Author|Xiaodong

Disclaimer|The title picture comes from the Internet.

Original article of the Institute of Shock, if you need to reprint, please leave a message to apply for an opening.

Beijing, 16 January 2004. The panic caused by SARS has gradually dissipated, and in 4 days it will be Chinese New Year's Eve. In the lively atmosphere of welcoming the New Year, the first ChinaJoy, which was supposed to open in the summer of 2003, was finally postponed at the Beijing Exhibition Center.

As the first large-scale game exhibition held in China, the first ChinaJoy has many shortcomings: the 20,000-square-meter exhibition area has only two exhibition halls, there are only about 100 exhibitors, and the number of visitors is only 60,000. But for the Chinese game industry at that time, the holding of ChinaJoy was like a key to open the game market, bringing the entire industry into a new era.

Today, 20 years later, when we take ChinaJoy as a special time dimension, looking back at those fragments with the mark of the times, as well as those characters who have left stories in the industry, we can look back on the ups and downs and glory of China's game industry in the past 20 years.

The beginning of the industry

On the opening day of the first ChinaJoy, the crowd of people queuing outside the Beijing Exhibition Center slowly moved forward against the cold wind of the wax moon, but the exhibition hall was particularly lively. The loudspeakers were deafening, and the visitors were given a large gift bag for each manufacturer's flyer and a souvenir at the booth – two "repertoire programs" that would later become the standard feature of previous editions of ChinaJoy.

At that time, the game market was in a historic stage of transition from the stand-alone era to the online game era, and many so-called "industry giants" were just "novices" who had only developed for a few years. To be more precise, the Chinese game industry at that time was a "wild era", and the first people to smell business opportunities became the leaders - Shanda was one of them.

Rewind the clock to 6 years ago. 1998 was a special year for China's Internet industry. In this year's "618", Liu Qiangdong founded JD.com in Beijing; In November, Ma Huateng's Tencent was established in Shenzhen; Ma Yun, who failed to start a business in Beipiao, is ready to leave Beijing with his team and return to Hangzhou to start a business...... Chen Tianqiao, who graduated from the Department of Economics of Fudan University, is just 25 years old.

As the secretary of the chairman of Lujiazui Group, Chen Tianqiao enjoyed the treatment of state-owned enterprises at a young age, and was a "young talent" in the eyes of most people. But at this time, he gave up his position in a state-owned enterprise and entered a securities company. A year later, China's stock market set off the famous 519 market, and within two months, the Shanghai Composite Index started from below 1,100 points to a peak of 1,725 points, an increase of more than 50%, and Chen Tianqiao earned the first 500,000 yuan in his life in the stock market.

In the stock market, Chen Tianqiao sees not only the "first pot of gold", but also the business opportunities in the Internet industry. In 1998, Chen Tianqiao and his wife took the 500,000 yuan they had just earned, pulled their younger brother Chen Danian, and rented a three-bedroom apartment in Pudong New Area, Shanghai, to establish Shanda Network. However, at first, Chen Tianqiao did not get involved in games, but wanted to build China's Disney. To this end, Shanda produced a large number of flash animations to build an online animation website, and also bought out the copyright of "Sheriff Black Cat".

However, with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the stock market in 2000, Chen Tianqiao had to shelve his dream of a "Chinese version of Disney" and look for other opportunities. At this time, the new business of game agency successfully caught his attention.

In 2001, "Stone Age", which can be called the originator of Chinese online games, swept the country. At the same time, in order to expand the market, Korea game companies began to recruit agents to open up overseas business, and the Chinese market has become the primary target of Korea game manufacturers because of its natural geographical advantages. Therefore, in 2001, Shanda obtained the exclusive agency rights of Korea's Actoz company's online game "Legend of Blood" in China at a price of 300,000 US dollars, officially entering the game industry.

