports milestone moments. I still remember that when Xu Bicheng, a player in the Glory of Kings project, Zhu Bocheng, a player in the Peace Elite Project, and others stood on the podium with a gold medal on their chests, and watched the five-star red flag rising in the surround sound of the national anthem, tears fell unconsciously.
By the time the gold medal coronation ceremony was completed, the gestures made me feel that they had lost their boyish childishness and become a mature and stable man. This filter may be affected by the gold aura at first. From a long-term perspective, they have completed the ascension of Chinese e-sports players from players, e-sports athletes, national training team athletes, and gold medal athletes. From the perspective of personal growth and industry development, they broke the boundaries with traditional sports athletes, stood on the stage of the Asian Games to win glory for the country, and were one of the 886 members of the Chinese delegation to the Hangzhou Asian Games, making e-sports and sports finally one.
It has taken more than 20 years for Chinese esports to get to this point, and it makes sense to say that they are mature. Some people may say that this group of e-sports people who first appeared on the Asian Games stage may not be able to stand it in the future, and their careers are too short to become role models for young people. These concerns are normal, but we can't deny that before they officially entered the Asian Games, they were all leaders in major professional leagues, and their clubs also held various titles.
Behind these auras is the result of their hard training day and night, and some of the players even overdraft their bodies for a short period of time. But they survived until they reached the top of their careers. From professional players to esports national teams, the same is true.
In May this year, after being recommended by the copyright owner of the project or the domestic ** party (hereinafter referred to as the ** party) and reviewed by the Sports Information Center of the General Administration of Sports of the People's Republic of China (hereinafter referred to as the Information Center), the candidates for the national training team of the e-sports project were publicized to the whole society and accepted supervision. After many audits, they came to the training base for nearly 40 days of closed training, with strict time limits on weekdays, getting up at 8:30 in the morning and ending the collective training at 22:00. During the period, in addition to project training, they must also carry out physical exercises, take psychological courses, and the daily range of activities is in the training area, rest area, and dining area.
Due to the existence of version updates and iterations of e-sports, and the Honor of Kings project and the Peace Elite project adopted the Asian Games version in this Hangzhou Asian Games. This means that athletes in both sports have to start practicing Xi heroes and honing their tactics again. It is worth mentioning that these athletes will have to face an elimination rate of close to 70% before they can eventually become members of the national team in esports. During this period, the psychological pressure borne by others may not be unimaginable or bearable.
This made the young players who are in the spotlight on weekdays feel the cruelty of competitive sports for the first time, and they have become more self-disciplined, gradually growing into a real sportsman, and also justifying the name of e-sports people.
Behind the debut, the stage jointly built by the industrial chain
On stage, they are star-studded and dazzling. Under the stage, there is also a group of mysterious people who shine. During the Hangzhou Asian Games, a large number of intercontinental e-sports standards and rules were put on the stage for the first time.
In the run-up to the Asian Games, we saw for the first time that the Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) (AESF) and the Information Center of the General Administration of Sport of China jointly led the customization, and Tencent and other Asian manufacturers participated in the compilation of e-sports and technical rules. **China Radio and Television Group has jointly developed the first e-sports event production standard with a number of e-sports industry organizations. During the Asian Games, we also witnessed 217 esports events running smoothly with zero technical glitches.
It is almost impossible to quickly introduce these standards and rules in a short period of time and ensure a smooth execution process. I am more inclined to think that this is an esports manufacturer and organization, and a systematic combing of past models and experiences.
For example, the "Eagle Eye" system, a tool developed by Tencent's e-sports product technology team, has provided security for the event for 310 consecutive days starting from the 2022 Asian Games test match, and during the Asian Games, it successfully warned in advance and dealt with more than 10 anomalies in a millisecond e-sports event, which not only made the competition fair and visualized, but also ensured the smooth progress of the overall event.
Pushing back further, it can be traced back to thirteen years ago, Tencent began the e-sports layout, at that time there was no league that we are familiar with now, and Tencent's e-sports story started from TGA. In the era of mobile e-sports, multi-region production and broadcasting technology has enabled Tencent to restore product characteristics in the field of e-sports with "multi-perspective packaging". Adhering to the promotion of e-sports industrialization, Tencent's competition tools have also been more widely used.
With the emergence of professional events such as League of Legends LPL, CrossFire CFPL, Honor of Kings KPL, Dota DPC, Peace Elite PEL, and Fifth Personality IVL, Chinese e-sports has truly achieved "total expansion". With the growth of the scale of many e-sports events, the upgrading of users' viewing needs, the development of technology, and the experience precipitated after the execution of each event, China's e-sports has taken a solid and long-term step in improving the industrial infrastructure.
Behind the shining in Asia is the development of the industry
On the field, Chinese e-sports athletes won gold medals and shined in Asia. Outside the stadium, the Asian Games e-sports event has also reached a new milestone of "double billion" in communication and commercialization.
According to the data of Tencent's rights-holding broadcast related platforms, the amount of content of Asian Games e-sports events exceeds 3500 million times. In addition, according to the "Asian Games E-sports E-sports Empowering City Development Evaluation Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Asian Games E-sports Report") written by the joint research team of the National Sports Industry Research Base of Zhejiang University and the National Sports Industry Research Base of Central China Normal University, the economic benefits of the Hangzhou Asian Games e-sports events are about 2600 million yuan. At the same time, it was also pointed out that the Asian Games e-sports events have played a positive role in stimulating local employment, spreading local culture, and enhancing international influence in Hangzhou.
