The trend of service is the next big change in the game industry

The rapid popularization of intelligent mobile devices has changed every aspect of people's lives and many industries. Among them, mobile devices will bring human beings into the "Everyone is gamer" era, making the game industry in 3 years has been a profound change.

In the midst of many profound changes in concurrency, the concept of GaaS (Game-as-a-service, the "game as a service") sprang up and landed quickly, becoming one of the hottest topics of discussion for the current game practitioners. Practitioners generally believe that GaAs is the market size of mobile phone casual game after the game of MMO (large multiplayer online game) games, the next big change in the game industry, at the same time, it is not a long span of the entire game industry history of the landmark event.

As the name implies, and the software industry has long been popular SaaS (software as a service) concept, the GaAs concept and free, online, cloud, CRM and other concepts closely linked. However, due to the special properties of the game industry, the emergence of GaAs has a very complex social background and business logic.

In view of the growing social influence of the hand travel industry, research on SaaS has begun to appear in various industry reports and industry meetings. and a number of mobile games, represented by EA and its "Plant vs. Zombies 2", have been GaAs, fully demonstrating that GaAs is in every part of the industry chain at a much faster rate than SaaS.

What is perhaps not noticed is that, at a time of staggering growth, China has become the fastest and most radical market for change in the gaming industry. GaAs also began restructuring the industry chain in China with faster acceleration.

The fruit of the long tail

The concept of GaAs was first born in the United States, where social games began to flourish. Since 2009, Zynga has relied on free social games such as Farmvalle, which are rooted in the Facebook platform, to expand rapidly into a supernova in the gaming industry. And these social games, represented by Farmvalle, unlike host games and casual games, it is generally characterized by free installation, registration, real-time online, and the basic features of interacting with players in the game, and they are more important than previous end trips (that is, large games that need to be installed on the PC). To MMORPG) is much less difficult.

In 2010, Zynga earned millions of dollars (virtual trading in 2010 will reach $1.6 billion trillion), and its valuations are then doubled from 4 billion dollars in 2010 to 7 billion to 9 billion dollars, easily surpassing the market capitalisation of Old Big Brother EA 6 billion.

Zynga's huge success has brought the first round of US gaming industry discussions about GaAs. On the topic of "whether other games can be free at the front end" and "how to set up an internal interactive system", the participants discussed the concept of GaAs for the first time on the GDC at the 2010 GDC Annual meeting (the Global Game Developers Conference, a branch of the global Application Developers Conference).

In fact, like SaaS is in the global Enterprise information transformation in the tide of the emergence of logic, the premise of the birth of GaAs, the same is the user (that is, players) a huge increase in the number. As Anderson, the former editor of Wired, said: "Long tail long enough is the prerequisite for free product", it is rooted in Facebook's huge number of global users (Zynga can obtain these potential users)--in the number of gamers in the context of sudden local growth, Zynga has succeeded in using its own data mining.

However, real-game players exploded in the 2009 after the birth of the App Store and Android, and in the 2012-year 3-year boom-with the popularity of smartphones and tablets, time was fragmented, a paradise that had long dreamed of gaming practitioners The time has come for everyone to gamer.

In 2009, the mobile gaming market was only about 5 billion dollars in size, most of which were built in games. The participants in the GDC conference were also 1000 fewer than 18,000 people in 2008. The future APP stores report, recently released by Juniper, shows that global smartphone and tablet consumption will reach $75 billion trillion by 2017, with hand travel earning $24 billion trillion, up to 32% of $75 billion trillion. The 2012 GDC conference attracted more than 23,000 participants!

So, looking back, Zynga's success is nothing more than a blip on the rise of GaAs in the gaming world. The time has come for GaAs to really reshape the industry.

The 2013 GDC event will be opened in Los Angeles on November 5. Patrick Miller, head of the GDC online community, conducted a series of research and interviews on industry trends, and on October 15 published an article on how GaAs changed everything. The article quotes Dan Fiden, partner of Signia Venture Partners, who focuses on game investing, saying: "The gaming industry is facing tremendous changes, not from Facebook or mobile devices, but from the game's GaAs itself." The impact of GaAs on the industry is much greater than the rise of casual games. ”

Reshaping the industrial chain

Just as the tremendous changes that SaaS has made to the software industry have not cooled yet, GaAs is bound to revolutionize the entire gaming industry.

Specifically, on the one hand will be the game company's own product line and business line of Double GaAs, on the other hand, with the game industry-related industry boom, some new forces will become part of the game industry.

In the first, Big Brother EA has taken the lead in taking the step of reform.

EA will spend a huge sums of money to buy the long-term cash cow-"Plant vs Zombie 2" Free, is EA This is an important step in the direction of SaaS reform. Although people complain about the sudden increase in the difficulty of the game, they have to admit that the "Plant vs. Zombie 2" Player does have a strong demand for pay within the game.

However, like SaaS, front-end free is only one of the characteristics of GaAs. Its important feature is to focus on back-end services, the last "S".

Brendan Sinclair, author of GameSpot, a well-known gaming website, said in June 2012 that GaAs meant that one-time purchase transactions between game users and game publishers in stores (including various application stores) would be "lost"-specifically, This is no longer the only intersection between the player and the publisher, but it will evolve into the beginning of a long-term intersection with free.

Sinclair specifically mentions EA's "Global User Experience Center" (CSM Customer Experience centre), which opened in Austin, USA in January 2012. You know, gaming companies tend to be light asset companies, and in the history of the gaming industry, no game company has ever spent much money setting up its own "experience Center" line of business.

