(This article was first published in the Qingbo column and is authorized by Zijin Finance. Please indicate the source when reprinting)
When it comes to online games, people of different age groups may have completely different views. People born in the 60s and 70s will naturally think of playing with things to lose one's life. The young people born in the 90s and 00s think of e-sports and King of Glory, while the backbone of society born in the 80s probably has a love-hate relationship. They can play some games, but they don’t really like children playing games at home. This is where online games enter The epitome of China’s still-bad reputation after more than two decades.
Tencent As the world's largest game company, games are the basis of its core business, accounting for nearly one-third of the company's revenue sources, and the profits and cash flow it contributes to the group are even greater. Therefore, Tencent has the necessity and possibility to correct the name of the game, but in the past it was often demonstrated through some cultural soft power. This time Tencent proposed a new concept of "game technology", but did not directly apply the concept of metaverse . This is a bit interesting.
In fact, on the same day that Tencent launched the concept of game technology, its largest shareholder announced a plan to reduce its stock holdings, and it was an extremely rare reduction. This directly put Tencent's stock price under short-term pressure. Although the launch of game technology, along with The reduction of holdings by major shareholders has no direct relationship, but in a sense, it can be regarded as releasing a benefit, that is, games are not just 2C applications, not only providing leisure methods for Internet users, but also have strong 2B application scenarios. This is Tencent The development path of the industrial Internet has been emphasized in the past two years.
Judging from Tencent's interpretation of game technology, many game technologies including virtual reality, mixed reality , and game engines, once applied properly, can be used in fields such as digital cultural preservation, industrial simulation , smart cities, and film and television creation. To play a role, in the words of Tencent Senior Vice President Ma Xiaoyi : The spillover of game technology is expected to become an innovative base for promoting digitalization in many fields. The sentence
is not technically controversial. However, due to the "infamy" that games have been saddled with for more than 20 years and the inherent thinking of our ancestors "playing with things to lose one's ambition", it is actually not possible to truly make game technology an innovative base. It’s not easy, and it’s always a little weird to talk about such a concept while launching dozens of new games at Tencent’s own game conference. Whether it’s corporate users or government and enterprise users, they may not really take it seriously.
Of course, from the perspective of the game department, after the boss has clearly laid out the banner of the industrial Internet, something must be said, and game technology can indeed make a difference, and there are relevant technical reserves, talents, and funds, and The game department itself is not short of money. Unlike those departments that lose money and make money, now the first priority is to make money, rather than create a new concept.
In the past, the crossover of games was mainly limited to the cultural and creative field, such as digital museum projects such as Digital Dunhuang and . However, if we want to expand from cultural and creative industries to the industrial and manufacturing fields, we cannot say that it is impossible, but I always feel that it is a bit "not doing business properly" "To compete with the cloud computing department for jobs, Tencent's current solution is that the game and cloud computing departments work together to dig into the cake. The idea is good, but due to the limitations of interest distribution and management structure, this kind of cross-department, Cross-industry cooperation will find it extremely difficult to advance once it is implemented, and it will turn into an unfinished project if you are not careful.
All in all, using games as the basis for innovation and crossing over from the traditional cultural and creative fields to industry, manufacturing, smart cities and other fields is a good idea, and it also proves that Tencent's transformation to the industrial Internet is real, even though it has always been stable in the past. The game departments in Diaoyutai have to express their opinions, but the real difficulty is that unlike Tencent’s large consumer Internet platform and the huge advantages of ’s long-tail effect and , the services of the industrial Internet are more fragmented and it is not easy to form a scale advantage. In many cases, even It is the embarrassing situation of being swatted away by anti-aircraft guns, but after the consumer Internet touches the ceiling, it must be done no matter how difficult it is. This is a transformation path that giants including Tencent cannot choose.
Therefore, the game department, which contributes a lot of profits and cash flow to Tencent, also has to do these things that it did not want to do in the past. The situation is forcing it to have no choice.
