Fighting blitz with traffic
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Blade Knife Finance” (ID: niudaocaijing) author: Zhao Tao Tao.
Affected by the new crown epidemic, the Chinese gaming industry unexpectedly ushered in a small climax in the beginning of 2020, and in the middle there was an opportunity to overtake the curve.
With huge traffic and strong channels, bytes are beating and waiting for opportunities to continue to enter the game industry. Its amazing performance of casual games during the Spring Festival became a sneak attack on Tencent games.
This is understandable. In the case that games occupy more and more daily time of domestic mobile Internet users, the byte beating that has been invested in the content field naturally also needs to be involved, and use games to enrich their own content ecology.
With a huge traffic pool, ByteDance’s entertainment platform with a large number of young people has become the focus of major game manufacturers. As early as 2018, according to the “Dou Yin Advertising Analysis Report” released by the data statistics platform AppGrowing, the gaming industry has become the industry with the highest proportion of Dou Yin advertising, at 34.48%.
How to superimpose the platform’s algorithm logic and game research and development capabilities on the traffic will be related to the success or failure of the company’s game strategy. Can you use games as a cash cow to raise other high-potential businesses like Tencent and NetEase? Can you prove to the capital market that byte-beating revenue will not be highly dependent on advertising revenue.
The significance of this battle lies in whether the beating of bytes beyond advertising can find the next 100 billion fields; from information, social, to short videos, the two are constantly struggling, and the profitable games may be the two Battle.
But there are comments that the byte-beating game business is still young and does not have the strength to impact Tencent games. Regardless of the outcome, the state of byte beating the game industry has formed, the capital market needs it to make games, and the game market also needs a variable.
A sneak attack with a premeditated plan
The strategy of the byte-beating game can be described as “the casual game is open, and the heavy game ends.” Casual games have achieved staged victories, and heavy games have not yet begun.
During the Spring Festival this year, ByteDance showed an amazing explosive power in the field of casual games. Top 10 free gamesThere are 6 games of Byte Beat distribution / agent, and 4 of TOP 5 games.
TOP 10 games such as Brain Hole Master, My Kung Fu Special Cat, Special Agent are on the 100th floor, Xiaomeidou Landlord, My Little Home, etc. are all released by byte beat. From this game matrix, covering all-round, multi-aged casual games such as action, puzzle, chess, etc., we can see that the byte bounce intentionally uses the special point of the Spring Festival to conduct a game of the industry leader Tencent games. “Organized, planned” sneak attacks.
This is not the first time that ByteDance has achieved results in casual games. Starting in early 2019, its casual games have eliminated viruses and I Kung Fu special cattle continue to top the free list of games. Although the revenue of casual games cannot be compared with that of large games, it cannot be ignored in terms of user time and market share.
In fact, in the past year or so, ByteDance has become the first light game publisher in China. Some people in the industry believe that starting from casual games is a good start for the whole game industry.
According to AppGrowing data, among the major buying platforms in the gaming industry, byte-beating products crowded out Tencent’s ads with 47.1% of the number of mobile games, ranking first; the top 100 ads in 2019 Of the mobile games with the highest spending, 63 placed most of their ads on today’s headlines.
Lightweight and low decision-making in casual games. Byte Beat can be easily launched with many high-traffic products such as today’s headlines, Douyin, and watermelon videos.
Using high-traffic products to promote casual games, this process byte jump has been verified. A game developed by ByteDance previously, “Yin Leap Ball”, did not respond very well when it was initially launched, but in the later period, with the buzzing blessing, “Yin Leap Ball” successfully topped the game’s free list, and for a long time Stay within TOP 10. Since then, games such as “Drifting for All” and “Art of War: Self-Go Chess” have been bounced in the same way.
It is worth mentioning that the byte-jump action issued casual games for the identity of the agent, and has not been resisted by Tencent. For example, the eradication of viruses was once marked as “creative” by WeChat mini-games. In the current mini-game ecology and WeChat content ecology, we can see that games with a large number of byte-beating agents are pushing.
Interestingly, when Tencent launched a game to defeat Lianzhong, founder Bao Yueqiao had a similar experience. When QQ first launched in 1999, Bao Yueqiao and Ma Huateng had a good relationship. They also helped Tencent to encourage users of Lianzhong to install QQ.