Chen Tianqiao's judgment on the Internet industry has not been blinded. After the turn of the millennium, Internet cafes have spread rapidly from first-tier cities to large and small towns across the country, and online games and chat rooms have become the main online entertainment methods for a generation of young people. Therefore, one month after the open beta of "Legend", the number of simultaneous online users quickly exceeded 400,000, and with the point card charging and Internet café sales model, it contributed to Shanda's rapid growth of cash flow.

Originally, Chen Tianqiao was expected to need a year of operation to pay back, but as a result, "Legend" achieved profitability in one month of public beta. It is said that some players couldn't wait for the point cards to be printed and sold, so they went directly to Shanda to pay cash for the card number and password. At that time, there was no need for equipment recycling, and there was no "scumbag" call for "if it's a brother, come and cut me", except for those who played stand-alone games in Internet cafes, the vast majority of people were playing "Legend".

Seeing that the game was so popular, Chen Tianqiao immediately decided to use the income from the first three months of the open beta to expand the server, so the user scale and revenue scale of "Legend" are also snowballing bigger and bigger. According to industry media reports, Shanda achieved a revenue of $42 million in 2002 with "Legend" and a net profit of $17 million. In order to continue the popularity of "Legend", Shanda later developed its own "Legend World" to the market, and these two "legendary" games also created Shanda Legend.

In March 2003, Shanda received a US$40 million investment from SoftBank Asia. A year and two months later, in May 2004, Shanda successfully landed on the NASDAQ as the first domestic online game stock, raising $152 million, creating the largest IPO of a Chinese Internet company in the United States at that time. At the same time, the number of concurrent online players of Shanda's games has grown to 1.2 million, which is far ahead of other game companies.

However, Shanda's success has its flaws. After taking the top spot in the domestic game industry with "Legend", the licensor Actoz suddenly publicly accused Shanda of defaulting on the payment of "Legend's share", and later Shanda acquired 28.96% of Actoz's shares for $91.7 million, becoming its largest shareholder. However, the rights to Legend are not limited to Actoz. In 2003, Wemade, which also owns the copyright, handed over the agency of "Legend 3" to Guangtong Communication, which had just set foot in the game field.

So there was a magical scene at the first ChinaJoy: in order to promote their "orthodox" status, Shanda and Guangtong have spent money to promote their "legends", from the Showgirl lineup, cosplay stage "volume" to gift delivery, this rough and direct but within a reasonable range of competition has become a true portrayal of the industry at that time.

Disorderly prosperity

The successful holding of the first ChinaJoy allowed game manufacturers to see the vigorous vitality of the Chinese game market, and more importantly, the grand success can be traced. For a time, local manufacturers have invested in "Legend"-style real-time MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), and even Shi Yuzhu, who has made a lot of money in the health care product market, has also invested in "Journey" across borders. At the second ChinaJoy held in Shanghai in October 2004, World of Warcraft, which was represented by Ninth City (hereinafter referred to as "Nine Cities") and exhibited for the first time, created a common memory for all Chinese MMO players.

Before the launch of World of Warcraft, Nine Cities had already tasted the sweetness of the agency model.

In July 2002, Jiucheng used $2 million plus 30% profit sharing to win the distribution rights of the MMO online game "Miracle MU" developed by Korea's Webzen in China. In February 2003, "Miracle MU" began to charge officially in China. According to Zhu Jun, the founder of Jiucheng, revealed in an interview with the media, "Miracle MU" brings an average of 2 million yuan per day, with a profit of more than 50%, and a steady stream of cash inflows every day. And Zhu Jun's proud tone of talking about the earning ability of "Miracle MU" is not reminiscent of the fact that acting for "Miracle MU" was originally a big gamble.

Somewhat similar to Chen's experience, in 1998, Zhu Jun saw the future of the Internet industry and China's game industry, and registered a foreign-funded company called "Gamenow" in Hong Kong with a capital of US$500,000, and at the same time created a virtual community "GameNow.net", which was later renamed "Ninth City".

