The Wind of China Entertainment 2005

Chapter 742 Eat Tencent Video
"What do you think?" Lu Yuan pondered for a moment and looked at his brother-in-law.

When Lemon Game Studio was established, Zhou Mingyuan also had a technical share.

Zhou Mingyuan smiled and said, "At first I didn't answer their calls, but I have to admit that they are right about one thing. The potential of this game is far more than this, and the current development has reached a bottleneck."

Since the broadcast of "My Love from the Star" in August, the sweet gaming interactions between the professor and Song Yiren in the plot have made "League of Legends" attract many female viewers to become game players.

This mobile game is derived from "League of Legends", but it has lower technical content than it.

This was the consideration that Zhou Mingyuan and others in the studio took into account when developing the game.

Games are just games after all, and they cannot be used to make a living. They are mainly for entertainment, and most people just use them to kill time.

Because the game has a low threshold, simple operation, gorgeous skins, and many ways to play, female players can also enjoy the thrill of the game.

As we all know, as long as a game has enough female players, it will not have to worry about attracting male users.

In addition, this game is well balanced, and civilian players can win through skills and strategies rather than simply relying on recharges.

Therefore, under the combined influence of multiple factors, "League of Legends" became an instant hit as soon as it was released.

Currently, the number of daily active users fluctuates around 1300 million, which is a monster level in the MOBO mobile game field.

Lu Yuan's mind flashed through the game's data, and he wondered, "I remember this game was ranked first in the game rankings in vivo's app store for three consecutive months. The entire mobile game market is still in the growth stage. How come it suddenly hit a bottleneck?"

"It is true that we are ranked first, but our user growth rate has begun to slow down," Zhou Mingyuan explained.

"As the popularity of My Love from the Star fades, we lack new traffic sources. Moreover, within just three months, many imitations have appeared on the market. Although they are rushed and cannot compare to ours in quality, they are still quite good. By the way, NetEase is also making similar mobile games."

"NetEase!" Lu Yuan muttered, and asked back, "Didn't Tencent do it?"

"No, or maybe it's hidden deep, but I tend to think they didn't have time to do it."

Lu Yuan remained silent. He was not surprised that there were followers in the market, but the absence of Tencent seemed incredible.

The gaming business is an extremely important source of revenue for Tencent. It is no exaggeration to say that Tencent took off thanks to gaming.

Since 2003, we have been involved in the gaming industry and have been testing the waters.

Finally, they found a development path that suited them, took advantage of QQ traffic imports, imitated and improved upon it, and quickly secured the top spot in the domestic online game industry.

In other words, Tencent doesn't like to be the first to try something new. It prefers to wait for its peers to test the waters first and then follow up after confirming that there is a prospect.

Many games produced by Tencent, such as "QQ Speed" and "QQ Dance", were first tried by other companies in terms of gameplay. Tencent optimized and then launched them, and they quickly occupied the market with their huge user base.

The current market for MOBO mobile games is a blue ocean, and Tencent cannot ignore the dazzling revenue data of League of Legends.

Seeing his brother-in-law's confusion, Zhou Mingyuan grinned: "The reason is simple. The time from the launch of League of Legends to its explosion was too short, leaving Tencent no time to react at all."

"Several studios under Tencent have also produced a series of mobile games including "Love Elimination" and "Running Man", but these are all light mobile games. They have no experience in making MOBO mobile games."

"It takes time to build an excellent production team. A good game takes at least a year from development to launch. But no one knows what the MOBO market will be like a year from now. NetEase, Shanda, and even Alibaba, which does not make games, are all trying. Tencent obviously can't wait."

At this point, he paused for a few seconds, his expression looking particularly confident: "Besides, even if they finally make a similar game, the quality may not necessarily surpass ours."

Lu Yuan looked at his expression, thought about it for a moment, and felt that it made sense.

His brother-in-law is a big shot in the gaming industry. He has worked in many large gaming companies and has extensive connections.

When he left Tencent, there was competition among the game studios within Tencent, and employees were in a state of uncertainty. He took this opportunity to recruit a group of technically skilled people.

Therefore, during the development of "League of Legends", Lemon Studio had no shortage of funds, time, or technology.

It is difficult to estimate the hidden costs that Tencent would have to pay to replicate and optimize such a carefully polished game in a short period of time.

Better to invest.

Lu Yuan handed him the grilled fish and asked, "So what did Tencent say that impressed you?"

Zhou Mingyuan held the grilled fish and looked around. He saw Qiqi and Yaoyao staring at him. The two children blinked their eyes and acted cute. He put the grilled fish in front of his wife with a smile.