At the opening ceremony of the global User Experience Center, EA executives all seated, whose COO Peter Moore's speech announced the determination of EA to transform GaAs: "The center is significant as an important step in the GaAs strategy of EA." Far from saying that, we urgently need this center to provide services to the tens of millions of players in the two games of Battlefield 3 and Star wars:the Old Republic that EA has just launched. ”

On the subject of GaAs, another shock to the gaming industry was the supercell company and its launch of a hugely successful game-the Tribal Wars (Clash of Clans, COC). Not only has it opened up a new type of game that is named after COC, but with the release of this year's Google Play version of the Tribal War, the COC has become a millions of daily income, surpassing Zynga's peak income levels, Its recent quarterly surplus unexpectedly and Gameloft flat!

There are many in the gaming industry who believe that the COC can be seen as a game in which the industry enters the GaAs era milestone. In its very simple game inside the scene (a strategy-like game is not even the task system), in fact, is a strategic and extended space is very strong hardcore world. The game captures the essential needs of mobile gamers: in the process of experience, no link is forced by players who are easily "distracted" by the handset and concentrate for more than 1 minutes. Even the core of the fighting part, but also in the first few 10 seconds after the deployment of soldiers left to watch. All of the players ' interests are mobilized on strategy application. This provides a broad space for GaAs around the game. This is evident from the COC-specific pages of the major gaming forums.

In short, in EA and Supercell's drastic reform can be judged, to GaAs transformation, has become the game industry consensus.

However, unlike SaaS in the software industry, the gaming industry is actually a three-dimensional experience economy, so the advent of GaAs is bound to give birth to new industrial forces around the gaming experience.

At present, the payment tool and the hand play home (information) community, is the current demand more obvious game peripheral service, both become the game industry in the GaAs framework of the important forces in the hope of greater. In these two, payment tools and payment links are still in the uncertain state of chaos, and the information community for the hand-play home has been the initial industrial scale.

And the special properties and use of the hand tour, determines the content of the hand-travel community, it is bound to and before the end of the tour and page tour of the community content "axes"-information, exposure and evaluation are differentiated. For example, a user who begins to play a network game from the hand is not able to learn from the basics of PvP (that is, game Player vs.).

America's Duxter, Raptr, and China's fascinating web are typical of such communities.

Fascinated by the web from the hands of the introduction of user needs, the intention to create a weak advertising and strong social hand travel colorful media. Former EA employee, obsessed Net CEO Chen the business value, the new community for hand travel means to conform to the GaAs trend and make it much easier to form player loyalty tools rather than information.

Chen to the Economist, fascinated by the network in order to give full play to the characteristics of GaAs, and did not use the usual discuz and WordPress tools such as the establishment of the station, also did not use the 3rd party CMS system, but carried out a special web site architecture, facilitate internal interaction and with the major application store docking. And in other game media is more rare will card in accordance with difficulty, race, waiting time file, such as meticulous, differentiated function, in the fascinating online can find.

"The cost of getting players from the traditional means of game distribution is getting higher, and in this context, the GaAs service represented by the hand-travel community can be of great value." "Chen said.

Chinese stories

In fact, the fastest-growing regional market for the game industry is not the United States, Japan or South Korea, but China.

At the fall developer Conference held in September this year, Chenhao, the CEO of Touch Technology, released a set of data: By 2014, the size of mobile gaming would be over 24 billion yuan. By the year 2015, China's hand-travel market will reach 40 billion--a reference to the 2010-year tour.

On the other hand, the Chinese market at the end of 2012 only began to appear monthly Tens hand tour, and in 2013 after the National Day holiday, Canton Silverside predicted the "time and Space hunter" October water will break 100 million yuan voice, micro-letter platform on the "running cool every day" has been the first to break billion. From a monthly income of tens of millions of billion, only spent a year-to know, this is the end of the 10-year tour, the page travel 4 years to reach the level.

The myth of one-night wealth and the increasingly fierce competition in the industry will certainly promote the prosperity of China's GaAs industry.

In fact, there are already many innovations around GaAs that the United States does not have, in addition to the hand-swimming community. This is reflected in the game tools and operational means above two dimensions.

At the tool level, YY's listing has actually proved the value of China's GaAs peripheral industries. and domestic well-known game developer Blue Harbor online Wang Feng recently said that is developing the communication function in the hand tour. And know Mingshou travel company Shanghai Mu and founder Baijing to remind our correspondent, China wear equipment rising tide, then in the GaAs industrial chain buried another foreshadowing.

On the official website of Taiwan chip maker Nvidia, the information on GaAs is highlighted on the product introduction page of the strategic-level product Nvidia grid.

"GaAs is not a new concept, China's GaAs process is much faster than in the United States." "Baijing said.

At the operational level, on the one hand, touch-control technology as the representative of the game operators have begun to "play games, gift flow" attempts, on the other hand, with the page tour, end of the influx of manufacturers to the market, Hardcore hand tour culture is forming, before the more mature electronic competitive platform began to move gradually to the hand.

In short, China's various forces are taking advantage of the GaAs trend, eager to make a hand tour farewell to the initial one-time consumer goods identity. Shunzhi, Mighty.

"In the future increasingly competitive game industry, around the game's ecological service capabilities, is the root of the game CP differentiation." Chen to the Economist.