After China's Internet bubble burst in 2001, Zhu Jun was unable to pay his employees' salaries for a while. Later, when facing the media, Zhu Jun revealed that in the most difficult time for Jiucheng, the executives only had shares and no salaries, and in order to maintain the normal operation of the company, Zhu Jun had to post money by himself every month, "At that time, I paid for the company's operation by myself, 1.2 million yuan a month, and it was 18 months." ”

It was this experience of falling to the trough that made Zhu Jun experience the thrill of "a big gamble and a quick getaway" from the explosion of "Miracle MU". In the 2004 Hurun IT Rich List, Chen Tianqiao ranked the richest man with a value of 8.8 billion yuan, and Zhu Jun, chairman of Jiucheng, ranked fifth with a wealth of 1.7 billion yuan.

There are only zero and countless bets. In 2004, Jiucheng poured the whole company's strength into winning the agency of "World of Warcraft" for 4 years at a high price of "13 million US dollars + 22% profit sharing + 70 million US dollars in independent computer room construction fees". It is said that Blizzard originally wanted to cooperate with Shanda, but Chen Tianqiao thought it was too harsh after seeing Blizzard's conditions, so he rejected Blizzard, which gave Zhu Jun the opportunity to gamble. Because Jiucheng holds the trump card of "World of Warcraft", it successfully landed on the NASDAQ before the game was completed and officially put into operation, raising more than 100 million US dollars. Zhu Jun, whose personal wealth skyrocketed, later bought Shanghai Shenhua Football Club, and set foot in the football circle earlier than Xu Jiayin and other real estate tycoons.

The rise of Zhu Jun and Jiucheng once again verified a fact: in the early days of the game industry, as long as you dare to bet, there is the possibility of a Jedi turnover. As Shi Yuzhu of Giant Network described, "This is an industry flowing with milk and honey, and now the most profitable thing in the entire Internet industry is online games." In the eyes of game manufacturers, the success of the online game industry is to first get the game agency resources and then attract users through various marketing methods. As a result, ChinaJoy, as an important platform linking games and players, has become a stage for manufacturers to compete for strength and show their means.

At the second ChinaJoy, the stars of the game platform became one of the most dazzling elements of the scene. Miriam Yang attended the scene as the spokesperson of NetEase's "Fantasy Journey to the West", and also participated in the award ceremony of the top ten games of the year; Yao Zhuangxian, producer of the domestic Chinese stand-alone RPG game "The Legend of Sword and Fairy", and Hu Ge, who played "Li Xiaoyao" in the TV series "The Legend of Sword and Fairy", also appeared at the manufacturer's booth; Hu Yanbin, who had just debuted and won the award, was also invited to sing for the game "Network Three Missing One" at the Zhiguan Electronics booth.

In addition to celebrities, manufacturers' investment in the Showgirl lineup is also expanding, and the number and appearance of Showgirls are constantly rising, which has also given birth to well-known Showgirls such as Weijing baby Sun Ting, "Sina Princess" Ding Baili, Ayawawa, "Red Cloth" Xie Yufan and "Bedridden Princess" Zhu Hong.

*Showgirl Ding Bailey

On the one hand, the competition between manufacturers for the "most beautiful showgirl" on ChinaJoy reflects the disorderly prosperity of the game industry, and on the other hand, it also reveals the hidden concern that game works are becoming more and more homogeneous under the rapid development of the industry. The MMO mode represented by "Legend" has become the basic routine of almost all large-scale games, and the gameplay of fighting monsters, leveling up, joining gangs, and brushing dungeons is also the same. And when the game mechanics can't bring new excitement, manufacturers start to play "off-board tricks".

