Nine Trends in the Game Industry

Abstract: Games have always been a hot industry in the Internet field. With the rise of the mobile Internet and the popularity of mobile phones and Pads, games have gradually developed from page games and end games in the early PC era to mobile games. In recent years, game manufacturers have been constantly exploring cloud games, hoping to bring players a smoother experience, and going to the cloud has become the best choice for the game industry.
How to make games run more stably, smoothly, efficiently and economically on the cloud? As the largest cloud provider in China, Alibaba Cloud provides game manufacturers with the best cloud solutions. This article mainly introduces the market situation and development trend of the game industry in 2021, and helps you understand the selection of computing resources for games on the cloud.

1. The market situation of the game industry

1. Global game market in 2021

Data source: NEWZOO

The total revenue of the global game market in 2021 will be US$180.3 billion, a year-on-year increase of 1.4%;
Among them, the mobile game market is US$93.2 billion, accounting for 52% of the global game market, with a year-on-year increase of 7.3%;
The number of global players will be 3 billion in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 5.3%, and 55% will be located in the Asia-Pacific region.

From the above core data of the global game market, it can be seen that the overall growth of the global game market is slowing down, and the trend of mobile games continues.
2. China's game market in 2021

Data source: "2021 China Game Industry Report"

• In 2021, the actual sales revenue of the Chinese game market will be 296.513 billion yuan, an increase of 17.826 billion yuan over last year, a year-on-year increase of 6.4%;
• Among them, the actual sales revenue of China's mobile game market was 225.538 billion yuan, an increase of 15.862 billion yuan over last year, a year-on-year increase of 7.57%. Mobile games still occupy the mainstream of the domestic game market, accounting for 76.06% of total revenue;
• In terms of games going overseas, in 2021, the sales revenue of China's self-developed online games in the overseas market will be 18.013 billion US dollars, an increase of 2.563 billion US dollars from 2020, a year-on-year increase of 16.59%;
• There will be nearly 700 million Chinese gamers in 2021, a year-on-year increase of only 0.22%, and the number of users is gradually becoming saturated.

From the above core data of the Chinese game market, it can be seen that the growth of the Chinese game market is slowing down, the growth of players has peaked, and the growth of China's self-developed games going overseas is obvious.

2. Game market trends

1. Game Industry Trends

The three obvious trends in the game industry are going overseas, mobile games and ecological changes.

a. go to sea
According to the above data, in 2021, China’s self-developed game overseas market sales revenue will be 18.013 billion US dollars, an increase of 2.563 billion US dollars compared with 2020, a year-on-year increase of 16.59%. All manufacturers are strengthening their operations and distribution capabilities, such as: global distribution, localized operations, Integrate research and operation; and in terms of diversified game categories, from SLG, leisure, card, to the current RPG, and even FPS MOBA games will appear overseas in the future;
There are still multiple challenges for games to go overseas, such as themes, culture, compliance, etc.;

b. Mobile game
Mobile games account for 53% of the global market, and 75% in the domestic market. With the continued growth of mobile device shipments, there is still a lot of room for mobile game penetration in overseas markets. The PC market, The host market will shrink further;
c. Ecological change
On the one hand, the quality of the game is king, and a large number of potential players begin to accumulate during the exposure, warm-up, and testing of the game during the R&D period; The mode of being king is changing quietly.

2. Game Product Trends

IPization (continue to enlarge and tap the value of IP) and high-quality products have already become the consensus of the industry. In the current market environment, game products have the following four new trends:

a. Long-term operation
Game manufacturers need to continuously update game content; further improve refined operation capabilities (pull new, promote activation, pull back);

b. Category integration
Since the industry is already in the stage of stock competition, especially in the domestic market, the number of products on the market is small, and it is now difficult to use one game type to define most of the current games, SLG&RTS; SLG&card;

c. Cross-platform
Multi-terminal (across mobile and PC), cloud gamification, large DAU platform games, and even Metaverse games have appeared;

d. Socialization
In-game social interaction has become a standard configuration and an important design point, and various game manufacturers have established their own game communities to enhance player sharing and exchange experience.

3. Game technology trends

a. Game rendering
Self-developed manufacturers continue to increase R&D investment, continue to improve technical capabilities such as game modeling and real-time rendering, and continue to improve image quality, in line with traditional 3A games;

b. Cloud-native
More and more game servers are deployed using K8S, and some customers use Serverless to meet the demand for elastic computing power. Cloud-native databases have become the default choice;

c. Big data:
In addition to refined operations, plug-ins, etc., many game manufacturers regard basic big data + AI + advertising analysis (RTA ROI attribution) as the standard configuration of the game big data platform.