"Tencent listed many of our current problems, such as many of our peers in the market following suit and even directly plagiarizing the character modeling of "King of Glory", and our legal department's failure to respond in a timely manner. And most importantly, the potential of this social game is far more than that, and Tencent can bring us a new traffic entrance."

"Social games?"

"Yes, the underlying gameplay of MOBA games is social, which naturally has a network effect. The more nodes on the network, the more valuable the game is. In other words, the more people play such games, the more fun they are. On the contrary, in products with low DAU, players often give up the game because they can't find anyone to match with and think that there are not many people playing around them."

"And Tencent's joining can provide traffic support from QQ and WeChat."

At this point, Zhou Mingyuan became excited: "Xiaoyuan, think about it, players can share their achievements, records or activities in the game to WeChat Moments and QQ Space. The player list is full of WeChat or QQ friends. This way of forming a team is much better than simply logging in with a mobile phone number."

"It can not only satisfy their need to show themselves, but also enhance the social communication effect, attracting more players to understand and participate in this game, and perhaps make "League of Legends" a national mobile game."

Lu Yuan smacked his lips. Tencent's pie was too big, but the two major traffic pools of QQ and WeChat did help Tencent to gain territories in the gaming field.

"I want to hear your thoughts." Zhou Mingyuan asked.

As one of Tencent's former employees, although he is extremely disgusted with his former employer's dishonest tactics, he has to admit that Lemon Game Studio was established not long ago and its employees are all technical personnel. Tencent can indeed help a lot in operation and promotion.

Lu Yuan looked puzzled: "How do I join?"

"Tencent proposed to invest $3 million to acquire 20% of Lemon Studios and provide traffic support, but will not interfere with our operations."

Tencent's valuation of the game is 100 billion. Lu Yuan converted it in his mind.

Zhou Mingyuan was worried that he didn't know the inside story, so he added: "Of course, if we really reach a cooperation with Tencent, this offer is too low. The 4G license will be issued in December, and the mobile game market will enter a new era. 3 million is not enough. If "League of Legends" can really become a national mobile game, the annual turnover can exceed billion, and the value of the game will be more than billion."

"Cough." Lu Yuan coughed. He was shocked by the number his brother-in-law said. What the hell was one hundred billion?

Can Tencent be trusted?

Zhou Mingyuan stared into his eyes and said, "Xiaoyuan, the scale of the gaming market is much larger than that of the film and television industry. It's not just one or two times larger. The two are completely not on the same scale."

"We were lucky enough to push League of Legends to its current position thanks to My Love from the Star, catching Tencent and other gaming companies off guard."

"But compared with these old game companies, we are far behind. This is just the domestic market. According to the plan, the game will radiate to neighboring countries. We are very weak in terms of channels."

"In the three months from August to now, the revenue of League of Legends has reached nearly 8 million yuan. With the help of Tencent, this number can be multiplied several times. It will be a cash cow for the development of PPS."

"."

This camping trip lasted until about four in the afternoon.

After cleaning up the lawn, the group headed back home. On the way back, Liu Shishi found that her boyfriend had been absent-minded the whole afternoon. Seeing Lu Yuan staring at his phone after getting in the car, she stretched her neck to take a peek.

#Join hands, Tencent's Yixun.com and JD.com jointly disrupt Alibaba's Double 11#
#Tencent and JD.com, two powerful forces, aiming at the dominant Alibaba#
#WeChat Pay and Alipay ecosystem confrontation#
#Alibaba and Tencent "fight each other", China's Internet ushered in the most intense "street fight" in history#
"what happened to you?"

Lu Yuan didn't answer, still staring at the phone screen, a smile appeared on the corner of his mouth: "During this Double Eleven, Alibaba and Tencent fought each other. Tencent blocked Taobao links in WeChat and QQ, and its subsidiary Yixun.com pulled in JD.com and Suning to encircle Taobao."

"Oh, just fight. The more severe the fight, the more benefits consumers will get."

Liu Shishi didn't care much and said, "But Tencent's Yixun.com is not that good. I've used it. It has traffic and all kinds of bombardment on WeChat and QQ. It seems to be in the top three in the industry, but the experience, product after-sales, express delivery, including the transaction volume on Singles' Day, etc., are far inferior to JD.com and Alibaba, and even inferior to Suning."

Yixun is an e-commerce platform established in 06. It entered the 3C digital vertical field and competed with JD.com.

Seeing that Alibaba was dominating e-commerce, Tencent also wanted to get in on the action, so it invested in Yixun and took control.

With the support of Tencent's traffic and funds, Yixun went crazy and entered all categories from 3C. It single-handedly challenged Alibaba, JD.com, Suning and Gome and launched a price war.