In order to compete for the attention of the players, Showgirl's body is getting hotter and hotter, and the clothes on her body are becoming less and less fabric. The NPCs in the game and the characters on the posters are also becoming more exaggerated. To this end, Wu Shulin, then deputy director of the General Administration of Press and Publication, publicly criticized some online games for having a negative impact on young people at the 6th ChinaJoy Summit in 2008, and pointed out that some companies "added program functions that are not suitable for minors in order to pursue economic benefits and attract the attention of players."

Behind the public criticism by the competent unit is the crux of the game industry at that time: the vast majority of manufacturers still rely on past experience, take a single product as the core, and maintain player activity through operational means, ignoring the creation of game IP, which leads to the life cycle of many games is only three or five years, and only high-quality games such as "World of Warcraft" can survive in the market for more than 10 years.

At the same time, the reality of few self-developed masterpieces and scarcity of high-quality products also limits the further development of game manufacturers. Just as Nine Cities' World of Warcraft franchise expired in 2009, its business performance took a sharp turn for the worse, and China's game industry urgently needs to shift to a new track at a higher speed.

Pan-entertainment turnaround

Why are there few self-developed masterpieces? The core problem is that the stakes are too high.

According to an analysis by industry insiders, more than ten years ago, according to the configuration of a 100-person R&D team and a 2-year R&D cycle, the R&D cost of a terminal game was about 24 million yuan. If the number of team members is reduced to about 30 people, and the R&D cycle is compressed to one and a half years, it will also require at least 5.4 million yuan in R&D costs, which does not include the cost of marketing and promotion. For companies that have just entered the game industry after the millennium, it will undoubtedly face huge risks if they rashly choose to develop their own games.

Therefore, some manufacturers choose to summarize the gameplay and essence of excellent games, and make micro-innovations in story background, character setting, etc., so as to shorten the R&D cycle and quickly put it into the market. However, this "copy and paste" model still cannot solve the problem of simplification of game operations. It was not until in the context of pan-entertainment that the game industry found the golden key to promote the overall development of "e-sports" outside of products.

The e-sports element was reflected in the first ChinaJoy. At that time, Guangtong, who was competing with the grand chamber, held the FIFA Championship between China, South Korea and Germany on the spot, and invited Duan Xuan, a well-known host of CCTV, to host the scene. On November 18, 2003, before ChinaJoy was held, the China Digital Sports Platform was officially opened, and the General Administration of Sports of China officially announced that e-sports had become the 99th official sport recognized by the General Administration of Sports of China.

This means that games, which were originally regarded as "playthings", have become competitions, and players have begun to pay attention to various competitions at home and abroad, in addition to playing games.

In 2005, Chinese esports player Li Xiaofeng (game ID: Sky) won the world championship of the real-time strategy game "Warcraft 3" at the WCG World Finals held in Singapore, winning China's first WCG individual gold medal, and successfully defended his title the following year, becoming the first player to win the event in consecutive years. At the 9th ChinaJoy in 2011, Sky was also invited to play an exhibition match.

The celebrity effect of e-sports stars has rapidly driven the development of gaming events. Because "Warcraft 3" is a stand-alone game, players need to register, log in to a third-party platform to fight, so from the early Hao Fang battle platform to the later 11 battle platform, VS battle platform and Tencent's TGA platform began to emerge.

In particular, the Haofang battle platform founded in 2002, although it is not the earliest battle platform in China, but with the popularity of "Warcraft 3" and the DOTA map, it has become the first big battle platform in China. In 2006, Haofang's registered users have reached as many as 100 million, and this number has exceeded the three major stand-alone games - "Counter-Strike", "StarCraft", "Warcraft 3" global sales combined.

As the saying goes, "people are afraid of being famous, pigs are afraid of being strong", Haofang's prosperity has also attracted the attention of Ogilvy Electronics, the domestic agent of Warcraft 3. Because the "Warcraft 3" used by many players and Internet cafes at that time was pirated software, Haofang, which provided battle services for these players, was sued for infringement by Ogilvy Electronics and claimed 120 million yuan.

