Title Picture |Three-Body Art Illustration Collection - Coltz
Statement |This article does not include commercial cooperation.
Author |Eel.
Originally, among the Internet companies that stepped into the game industry, Sina was not so eye-catching.
Until some time ago, Sina Games' official Weibo released a recruitment news, announcing that it would recruit an SLG development team and producer for the sci-fi IP "Three-Body Problem". As early as 2021, Sina got the ownership of the IP of "Three-Body Problem", and now it is still a little surprising to see that it is ready to lay out game research and development.
Sina has not made too good results in the game industry in recent years, and once showed that it wanted to withdraw from the competition. On an interview program in 2018, Sina CEO Cao Guowei said that we (Sina) just don't have the genes to make games, which is related to the setbacks at the beginning. Until now, I don't think it's okay to make games, no way, it's not this life. 」
Sina Games (referring to the game research and operation business under Weibo, excluding **) has undergone business expansion, reorganization, and contraction, and has probably been forgotten by many people. Nowadays, on the official website of Sina & Weibo, there is no introduction to the game business or a position in game development. It is also in the absence of attention that Sina Games is recruiting to return to the game.
Sina Games' own business scale is relatively limited, and its long-term income is not outstanding. Since 2016, Sina Games has released 17 mobile games in domestic and overseas markets. Among them, only one game, "Douluo Dalu 2 Peerless Tangmen", is still in operation, and the two casual games released after 2020 have only been in operation for less than half a year.
Sina Games' recent product dynamics are still last year's placement management category "Let's Hunt! Primitive Man. Let's Hunt! Age of C**es (Age of C**es) was developed by Soul Technology and landed overseas in 2021.
data.AI Display, Let's Hunt! There are two overseas versions of the package body, of which the version operated by the soul world has been at the top of the Japanese iOS free list, and the payment level is relatively mediocre. The version operated by Sina Games has not landed in relatively well-performing markets such as Japan, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and this game has not achieved very good results after it was launched in China.
The MMORPG "Douluo Dalu 2 Peerless Tangmen" is the only heavy game in the mobile game business of Sina Games in the past three years. "Douluo Dalu 2 Peerless Tangmen" was developed by Xiamen Guangprism Network and launched in March 2021. The game topped the top 30 on the iOS best-selling list, but after a month it slipped outside the top 100 and continued to fall.
Sina gave a certain amount of investment in the early stage of the game's launch, and carried out linkage activities including Xiaolongkan hot pot and Xiabu Xiabu. However, the game does not seem to have invested much in follow-up operations, and the last update of its official account on social media was in June of the same year.
Now Sina Games also has a card RPG product "Bard".
The original "Bard" is a real-time card battle game developed by Play Heart Network. This product was tested in 2017**, and the next two years were tested and the version number was obtained, but it has not been officially launched.
It wasn't until the beginning of this year that Sina's release of "Bard" was officially revealed on taptap. Combined with the player trial on the Internet**, the full name of the current game should be "Bard: Hundred Eyes Mobile". The game screen shows that the copyright owner of "Minstrels: Ghost in 100 Eyes" is still Wanxin Network, but the content of the game has changed considerably, and the gameplay is closer to the turn-based JRPG.
Bard
Bard: Hundred Eyes Mobile
In addition, in 2022, Sina Games also tested a two-dimensional RPG "Alice Order" in overseas markets. Alice Order was authorized by SE, and was originally planned to be jointly developed by Sina Games, Gollum Games and Japan's SE, and was launched in 2018, but the subsequent cooperation was terminated. According to public information, the game was later developed by the Fairy Fable production team under Mackey Interactive, and production began in 2018.
Now "Alice Order" may still not be launched. According to TapTap users, the game's official Q group in China has been disbanded. And before the game was tested overseas, Mackey Interactive had actually decided to disband at the end of 2021.
It can be said that in the past few years, Sina Games has rarely made big moves, lacks eye-catching products, and the mobile game business has never improved.
