The market of hand swims gradually cools, how long is the heat?

It is worth the vigilance of China's mobile gaming market that a series of dividends from smartphone growth are fading.

A number of monitoring agencies reported that the first half of the 2014 smartphone shipments appeared on the chain decline. The market is moving from an incremental era to an era of stock substitution. This means that the growth rate of mobile internet users will start to decline, which also led to a decline in mobile gaming users.

This problem will lead to a deeper industry impact. Executives at mobile gaming companies say the drop in new users will hamper the industry's growth, which has been tested on PC-side trips.

This is only one reason for the slowdown in the mobile gaming market. Lu Peng, vice president of Tencent Games, said that the demographic dividend effect began to disappear, the third quarter did not have the phenomenon class products, these factors led to the mobile gaming industry growth began to slow.

From the overall trend, it may be 3-5 years before fundamental changes take place, but some signs have emerged. Eric analyst Cao Di said the 2014 mobile gaming market was not as good as 2013, but the growth rate was slowing, but the demand for users was still grabbing, so the stock would be large.

Some game developers, especially the small and medium team developers, have begun to worry about their next living space. The main reason is the cost constraints, and in the dialogue with the distribution platform is suppressed, the survival difficulty is increasing.

Not only that, the rapid development of mobile games in the past two years has been affected by the capital operation, because investors bullish on the former brought a lot of hot money, once the whole industry speculation. But starting this year, the capital has begun to calm investment.

In fact, the development of large companies is not a smooth ride. Some industry insiders said that in recent years the development of large companies tend to be conservative, more concerned about whether the product can quickly seize the market, the pursuit of success, but lack of innovation. At the same time, the pursuit of IP has led to a bubble in the industry, the cost of IP procurement gradually climbed, will lead to some company funds difficult to maintain. However, the choice of IP is often close to and gambling, the enterprise is very risky.

In fact, although the heat of mobile gaming market is gradually cooling, enterprises pay more attention to the actual operation, but research and development, distribution and channel, the game industry chain of these three links are each other at the other ends of the infiltration, the market competition will be more intense. As a result, China's mobile gaming market has highlighted some unique phenomena.

Development is too quick for success

What happened to the market? A well-known game main test Liu Yang (alias) told Tencent Technology, the current mobile gaming market and the previous several years of the page tour has similarities, are by virtue of the low threshold of access to the easiest way to import users, but did not last long, the user ultimately because of the lack of satisfaction and diversion.

Because of the short life cycle of the mobile game itself, update the iteration quickly, so the type of overall game is biased to casual games. In fact, the market space is not small, but the majority of domestic mobile phone game team design ideas are relatively limited, and the distribution platform of the right to speak, making small and medium-sized team developers to adapt to the market difficult. Liu Yang pointed out: "Good game focus or content itself, but the domestic game companies are often market-oriented." ”

The reason is related to China's distribution channels. Mainly in the Overseas Apple App Store and Google Play mainly, while the domestic Android platform distribution channels more diversified. This has led the platforms to use their own advantage to compete for resources, thereby further expanding their impact on the product.

"A complete product as long as on a large platform, the basic success of the half, and the product itself has become the second place." Insiders say.

Using IP rapid replication is the result of game development for the market. Specifically, it is a successful product as a template, the rapid use of other IP replication. The result is that the game is the same, although the short-term will be able to migrate users, but the product quality once poor performance, it will completely lose users.

Second, the use of existing well-known games for mutual drainage. such as by virtue of the traditional tour "dream West", NetEase for its hand tour "mini West Tour" for the user's diversion. From the marketing level, this is a way to use their own brand advantages, but from the product itself it is very dangerous for its original products, once the product itself is not, even the company's reputation will be destroyed. And, such things laissez-faire, will directly affect the development of the entire industry.

The easiest way is to follow the popular games and replicate them. Game companies only need to focus on the market, follow the star products to launch the same type or the same theme of products, such as the previous popular card games. This can be a platform for the promotion, you can also take the opportunity to marketing. But this will make the whole industry tend to homogenization, and even low quality, and ultimately endanger the development of the industry itself.

No sense of direction in mobile gaming market

Since most of the current product models do not break the old mindset, some practitioners have become less clear about market judgments.

Lu Peng revealed that, so far, although there are many products out, but from the effect of product launch, and did not appear as the first half of the phenomenon-class products.

The third quarter is not a phenomenon-level mobile phone game products appear, in fact, from the emergence of every phenomenon-class products will educate users once, and the user's expectations of new products will improve, while the user's game habits and tastes also changed over time, This leads to the continuation of successful game ideas developed products difficult to be sought after by users.

The market's sense of disorientation is also reflected in the emergence of some seemingly mobile gaming that is actually a marketing emergency.

With the advent of the fast-growing "neuro-cat", a large number of games based on HTML 5 technology have sprung up again as a result of their lightweight and beneficial spread across social networks. At the same time, some manufacturers use the news hot events, such as the festival grab train tickets, such as the introduction of the corresponding HTML 5 games, through the user on the social platform to share the relevant marketing.

Cao Di said that the HTML 5 game is still in the early stages of development, mainly due to technical constraints, the requirements of the terminal adaptation is relatively high, and there is no large number of heavy games appear.

However, some game practitioners believe that such games have two sides. On the one hand, the user's point of interest will decline faster, and can not meet the needs of the real game users, but on the other hand, many people who do not play the game began to contact the mobile game, so as to turn into the real game users.