Source｜Poison Eye(ID : DomoreDumou)

Author｜He Runxuan

Recently, there is a lot of mainstream news about e-sports. For example, Station B and Riot Games jointly announced the strategic cooperation of League of Legends global events, officially obtaining the exclusive live broadcast rights of global events in mainland China for three consecutive years. For example, the 2020 and 2021 League of Legends global finals will be held in China, and even Tencent officials could not help but send a separate push for this news.

At this point, the broadcast of “Crossing the Line of Fire” is quite convincing. It is not difficult to see the praise from the audience on Douban. Less than 8% of the people gave it a rating below three stars, and some even called it “the best e-sports drama ever.”

Only less than 8% of people gave a rating below Samsung

Compared with the good reputation, “Cross Fire” seems to be a little bit applauded. According to Yunhe data, it only ranked seventh on the serial drama dominance list after half a month, with a market share of 1.7%. It’s better than “Pretty Scholar”, which is more evening line.

So, where is the word-of-mouth and data wrong?

In fact, I have a little understanding of e-sports dramas,It can be understood that there is a typical dislocation: the mainstream users in the e-sports industry and the drama industry are male and female respectively, and they do not overlap. An e-sports drama that is sufficiently restored and wonderful, but not necessarily the favorite of mainstream female audiences (focus: mainstream rather than all).

This is not a stereotype: According to the “2019 Global E-sports Industry and User Development Report” by Penguin Think Tank, Chinese e-sports users are still dominated by men, and women account for only 30%. The main audience in the drama industry is the opposite. Based on this, most of the e-sports dramas on the market are biased towards “female channels”, that is, the main romance line, superimposed on the label of youthful blood, hoping to take this out of the circle.

But “Crossing the Line” seems to be full of energy to do “male frequency”. Feelings are not the main line. There are many real-life fights. As a result, it is easy to cause a certain threshold for viewing.

On the Tencent video conference two days ago, Sun Zhonghuai, vice president of Tencent and CEO of Penguin Films, also specifically mentioned the show in his speech: according to the user’s trend of watching the show, they re-adjusted the first episode. Editing has greatly improved user retention. The changes between the two versions before and after the first episode are mainly to reduce the fighting scenes and advance the main story line.

“Crossing the Line of Fire”

Just like e-sports does not require love, some female audiences seem to vote with their feet: TV series do not need e-sports.

Although current e-sports reports often mention the rise of female consumption, their strength is mainly concentrated in e-sports consumption and the purchase willingness of the surroundings. From the basic level, men still dominate. This is also supported by data. The aforementioned Penguin Zhiku report mentioned that although the female index of Chinese e-sports users reached 64.7, it ranked last among all the countries surveyed. In terms of the popularity of female users, domestic The competitive industry still has a long way to go.

In recent years, the only hardcore e-sports drama out of the circle is “Full Time Master”. It does not have too many emotional dramas, and there are many fighting scenes, but there are still many female fans.During its broadcast, Yunhe data showed that in the “Full-time Master” crowd portrait, although the proportion of male audiences is higher than that of females, the gender gap is not great. But this drama has its particularity. The rich fanboys make it have many female fans who come here. It is difficult to determine whether its female audience is attracted by fanboys or e-sports elements.

“Full-time Master”

In addition, another possible misalignment that e-sports dramas need to think about is that mainstream e-sports users may not have much demand for watching dramas.

As soon as e-sports users are more inclined to watch live broadcasts, the “2020 Global E-sports Market Report” regards live broadcasts as an important source of income: According to its forecast, live broadcasts will bring in revenue of $18.2 million in 2020. And it will grow to 31.6 million US dollars in 2023. Secondly, the chain from e-sports guide to the drama itself is too long. In addition, the mainstream male users of e-sports are concentrated consumption, which has higher requirements for dramas, and the attrition rate in this process is also higher.

A senior producer who has tried both the game business and the film and television business told Dumo (ID: DomoreDumou) that in this cross-cutting field, they have long discovered that games and film and television have walls, so they have no plans Simple diversion between the two. “Many years ago, our analysis of the market and users has been very clear. This kind of thing has no intersection, because it is a competition with each other. In addition to the deduction of the time just needed to sleep and eat, your effective time is just that. Point, what you can do is very limited, this is a physical existence.”

Therefore, he is also pessimistic about whether e-sports drama can form his own circle, because dislocation always exists, and it is difficult to form a real category.

The current practice in the market is still to refine the hot bloodlines of romance, such as last year’s “accompany you to the top of the world”, such as “Dear Loved One”, to put it bluntly, they are all romance dramas in the shell of e-sports, with game content Not high. This is the “natural choice” of the market. Lu Fanxi, the co-CEO of NASDAQ and the founder of Rabbit Hole Culture, once told Dumou that for male audiences, the adaptation of e-sports drama