Interestingly, when many players talked about the lawsuit faced by Haofang in the forum, they almost united in accusing Ogilvy Electronics, which also reflected the special environment of the early domestic game market.

Li Lijun is a technical background, Hao Fang initially did telecommunications system integration related business. When asked why he founded the Haofang platform, Li Lijun replied: "At that time, online games have begun to become popular, but I and the backbone of the team are still very keen on supporting the stand-alone game of LAN battles. When we had the mature technology to make it possible to allow players to freely combine to play LAN battle games on the Internet without geographical restrictions, we did not hesitate to do it. ”

Although Ogilvy Electronics' lawsuit was later dismissed, the lawsuit gave Li Lijun, the founder of Haofang, the idea of selling Haofang. Subsequently, Haofang was interested in getting involved in the grand acquisition of the e-sports battle platform, and Li Lijun took the backbone of the staff to create a new platform, and launched the Warcraft map "Dynasty Warriors" similar to the "Three Kingdoms". So far, the new mode of developing battle maps based on existing games has also opened up the market for MOBA competitive games.

Because the content attributes of the game event itself attract a large number of players to watch, in order to capture the player group, there are more and more series of events held by hardware manufacturers and game manufacturers, such as the NVIDIA E-sports Competition and the Century Tiancheng K1 TV Professional League. In addition, as a vertical content channel for players to watch games, live broadcast platforms such as Game, GTV, and ImbaTV also extend the experience and value of games to players from inside the computer screen to off-screen.

Although the development trend of e-sports has not provided much assistance for manufacturers in game development, as an extension of the value of games, e-sports has opened up a new stage for the operation of game products. Tencent's "CrossFire" and "League of Legends" have broken through the life cycle of traditional terminal games through event operations and raised the upper limit of game revenue.

According to a research report released by Gamma Data in January 2024, the proportion of CrossFire players watching related events has been at a high level, and even 26% of users have temporarily stopped playing the game for various reasons, but they still maintain a high level of attention to related events.

In addition, CrossFire enhances the interactive experience between players and the event by adding professional competition-related weapons, skins, sound effects, props, spray paint, and other content in the game, thereby driving payment. Nearly 60% of CrossFire users are the first choice for event-related paid items, and CrossFire users pay twice as much as other FPS game users during major events, and e-sports events have also become an important reason for the high turnover performance of CrossFire.

Another change brought by pan-entertainment to China's game industry is that the two-dimensional group has gradually become the mainstream users of the market, which can also be seen from the changes in ChinaJoy.

Since the third ChinaJoy in 2005, the scale of the cosplay carnival has continued to expand, and it has attracted great attention from ACG enthusiasts. When the game industry welcomes the addition of new blood from the second dimension, the rise of the mobile Internet brings the entire industry to a new track.

True prosperity in the era of mobile Internet

Around 2012, smartphones gradually became popular, and a number of "killer apps" such as "Fruit Ninja" and "Angry Birds" dominated the App Store, so that many players who did not belong to the traditional game circle began to accept the new game form of mobile games. According to the network data released at that time, the scale of China's mobile Internet users exceeded 500 million in 2013, accounting for more than 80% of the total Internet users, and a new market was pushed in front of Chinese game manufacturers.

At the 13th ChinaJoy in 2015, Tencent brought a MOBA mobile game called "Heroes". The booth was built in equal proportions with the "Crystal Base" and "Defense Tower" in the game, and a number of popular anchors such as Feng Timo were also invited to broadcast live. Later, the game was renamed "Honor of Kings" and became one of the main sources of revenue for Tencent Games to date.

In fact, after more than ten years of accumulation, China's game industry in the era of mobile games has developed certain R&D strength and the ability to grasp the market, and has gradually formed a set of its own methodology. One of the most striking phenomena is that the founders of game companies are gradually retreating into the background, and are replaced by independent game studios and game planners who communicate with players in a remote manner. Without the "atmosphere of the rivers and lakes" game industry, although there are many fewer stories, the entire ecosystem has become more scientific and efficient. It is precisely because of this that Chinese games have ushered in real prosperity in the era of mobile games.