In addition, another action of Tencent is to strengthen the incentives for the company’s outstanding talents and the implementation of competition agreements to prevent being dug.
Replaying Tencent’s tricks
You can push casual games with a lot of traffic. This is a strategy that is almost difficult to defend, especially for the same year.Got your own Tencent game.
Bao Yueqiao, the founder of Lianzhong once broke the rules of the casual game market. “Unlike large online games, the rules of chess and card games are fixed, there is no technical threshold, and players are highly coincident with QQ users. Tencent is easy to imitate.” < / p>
The same is true for byte bounce.
Looking back at these explosive games released by the byte beating agent, in fact, there are models to follow. Brain hole masters, virus elimination, etc., most of them have similar and more mature similar games, which are repackaged and launched, and their market acceptance is guaranteed.
The game layout of byte-beating today is almost exactly the same as that of Tencent. The development of Tencent Games has also experienced a long journey from casual games, agents to self-development. When Tencent started to get involved in the game industry in 2002, Zeng Liqing tried to represent the overseas game “Triumph” in China. At that time, Tencent had no agency experience at all, and ended in failure.
After the failure of Tencent’s agent “Triumph”, Tencent began to try a new direction, that is, chess and card casual games. At that time, Tencent’s advantage was the huge traffic and usage frequency of social product QQ.
At that time, the leader of domestic chess and card leisure games was Lianzhong, who started off with professional chess players. Lianzhong’s chess and card games, especially Go, are very professional. Since the founding of Lianzhong, many national players such as Ma Xiaochun and Nie Weiping have played chess in Lianzhong, and Li Zaishi, who has played man-machine battle with AlphaGo, has also participated in Lianzhong. In the online Go game, the level of Lianzhong’s players was completely incomparable with other platforms at the time, and the founder of Lianzhong Bao Yueqiao himself also loved to play chess.
In 2001, Lianzhong’s registered users reached 12 million, making it the game platform with the largest number of registered users in China and the largest number of online users in the world. These are seemingly insurmountable data.
But when Tencent started promoting games based on QQ, it taught Lianzhong a truth: casual games, game quality is not important at all.
The pattern is quickly starting to reverse. In just one year after Tencent launched the gaming platform, Lianzhong was kicked out of the throne of casual games. Bao Yueqiao carefully studied the QQ game and found that from the platform to the game design, it is a copy of Lianzhong.
Looking back now, taking casual games as the entrance, it became the first turning point of Tencent’s games. The second turning point occurred in 2007. Tencent won the domestic agency rights of DNF-the former is to support the market and the latter is to make money .
At the time, China ’s gaming Internet, the top three were Shanda, Jiucheng and NetEase. Tencent had almost no place in heavy games. By coincidence, Tencent eventually won the agency right of Korean company Neople.
After snatching the DNF agency right from Shanda, the game has really become a Tencent cash cow business. With the agency DNF, Tencent has accumulated agency experience in large-scale games, and has since rapidly improved its game operation capabilities.
So in domestic, the heavy game of big companies, technology, market, traffic is of course important, and more importantly, can we bet on the agency rights of next-generation games. From giants to Shanda, from Jiucheng to NetEase, the history of the development of China’s Internet online games is a history of scramble for agency rights. The change of position of the game’s boss has almost been completed in the scramble for a certain game.
Now that the byte bounce has almost completed the first counterattack of casual games, will the larger heavy game market behind it be achieved through agents?
Severe game, cast a net or horse race?
Byte Beat has no experience in developing heavy games. In the current public news, it is biased to make up for it through the acquisition team.
It is reported that ByteDance has established development teams in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou Self-Research Center. The four teams are from Sanqi Interactive Entertainment in Shanghai, Perfect World in Beijing, and Netease Games in Hangzhou. , And Tencent in Shenzhen. The game team has more than 1,000 people, and there are still a lot of games related to new recruits this year.
The person in charge of the game business has also recently clarified. According to Thomson Reuters news, Byte Beat appointed Yan Yan to manage the Byte Beat game business separately. Previously, the byte-beating game was divided into two parts. One was the strategic department under the group, which was responsible for heavy games; the other was the commercialization department under the headlines and Douyin products.
This time, the responsibility for the game business is clear. The game business is no longer in the pure commercialization of advertising, or the stage of strategic attempt, which also shows that it has reached the stage of general attack.