In the past, whenever Sina Games faced the new wave of the game industry, it basically played the role of a catch-up, and it still did not achieve too good results after sorting out the business several times.
In the early 20's, the Internet giants plunged into the gaming space together, and after witnessing the success of "Legend", Sina also looked at foreign games. At the beginning of 2003, Sina announced the establishment of a joint venture with NCSOFT, a South Korean company, Sina Legu Information Technology***, which is 51% owned by Sina.
In the following two years, the two collaborated to launch Lineage and Lineage in the domestic market. The cooperation between the two parties was not as successful as expected, and "Paradise" can be regarded as the final highlight. According to the financial report, the average number of daily users of "Paradise" in Q4 2004 was about 650,000 people, of which in December the highest had reached 9About 40,000 people.
In 2004, a number of senior executives of Sina Legu left, including Yang Zhen, the former vice president of NetEase and the later executive vice president of Sina Legu. In May 2006, Sina gave its stake in Sina Legu** to NCSOFT and received $2 million, and the first attempt to introduce PC games came to an end.
At that time, Sina did not ignore its own attributes as a portal. In 2004, Sina announced that it had partnered with CJ Internet, the largest online portal in South Korea, Nermarble, to launch Sina iGame, a casual entertainment platform, and launched "Wild Vegetable Tribe", "Burning Racing" and other casual games. igame was also unable to turn the tide, and the original person in charge, Wang Tao, joined Sohu in the same year that the platform was launched, and led the team to develop "Dragon Babu".
Left: Joon-hyun Bang, President of CJ Internet in South Korea.
Right: Wang Yan, CEO and President of Sina.
In a short period of time, Sina did not make any major moves in game research and operation. It wasn't until the birth of Weibo that Sina, which had a traffic advantage, began to notice the potential of social games.
In 2011, Sina announced the launch of game platform micro-games, including "Micro City", "Three Kingdoms Kill", "Q Will Three Kingdoms" and other game products. Xu Cheng, CEO of Micro Games, is also the COO of Shanghai Five Minutes, a social game developer, and has launched his masterpiece "Happy Farm", and has certain successful experience in social games.
As a latecomer to Renren and QQ Space, Micro Games proposed a zero down payment sharing model in the first year to attract developers to settle in, considering the problem of rapid start. During the same period, Sina and Li Hualiang's family initiated the establishment of Xuanji Network, and the representative work "Micro City" gained 1 million users within a week, which was regarded as one of the representative products of the early micro-game.
In the first year, there were several games with a monthly revenue of millions on microgames. However, in Xu Cheng's view, the results of micro-games are not ideal. He shared in a 2011 Weibo Game Developer Forum that half of Weibo's users accessed it via mobile phones at the time, but micro-game products had not yet taken advantage of this opportunity, and most of them lacked innovation.
Xu Cheng, CEO of Micro Games.
Originally, micro-games once considered continuing the policy of zero sharing. Eventually, after a year of water storage, the micro-game began to charge fees at a rate of 37 shares. During the same period, Sina also contributed revenue to Sina Play, which is responsible for the web game business, which also drove Sina's game revenue up.
Starting with the 2013 financial report, Sina began to mention the change in game-related revenue. The gaming business has grown year by year since it started at more than $10 million in 2012, all attributed to an increase in the average monthly payment per paying user.
With the decline of social chain games, Sina began to prepare to further transform from a platform identity to a publisher, and pinned its hopes on the mobile game business. In 2014, after the release of the financial report, Weibo CFO Zhang Yi revealed that game revenue accounted for 40% of value-added service revenue, of which PC game revenue accounted for about 88%, and mobile game revenue accounted for only about 12%; Cao Guowei said that the growth of Sina Games in the future will mainly rely on mobile games. But hopes for growth have largely been dashed.
In 2015, Sina integrated micro-games, Sina Play and other businesses, and took the company's micro-game interaction as the main body of the game business. After sorting out the business, Sina Games began to devote itself to the exclusive ** business of mobile games, and its published products include "Hand of God", "Cherry Maruko", "EVA Dawn", "My Name is MT World" and so on.