In 2016, NetEase's self-developed game "Onmyoji" exhibited at ChinaJoy exploded in the two-dimensional circle. A careful analysis of "Onmyoji" will find that although this game adopts a half-turn gameplay similar to the turn-based gameplay of "Fantasy Westward Journey" more than ten years ago, the two-dimensional art design with explosive concentration, the Japanese-style strange world view set in the Heian period of Japan, and the unprecedentedly powerful voice actor lineup make "Onmyoji" successfully out of the circle with the positioning of a two-dimensional mobile game.

Behind this ingenious fusion of oriental aesthetics and two-dimensional culture is the long-term accumulation of self-research strength and the precise control of market demand by Chinese game manufacturers. At the same time, manufacturers are gradually realizing that in the era of mobile games, they have to face a larger crowd and more complex circle attributes, including the post-95s who have never even been to an Internet café, or the post-00s who have been using smartphones at the beginning.

The demand of "new users" for game experience has also increased with the increasing update speed of the mobile game market, forcing manufacturers to continue to innovate in gameplay, art design and gameplay experience, and finally turn to "high-quality" development. In order to balance the investment cost of "high-quality", manufacturers are no longer obsessed with creating "killer" popular products, but build popular products into mature IP, and achieve long-term operation through pan-entertainment forms such as mobile games, e-sports, and IP film and television.

But there are always two sides to things. The "high-quality" route can indeed allow manufacturers to maximize the utilization of resources and form an IP matrix, but it is the result of a game "standby" for too long, and it may also be that manufacturers lose the motivation and courage to innovate.

In January this year, at Tencent Holdings' 2023 annual staff meeting, Ma Huateng commented that the game business was "lying on the credit book". The reason why Pony publicly named the game business is because in the face of the challenges of the new generation of game companies and the rapid changes in the market, Tencent's game business seems to lack enough innovation and bright spots.

Among the two mobile games under Tencent Games that contribute major revenues, "Honor of Kings" was born in 2015, and "Peace Elite" (formerly known as "PUBG: Exciting Battlefield") was born in 2018. Although the two games have long outlived most mobile games and are still able to generate stable revenue, the fear of stagnant growth for Internet companies has sounded the alarm for Tencent early.

According to the financial report data, in the first quarter of 2023, the revenue of Tencent Games' domestic market will be about 35.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6%; In the second quarter, it fell to 31.8 billion yuan, down about 9.4% from the previous quarter; In the third quarter, Tencent's game's revenue in the domestic market increased by 5% year-on-year to 32.7 billion yuan, but the growth rate lagged behind the international market by 14%. By the fourth quarter, Tencent's game revenue in the domestic market was 27 billion yuan, down 3% year-on-year. By the first quarter of 2024, Tencent Games' domestic market revenue will be 34.5 billion yuan, down 2% year-on-year.

What makes the big factories even more nervous is that the opponents who compete with them on the same stage have also changed.

Manufacturers need to break the "dimensional wall"

On social platforms, many netizens like to ridicule the plot of "macho men falling from the sky" whenever a country falls into chaos, but the Chinese game industry ushers in "otaku from the sky".

In 2011, Liu Wei, Cai Haoyu and Luo Yuhao, three old people from Shanghai Jiaotong University, used the interest-free loan of 100,000 yuan obtained from participating in the Shanghai University Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, as well as a 50-square-meter office space that can be used for free for half a year, with the mission of "technology nerds save the world" to set up miHoYo Studio.

In the early days of its establishment, miHoYo suffered a "beating" from the market, but fortunately, it was able to adjust from the buyout payment model to the in-app purchase payment model in time, so as not to lose money. Later, the operating data in miHoYo's "prospectus" showed that its operating income in 2013 was 1.3074 million yuan, and its net profit was only 284,000 yuan - this money may not be enough to expand the team at that time.