At present, if you look at the heavy game layout of byte bounce, if you pin your hope on self-development, the advantage is not obvious.
Recruiting teams at the locations of various game manufacturers can indeed reduce the shortage of personnel, but according to the current information, the game teams in various places are not particularly strong: The Hangzhou team is the Netease Hangzhou Pangu Studio that takes over the market. This is optimized by NetEase in 2018; Shanghai Mo Yan, as an asset acquired by Sanqi Mutual Entertainment a few years ago, gave the byte a jump this time, which is not a top team.
Responsible for the rigorous instruction of the game business. In his resume, he has two years of experience in the strategy department of Tencent. In 2015, he joined ByteDance and served as Zhang Yiming’s business assistant, but he did not see any obvious experience in the game industry.
So, Byte Beat’s current game team, if there are no people who have not been reported publicly, it is difficult to compete with Tencent. Regardless of whether the development of co-developing by bytes is for horse racing, net casting, or the entire industry layout, it seems difficult to repeat the legendary experience of the giant Shi Yuzhu.
But relatively speaking, if you can accumulate some experience and use the existing team and the distribution capabilities of its Douyin and other products to represent a ready-made game, it is relatively more secure. After all, taking the agent path is other Many manufacturers have verified, and the current advantages of byte bounce are in distributionMore obvious.
After only one year, it has become the largest publisher in the field of light games. Some practitioners believe that the users of Douyin and Today ’s Headlines are actually potential users of heavy games. In addition to the natural advantages of short videos for game promotion, such as byte-beating mini-games, developers should not force the upload of 10 cold-start vertical videos.
Last battle
From the headline to the vibrato, the byte bounce is more and more difficult to prevent for Tencent. What is more frightening is that the byte bounce ambition has never been greater.
After several casual and especially bullish charts, Byte Beat has begun to show signs to promote the game center. Evening Light Year is the backstage of the byte-beating game release, and the front end is the game center Ohayoo.
What Byte Beat wants to do is not just casual games, not just explosive heavy games, but to create a game center and square through casual games. That is, an integrated game center that releases agents and self-developed games. This imagination space is much larger than a few popular games. This is the area where Tencent Games is currently best at.
Tencent is also blocking the rise of the byte-beating game. For example, in June last year, Tencent proposed a new share ratio for channel vendors, from the original 50-50 to 37-70, and 30% of channel developers. Shang Qicheng, this move was once considered to be a second choice for channel vendors such as hardcore alliances, but now it looks the same for byte beating.
The importance of the game to Tencent is self-evident, and for byte beating, it can gain something in the game field, and it is also a good balance of revenue. Byte Beats In recent years, advertising revenue has continuously created a growth myth, and it has also exposed a single revenue problem. If future byte beats land in the capital market, this will be a hidden danger.
From the perspective of product layout, after the headlines of today, Byte Beat has always pursued the method of using traffic to beat traffic. If the analogy between the byte beat and Tencent is more sturdy, The nomadic people and the city’s high-walled agricultural civilization, even if the byte-beating offensive is so fierce, but Tencent relies on the social moat, the strength of the two sides is still very different.
The problem with traffic thinking is that it is not reliable. For example, after the vibrato became the main force, today ’s headline data dropped. In the past two years, even if the byte-beating advertising business has grown by leaps and bounds, it is still a share of the advertising market from Baidu and Tencent. If you want to maintain a good growth rate, you can directly enter the industry. There is no way around it.
Search, e-commerce, and social networking are the three main entrances, but information and short videos are not entrances but traffic. So ByteDance is anxious to find some opportunities at the industry level behind advertising. When the traffic is abundant, it can take root in an industry.
The same is true for games. Zhengbiao Zheng, the founder of Gameboom, once said that for byte beating, whether to sell traffic to a game company or to develop or agency it is just the difference between selling heads and realizing them directly. Like thisThe e-commerce, finance, and education that have been tried recently in the headlines, and the short videos have also begun to expand into live broadcast and cargo delivery. This all shows that the byte bounce has long wanted to not only be a seller.
But it can also be seen from these several attempts that in the field of complex business logic, byte bounce is not done smoothly. Instead, it is a purely digital realm of games, which is a better opportunity for it.
Some people think that how to balance the byte beat between the platform and self-developed, original advertising and game revenue? But in fact, this problem has never been balanced in e-commerce, finance, education and other fields.