For Tencent, which has not made any achievements in the game console field, this time it chose the handheld direction.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Three Easy Living” (ID: IT-3eLife), Author: Sany bacteria.
In a blink of an eye, more than a year has passed since Nintendo Switch, a game console product owned by Nintendo, officially landed on the domestic market. In these short ten months, the Switch in the domestic market has also experienced a reversal from no one’s optimism to a million sales. The exclusive agent Tencent once said that Nintendo has surpassed Microsoft and Sony to become the largest in the domestic market. Vendor of game consoles.
The outstanding performance of Switch in the domestic market may have given Tencent confidence to a large extent. Recently, news showed that Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. obtained a patent named “Game Console” on March 19, and related information indicated that its application date was October 2020, and its publication number was CN306392452S.
According to the patent schematics that have been published so far, Tencent’s “game console” is actually a very typical handheld, which is quite different from the detachable handle design of the Switch. But it is worth mentioning that there is a button similar to the Windows logo on the left side of this handheld, so the outside world speculates that it will most likely be a small Windows 10 product that is currently on the market.
Although Tencent is now the world’s largest game manufacturer, it is almost “invincible” on PC and mobile terminals, but on the host side, Tencent’s influence obviously cannot match this identity. For Tencent, it is of course not that it does not want to cross the three major platforms of PC, mobile, and mainframe, and even its attempts to enter the mainframe field have never stopped.
As early as the 2015 Tencent Game Carnival (TGC2015), the official exhibited a game console named miniStation. This product uses Android system in software, hardwareIt adopts the model of cooperation with Lenovo, Skyworth and other manufacturers, and is equipped with a combination of ARM Cortex-A17 and Qualcomm Snapdragon series of high-end customized chips. However, due to the lack of game lineups and the design flaws of the product itself, miniStation was generally considered by players at the time as an “Android TV box connected to a TV, forcibly calling itself a game console.”
Following Tencent’s first attempt in the field of game consoles, miniStation ended up becoming a TV box, but after that, the next attempt will be the Blade TGP BOX a year later. As a product jointly launched by Tencent, Haier, and Intel, TGP BOX can be regarded as learning from others’ strengths. Among them, Haier is responsible for hardware production and manufacturing. Tencent provides system development based on TGP OS Tencent game platform, massive game content import, and ecological incubation Intel provides computing platforms and technical support including Intel RealSense technology and smart homes.
Maybe it has learned from the previous miniStation lineup of first games, based on the lessons of mobile games such as “Impom”, “Endless Sword”, “Cross Fire: Gunfight King”, and built-in Windows 10 and TGP OS game console The dual-mode TGP BOX is more in line with the needs of players at that time in the game lineup, bringing popular games such as “Need for Speed OL”, “FIFA OL3”, and “Cross Fire”.
But can you still see TGP BOX now? Therefore, after two consecutive failures, Tencent also chose to dormant. Until now, the success of using Switch in the domestic market proves that the “National Bank Warriors” also has the ability to consume that cannot be underestimated.
But even so, after the patent information was exposed, some players still believe that Tencent is fighting again and again. Choosing a style similar to that of Nintendo Switch as the direction of research and development is obviously to use the influence of Switch to play a trick to “borrow a chicken and lay eggs”, but in fact, the handheld itself is actually no return.The discontinuation of the Paradise 3DS in the middle of last year also means that the era of handheld computers is over in a sense.
Although in the past two years, Windows 10 handheld products have ushered in another round of concentrated outbreaks, including OneGX1Pro, AYA, GPDWIN3 and other products. However, from the perspective of some people in the industry, the so-called Windows 10 handheld is actually a trick to solve the lack of game lineup. After all, it can run Windows 10, and it also allows players to use games such as Steam, Uplay, Origin, and even Epic’s game library.
However, in the absence of a breakthrough in hardware technology, all current handhelds, including Nintendo Switch, need to face the “impossible triangle” of performance, price, and portability. The reason why the Switch can sell for a price of $300 is that under the royalty system, it first sells hardware at a loss and then makes money by selling games. However, the PC terminal represented by Windows is very open. Nowadays, Windows 10. Obviously, the sales of the machine can hardly attract a different eye from game developers.
Therefore, the audience of this type of Windows 10 handheld is actually very limited. Only real hardcore players will be interested in it, and this type of product has to face competition from streaming tools such as teamLink. For Tencent, it is obvious that they have a good grasp of the situation faced by handhelds today, but why still “knowing that there are tigers in the mountains and going to the mountains”?
In many points of view, Tencent’s patent application’s “”Game console”, in a sense, is quite similar to the cloud phone previously launched by China Telecom. Although it is called a handheld/mobile phone, it is actually used to promote its own cloud services/cloud games. As a localized display platform for cloud games, obviously the handheld carrier is very suitable.
At present, the evolution of gaming phones seems to be “install a handle on the phone”, which is the “shoulder button” on such products. However, even after such a specialization, as a general-purpose computing platform, mobile phones are obviously hard to compare with handhelds designed for games in terms of gaming experience. The cloud game model allows the handheld to solve the balance of performance, price, and portability, and enables the hardware itself to come up with a relatively low price to reach more user groups, and then pass it. Cloud services make money, and this can be regarded as a replica of the royalty system in the game console industry.
So if Tencent is really going to do this in the future, maybe this “game console” might actually be interesting.