"Not doing business properly" in the eyes of parents creates a market of 100 billion yuan
Giants are vying to lay out the e-sports industry development radius continues to widen
A few days ago, the 2020 Global E-sports Leadership Summit and Tencent E-sports Annual Conference were held in Boao, Hainan. The "2020 Global E-sports Industry Development Report" released at the conference showed that China's e-sports users are expected to exceed 400 million in 2020. China will become the world's largest e-sports market.
"E-sports has become an international language, a social and cultural phenomenon. All parties in China's e-sports should strengthen international exchanges and cooperation, in-depth study of the cultural connotation of e-sports, and promote China's e-sports to the world." International E-sports Federation Digital Wang Guoji, member of the Technology Innovation Committee and chairman of the E-sports Management Committee of the Chinese Cultural Management Association, said.
The e-sports industry, which originated from games, benefited from the development of the Internet, and is supported by multiple policies, has now stepped into the fast lane of industry development. According to the previous forecast by PricewaterhouseCoopers in the report "E-sports Creates Opportunities for the Chinese Market", my country's e-sports industry will maintain a high compound growth rate of 26.4%, and its development speed will lead the world. From being accused by parents of "not doing business properly" to being optimistic by everyone, is the e-sports industry about to usher in a bright moment?
The market scale continues to grow, and the crowds compete in the e-sports industry
In the face of the new crown pneumonia epidemic that has swept the world, traditional sports events including the Premier League and the Champions League have pressed the "pause button". With digital advantages, e-sports has gained more new fans through online competitions during the epidemic. Strong vitality.
According to the "2020 Global E-sports Sports Industry Development Report", during the epidemic, the number of e-sports users in China increased by 26 million. Among the current Chinese e-sports users, the number of heavy users who watch e-sports content for more than 3 hours per week is about 40 million. In addition, the previous research report issued by the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences stated that by the end of 2020, the revenue of the e-sports market will reach about 140 billion yuan.
Huo Qigang, chairman of the Asian Electronic Sports Federation, believes that Asia has always been in a leading position in the development of the e-sports industry. Judging from the growth of the Chinese market, it is sufficient to lead the development of the e-sports industry in Asia and the world.
The continuous growth of the scale of the e-sports market and the scale of users has also attracted more and more companies to join, and the e-sports industry is becoming a crowd. The well-known game manufacturer NetEase intends to spend 5 billion yuan to build the NetEase e-sports ecological park has begun. In the future, the ecological park will use the park model to exert agglomeration effect and further open up the upstream and downstream e-sports; Tencent e-sports has been established with China Central Radio and Television In the e-sports event remote production and broadcasting center, the large-scale e-sports venues built by the domestic 5G network coverage also announced that it is about to land.
Established e-sports companies are increasing, and new e-sports companies are also entering. On August 24, Kuaishou and Weibo each announced their official entry into the field of King Glory Professional League (KPL) through mergers and acquisitions of teams. Kuaishou said that it entered the field of e-sports and will continue to make efforts to create a game e-sports content ecology; and Weibo pointed out that Weibo will maximize the brand awareness of this champion after acquiring the TS team. , Fan base and the commercial value of the club itself, and will build a complete youth training system, based on a professional operating team to better support the development of the club.
According to data from Tianyan Check, the total number of e-sports-related companies in my country has exceeded 10,000, including game manufacturers, clubs, event operations, live broadcast platforms and other links, and has formed a good industrial ecosystem.
Huang Ziting, co-operator of Acer's global headquarters and general manager of China, said that the e-sports economy is essentially an "experience economy", and the user "experience" itself has the desire to continuously pursue high quality and high reduction. This also forces companies to invest a lot of resources in many aspects to develop e-sports related industries. The major technology giants have aggressively entered the e-sports industry, which shows that the e-sports industry is undoubtedly an "attractor" of high-quality resources.
Create a new cultural consumption scene far beyond the scope of "playing games"
E-sports sports generally refer to confrontational sports that use electronic equipment as sports equipment and focus on the thinking ability, physical reaction ability and teamwork ability of the participating players. As early as 2003, e-sports was approved by the State Sports General Administration as the 99th official sports competition.
Different from ordinary online games, due to the need to ensure fair competition, e-sports competitions mainly compete for the operational capabilities of the participants, and no external props are allowed.
And e-sports players are not ordinary gamers. Li Jieming, vice president of the RNG E-sports club, said that becoming an e-sports player needs to go through the club’s training and management, scientific and regular hard practice every day to improve skills and stand on the field, which is no different from the growth path of professional football and basketball players.