At this time, Sina Games was already heading for a shrinking business, and the company's financial report was attributed to the fact that the performance of licensed games was not as good as expected, especially on the PC side. During this period, Sina Games launched mobile games with good performance, such as "My Name is MT World", which was basically hovering at the top 150 of the iOS best-selling list during the period. Even with this game, Sina's game-related revenue in 2018 still shows no obvious signs of recovery.
According to Weibo's prospectus, the Group expects that the game business will not recover in 2018, and the management has made a full impairment provision for the goodwill generated by the acquisition of certain game businesses. Since 2019, its game-related revenue has dropped to the million-dollar level, and the gaming business looks to be increasingly marginalized.
The business scale of Sina Games is not as large as in the past, and in recent years, when facing the wind, it has chosen to explore in a conservative way such as investment and acquisition. This has allowed Sina Games to continue its attention to the game industry, and it has also led Sina to keep a certain distance from the game industry.
The most aggressive investment is the acquisition of Masquerade Technology, which is mainly used for the layout of social applications and supplemental game research and development.
At the end of 2020, Weibo ended with 2$1.9 billion acquired Kamen Technology 6886% equity. According to the financial report, in 2020, Kamen Technology brought Sina $11.5 million in revenue and $7.2 million in net profit. The following year, the acquisition also drove the group's game-related revenues from $12.6 million to $10.1 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of more than 700%.
According to Kamen Technology, it is one of the few subsidiaries in the group that maintains independent exploration. Kamen Technology has subsidiaries such as Shanghai Yugong Information and Shanghai Yugong Jingyu, etc., and the game products released by these two companies include card games "Demon King and Conquest" (deactivated) and "Ryuyu" and "Paper Girl", etc., and last year also got the version number of "Bursting Maze", "Escape from Dream Island", "Trickster Party" and "Pocket Detective".
At the same time, Kamen Technology is not entirely in the gaming industry. It has also released social apps such as "Werewolf Killing", "Who is Undercover", "Foot Notes", "Xiao Du" and so on. Its subsidiaries also registered related trademarks such as "Space Killing" and "Bloodstained Bell Tower", which is estimated to be intended to consolidate the social application business, but no corresponding new products have appeared in the future.
Although the acquisition contributed significantly, it did not actually meet the Group's expectations. At the time of the acquisition, the two parties agreed that Kamen Technology would be entitled to receive the undistributed profits of Kamen Technology during the next two years if the corresponding performance conditions were met in the next two years. The final performance commitment was not met as expected, and Weibo reversed the accumulated equity incentive cost that had been confirmed.
Another investment is Brainhouse Technology, which will be jointly invested with Huya in 2021, and Weibo holds 46%。
Brainhouse Technology focuses on the research and development of live interactive games, and its representative product is "Interactive Party", which allows live viewers to participate in game interaction through barrage or gifts. In 2021, "Interactive Party" will land on the platforms of Huya, Station B, Douyu, and Kuaishou, and has gained a lot of popularity with the blessing of well-known anchors such as Miss Miss, Nuliu, Xiaoyao Sanren, and Hi's.
Subsequently, the popularity of live interactive games declined. "Interactive Party" is shown on the taptap page as a mobile game version, and there are no new developments yet. And the official *** of "Interactive Party" has stopped updating since the end of 2021. Last year, Brain House Technology registered "Messing Around Subway", "Messing Around Tower Defense" and "Messing Around Climbing the Building", and continued to launch new works. However, live interactive games have never been as popular as imagined, and Sina Games has never been deeply involved in them.
Interactive Party" is still looking forward to the game business in Sina, and after the news of the new work of "Three-Body Problem" is released, it shows that it still has plans to increase the game business. In the face of fierce competition in the game industry, Internet giants like ByteDance have opted out, while Sina has quietly persevered to this day. A satisfactory outcome remains to be achieved.