In 2014, miHoYo developed "Honkai School 2" with a team of 7 people, considering the overstretched financial situation and the precise positioning for the two-dimensional crowd, miHoYo chose to cooperate with Station B, which just wanted to enter the game publishing track, and the two sides hit it off and pushed "Honkai Academy 2" to the top of the domestic original animation mobile game.

"Honkai School 2" was launched for a year, and it created a profit of 65 million for miHoYo, and 6% of the revenue of Station B in 2014 also came from the intermodal business of "Honkai School 2". In 2016, "Honkai Academy 3" was launched in public beta, and miHoYo's monthly turnover easily exceeded 100 million. In 5 years, from starting from scratch to earning more than 100 million yuan per month, miHoYo's gold content is better than that of the manufacturers who "earned 2 million per day" in the terminal game era.

In the eyes of the outside world, it is almost an industry miracle that miHoYo, a small company without any big factory background, can survive in the market, but in the final analysis, it is because the times have changed.

In 2018, Analysys released the "ACG" Industry Research Report, which showed that users spent an average of more than 1,700 yuan per year on ACG peripheral products, with 5.68 million active ACG content consumers and 80.28 million marginal active ACG content consumers. In other words, the two-dimensional users who are good at "generating electricity for love" have smashed a blue ocean with real money on the game track.

Large manufacturers that smell industry opportunities are also coming. NetEase successively launched "Catalogue of Magical Forbidden Books" and "Rebellious Million King Arthur" in 2017 and 2018; Tencent launched the big IP mobile game "Fairy Tail"; In early 2018, Papergames launched Otome's "Love and the Producer", which successfully opened up the market for female players, and later miHoYo also launched a similar legal romance reasoning mobile game "Book of Undetermined Events".

Due to the resurgence of the problem of "underage addiction", the approval of edition numbers after 2018 began to become stricter. But this does not prevent the two-dimensional game from creating a new "legend".

In 2020, miHoYo participated in ChinaJoy for the first time. One month after the event, miHoYo's open-world adventure game Genshin Impact kicked off its global public beta, with a global revenue of more than US$1 billion and a global revenue of more than US$1 billion within six months of its mobile launch, making it the first mobile game in the world to reach the US$1 billion revenue target.

By 2023, according to the data released by data.ai, miHoYo and Tencent are the only two Chinese mobile game publishers with overseas revenue of more than US$1 billion that year, which is also the first time that miHoYo has surpassed Tencent and topped the overseas revenue list. Nearly 20 years after Shanda brought "Legend" to the first ChinaJoy, the two-dimensional mobile game developed by Chinese manufacturers has created a new "legend" in its own way.

Not long ago, the 21st ChinaJoy was held in Shanghai as scheduled. Some of the players who attended the event lamented on social media that ChinaJoy is no longer "pure", because in addition to game manufacturers and Coser, there are also a large number of car manufacturers, mobile phone manufacturers and consumer goods brands that have nothing to do with games. Even at ChinaJoy's blockbuster event, the China International Digital Entertainment Industry Conference (CDEC), games are no longer the only protagonists, and more audiences are attracted by the "Short Drama Innovation Forum".

In fact, it is not difficult to understand that when games are an important part of ACG, other industries naturally want to use games to reach their own users. Looking back on the development of China's game industry in the past 20 years, in addition to lamenting the ups and downs of an industry, we may also be able to find the way forward for the present from the past glory and regret of the industry.

It is worth affirming that since the first ChinaJoy was held, China's game industry has gone through great waves and industry supervision, and has become a world-class game, with both introduction and self-development, and the ability to publish simultaneously in domestic and overseas markets. In the future, what awaits Chinese game manufacturers is a bigger market and stage than "ChinaJoy".

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