For example, APM (operations per minute, including the number of keyboard and mouse clicks per minute) is an important indicator to measure the level of e-sports players. Earlier media reports stated that Faker, the top player in the League of Legends, had a peak hand speed test of 498, or 498 operations per minute.
How popular is e-sports? Take the WCS League of Legends Global Finals as an example. The 2019 Global Finals was broadcast on more than 20 platforms in 16 languages. According to official data, the average number of viewers per minute reached 21.8 million in the 5-week schedule. , Fans all over the world watched more than 1 billion hours of content.
As a national mobile game with more than 200 million registered users and 50 million daily active users, "Glory of the King" has long become a phenomenon-level product. In June of this year, KPL was held in Shanghai. According to the page data of KPL's 7 copyright broadcasting platforms, the total popularity of the live broadcast room on the night of the finals exceeded 180 million. At the same time, more than 100,000 people have been watching online at the same time in the official live broadcast of Kuaishou.
Domestic competitions are also going to the world, achieving overseas exports. Take the "Heartstone" Golden Team League hosted by China as an example. The league has been integrated by international clubs, including TL and other international clubs. It plans to continue to expand next year. Quota for international clubs.
"At present, the e-sports industry has far exceeded the scope of'playing games'." Chen Weisi, executive director of Tencent's Beijing headquarters, said that the e-sports industry has created a new cultural consumption scene and is also becoming the "going out" of Chinese culture. Carrier.
New technology opens up industrial space and becomes the engine of industrial rise
Different from traditional sports, the "equipment" in e-sports is mainly realized by information technology. Good hardware equipment and network environment are the main guarantee for the fairness and appreciation of e-sports events.
For example, during the running of a large-scale video game, in order to achieve as much as possible the simultaneous simulation of battle scenes, the parallel processing function of the processor is required; at the same time, because there are so many different characters in the game, when the grand war scene appears, Need to deal with a lot of real-time calculations; in addition, the high-performance processor can ensure the smoothness of screen switching, so that the operating data of the two sides of the game are highly consistent.
For e-sports competitions, a stable network environment is a hard requirement. The direct consequence of network fluctuations in the arena is delay. Any delay may determine the direction of a game. In the 4G era, the transmission capacity of game data is limited, and game scenes have to make concessions in terms of resolution. But even after video compression and reduced image quality, the download of game data is still at a low speed.
In order to reduce the impact of insufficient hardware performance and network fluctuations on the game, since 2018, League of Legends has adopted a new technology called "Time and Space Break"-after the game has a bug, it goes back to a certain point before the bug. The game continues at this time node. But this approach has also attracted a lot of controversy, because it is quite difficult to find a time point that satisfies both the referee and the game.
At present, the innovation and improvement of new infrastructures such as 5G and AI have not only solved these problems, but also further opened up the space for the e-sports industry.
It is understood that the theoretical value of the download speed of the 5G network is 10 gigabytes per second (G/s), which can ensure the fineness and realism of the game screen. In addition, due to the extremely low latency of 5G (only about 1 millisecond), interference factors other than the player's own technology will be greatly weakened, and the audience's viewing experience will also be greatly improved.
Zhang Wei, vice president of Tencent Games, believes that the accelerated application of 5G, virtual reality and other technologies in the field of e-sports will bring a disruptive experience to future e-sports events. In the near future, players may be able to choose their own viewing angles, or through VR technology, they can get a more immersive experience in the game scene.
The gradual maturity and popularization of emerging technologies will also bring new development opportunities for the industry. Perfect World CEO Xiao Hong believes that technological innovation has become the engine for the rise and development of the e-sports industry. With the combination of 5G and cloud computing, coupled with more and more mature virtual reality technology, virtual studios and virtual anchors can also be built for live e-sports, further increasing the willingness and interest of the pan-e-sports group to participate.
At the same time, the continuous maturity of AI technology has also brought more surprises to the gaming industry. In June of this year, a special "StarCraft" competition was contested between top human players and AI. During the competition, the AI demonstrated tactics that have never appeared in human professional competitions, and finally scored 2:0. Complete victory over human players. In Xiao Hong's view, AI technology has become an important training tool for top teams, and the advantages are particularly obvious, because "it is difficult for top teams to find the same level of training." In addition, AI can not only show the excellent operation ability of human masters, but also break human operation habits, making the same battle link more occasional and challenging, and even provide more tactics for human players to emulate, which will give professional players a competitive advantage. Ability brings great improvement.
Our reporter Cui Shuang