In order to launch a price war effectively, Tencent even went so far as to build a price monitoring system.

That is, it automatically captures the real-time prices of about 5000 popular products from four competitors, and adjusts the prices in real time to ensure that the price of its own products is the lowest.

But e-commerce doesn’t work that way. Various problems such as low sales rate and expired inventory are all exposed.

Tencent is overwhelmed and has no idea how to handle this.

Not to mention surpassing Alibaba, Yixun’s gap with JD.com is also getting bigger and bigger. In desperation, it joined forces with JD.com and Suning to encircle Taobao’s Double Eleven this year.

"By the way, why do you care about this?"

Lu Yuan then raised his head and said meaningfully: "Do you think it is possible for Tencent to merge Yixun into JD.com?"

"What?" Liu Shishi didn't understand: "Merge, wait, you mean Tencent is going to give up Yixun."

"Ah."

"Where did you get the news?"

"Huang Zheng guessed it!"

Liu Shishi was stunned. The name sounded familiar, but she couldn't remember it.

She shook her head and said, "Who cares? Just merge it. It has nothing to do with us."

Lu Yuan put his phone in his pocket and said, "Then what do you think, if Yixun can be merged into JD.com, does PPS have a chance to take over Tencent Video?"

When Liu Shishi heard this, her eyes widened, she opened her mouth unconsciously, then reached out and touched his forehead.

"Hey, why are you talking nonsense? You don't have a fever."

"Go away." Lu Yuan slapped her hand away, ignored her, and stared out the window in a daze.

After talking about games with his brother-in-law in the afternoon, he chatted with Huang Zheng again, and Huang Zheng told him his strategic thinking analysis of Tencent's development.

It can be roughly divided into five stages:

The first stage was from its establishment in 98 to 2000, which was the start-up stage.

During this period, the number of QQ users grew rapidly, but Tencent's profits did not increase accordingly. Instead, it had to look for investment everywhere to maintain normal operation of the product.

The second stage, from 2001 to 2004, was the exploration phase of the profit model.

From cooperating with Mobile Dream Network to launch mobile QQ, to launching virtual products such as QQ Show, and then to entering the game industry, revenue has shown exponential growth.

The third stage was the comprehensive layout stage from 2005 to 2010.

During this period, Tencent relied on the huge traffic generated by its QQ to imitate almost all product forms available on the market, with comparable profits and losses and poor reputation.

The fourth stage was from 2011 to 2013, when Tencent began to change its past comprehensive expansion strategy.

Focus on the development of several key areas such as Weibo, and in other areas acquire external teams or companies, or cooperate with small and medium-sized developers through open platforms.

The fifth stage, which began in 2013, is a stage of strategic contraction.

It is implementing a streamlining strategy, on the one hand divesting non-core businesses, and on the other hand building a new ecosystem around WeChat.

In Huang Zheng's vision, it is inevitable that Tencent will give up Yixun next.

Tencent Video’s embarrassing situation is similar to that of Yixun.

After Alibaba and PPS came into contact, the media was abuzz with the news.

Tencent’s reaction was quite big and they secretly contacted Xu Weifeng many times.

Tencent has provided traffic and financial support to Tencent Video, but the effect is average. In the streaming media industry, content is king.

With the collaboration of platforms such as iQiyi, Youku, and PPS, Tencent Video has little room to maneuver and is always on the defensive.

The merger of Youku and Tudou in 2012, the merger of iQiyi and Fengxing.com in 2013, and the strong rise of PPS in August.

Faced with this situation, if Tencent Video wants to reach the top, it means competing with three super video websites at the same time.

To achieve this goal, Tencent Video must at least buy popular programs such as "If You Are the One", "Where Are We Going, Dad?", "I Am a Singer" and "Running Man" to attract users.

But obviously Tencent cannot produce these high-quality contents.

"If You Are the One" is on PPTV, "Where Are We Going, Dad?" and "Running Man" are on PPS, and "I Am a Singer" is on iQiyi.

When it comes to long-form film and television drama content, Tencent has no advantage at all. PPS and iQiyi are fighting back and forth, and Tencent can only stare blankly at the water dispenser.

For Tencent, Tencent Video is currently useless.

There are rumors that PPS is going to reach a strategic cooperation with Alibaba, but Lu Yuan believes that PPS does not need this.

Tencent wants to acquire a stake in Lemon Game Studio, take control of "League of Legends", and achieve the so-called 100 billion yuan in turnover. These can be negotiated, and both sides will benefit if they agree.

But maybe you can exchange it for Tencent Video.

It is not Alibaba that invested in PPS, nor is it Tencent that invested in PPS, but PPS that swallowed up Tencent Video.

(End of this chapter)