*: Asian Games e-sports report jointly produced by the National Sports Industry Research Base of Zhejiang University and the National Sports Industry Research Base of Central China Normal University.
If you put this background in, the current major cities around the world are building e-sports capitals, and even the grand narrative of "world e-sports centers". You will find that through the spillover effect of the e-sports event of the Hangzhou Asian Games, that is, the spillover of the production standards of the competition system, the spillover of commercial influence, and the spillover of the momentum of the digital economy. Major countries and cities around the world have started a new e-race.
As the saying goes, when the water overflows, it is full. Now that we have conducted drills in the "official comprehensive events at the national level" and "continental events", we have precipitated the tools and methods. Then, after appropriate transformation in the future, China's e-sports production standards will move towards higher-standard intercontinental comprehensive events, and even a global e-sports platform such as the "World Cup", which can be completely feasible.
*: Nandu Big Data Research Institute.
As for the commercial impact, in addition to the aforementioned 2In addition to the 600 million data, we cannot ignore the unreleased commercialization potential of e-sports, such as the highest tickets**, the average winning rate of tickets does not exceed 5 per 1,000, and the 110 SKU e-sports licensed souvenirs that have been swept away offline. This highlights the strong consumption enthusiasm of Chinese esports users. Currently China has 4With 8.7 billion e-sports users, the global e-sports users have reached 57.4 billion and will maintain rapid growth. This also means that there are greater opportunities for commercialization for core esports users on a global scale.
Focusing on individuals, we see the commercialization potential behind the rapid growth of esports users. If we shift the perspective to the combination of e-sports with commercial entities and even cities, we will find that e-sports, a digital economy format, will stimulate the transformation and growth momentum of the real economy and cities, and drive the development of cultural and creative industries, tourism and other formats. At the Hangzhou Asian Games, non-local audiences contributed as much as 90% of the indirect economic value, which is enough to prove the role of e-sports, a digital economy format, in driving tourism and other related industries.
It is foreseeable that the practice and accumulated experience of the e-sports project of this year's Hangzhou Asian Games for core e-sports users and cultural tourism economy can be applied to a larger international stage. It's not hard to explain why the older batch of esports capital contenders are still increasing their weight, such as Los Angeles in the United States, Paris in France, Seoul in South Korea, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen in China. A new batch of entrants, such as Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, are investing huge amounts of money to build the E-sports World Cup, and hope to optimize the local economic structure with the help of e-sports.
I believe that in the new round of e-sports, Chinese e-sports people have the hope and strength to play a more important role. After all, a number of manufacturers represented by Tencent have reached cooperation with AESF to promote esports participation in more continental sports events.
In the future, Tencent Esports will also carry out in-depth cooperation with many countries and regions through the support of events, technology and ecology represented by the "Esports Asia Cup" to jointly promote the common development and prosperity of the Asian esports industry.
If you think about it, after 20 years of development, China's e-sports has finally gone from a dim and cramped Internet café to the Hangzhou e-sports center, becoming a part of traditional sports.
From crossing the river by feeling the stones to standing on the top of Asia, it is not surprising that the determination and perseverance of Chinese e-sports people have brought stronger confidence.
Seven years of "raising", flowers bloom and bear fruit
On the 9th of December, Tencent E-sports, the seventh year of its establishment, had no special ceremonies, but the finals of many Tencent events were held one after another. At this moment, standing at the starting point of the Asian Games, I find that Chinese e-sports is striving to seek a place in the Asian and global markets, and is constantly challenging higher mountains and longer rivers. This is bound to be a journey to applause and flowers, provided that we face up to the fact that the current scale of China's e-sports industry is not large enough, and the independent commercial operation space after breaking away from the copyright owner needs to be further strengthened.
At the same time, as the core link of the e-sports industry chain, although the e-sports club has been favored by capital and got rid of the reckless stage of generating electricity for love, it has not yet been able to take off the label of traffic tools. In the downstream e-sports IP development process, it still presents the characteristics of dotted and intermittent.
In the face of such challenges, copyright owners represented by Tencent E-sports have combined the e-sports strategy to start round after round of e-sports infrastructure in an attempt to break through the shackles. Overseas, behind the new forces of e-sports, Chinese e-sports are also quietly competing with their own ideas and experiences in a way of "moisturizing things silently", promoting the common development of the global e-sports industry.
Overall, opportunities beckon. At present, the operation of overseas e-sports games is in crisis, the Nagoya Asian Games is imminent, and the supply of e-sports rights of domestic game manufacturers has been effectively released. It can be said that in terms of event ecology, continental games, and copyright, Chinese e-sports have geographical advantages and people.
Over the past seven years, we have seen a significant decline in various industries due to the pandemic, and we have also seen esports take the lead in recovery due to its strong resilience. On the stage of the Asian Games, it has shown its influence on young people to the world with a new attitude, attracting countries around the world to compete for development. The seven years of rapid development of Tencent e-sports are undoubtedly a bright spot in the 23 years of China's e-sports, which has grown favorable rhizomes in the ups and downs, and finally grasped the soil that belongs to e-sports.
Today, e-sports has moved from "following the crowd" to "competing for the current", which is inseparable from the persistence and efforts of a generation of e-sports people, and also depicts a broader future for all parties in the industry chain.
Such a 2023 also gives the story of Chinese e-sports a new beginning.