"Game + AI" has become an industry consensus

Written by Chen Dengxin

Edited by Li Jinlin

Typography/ Annalee

A large model, with a new player.

Not long ago, miHoYo's large model Glossa was filed through artificial intelligence services, which will become a key starting point for improving the user game experience.

This means that miHoYo wants to eat the dividends of AI.

Entering the big model is the only way for miHoYo? Why has "game + AI" become the consensus of the industry? Competing for AI hard power, the giants are more advantageous?

Exposure is upward, and the dilemma of sluggish growth has not been solved

The large-scale model track is getting more and more crowded.

According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the scale of China's AI core industry is constantly improving, with more than 4,500 enterprises, nearly 200 generative AI service models that have completed filings and launched to provide services to the public, and more than 600 million registered users.

It is not difficult to see that there is no shortage of large models in the market, and there are even signs of surplus.

In this context, miHoYo launched a large model Glossa, which is intriguing: as the "first brother" of the two-dimensional game, miHoYo is currently under visible pressure.

After the debut of "Genshin Impact", the second dimension became the hottest game segment, and miHoYo also stood on the "outlet" and became the head player in the game industry, but the 4-year-old "Genshin Impact" is not as popular as before in terms of popularity and income.

"Genshin Impact" is no longer as brave as it used to be

Diandian data shows that after several version updates of "Genshin Impact" in 2023, the number of monthly active users is declining, and the overall trend is declining.

What's even more troublesome is that miHoYo's stamina is debatable.

In 2023, most two-dimensional games will fail, and the only one that will run out is "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", but "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" has not escaped the fate of driving high and going low.

According to the research report of Bank of Communications International, from January to August 2024, miHoYo accounted for two of the top 10 mobile games in China, and "Crashing Iron" ranked ninth, with a year-on-year decline of 13%; "Genshin Impact" ranked tenth, with a year-on-year decline of 52%.

As for "Jeopardy Zero", although it is hot, it does not stage the drama of riding the savior alone.

According to data from Sensor Tower, among the top 20 mobile games in China in September 2024, "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" and "Genshin Impact" ranked 12th and 19th respectively, without the shadow of "Jeopardy Zero"; In September 2024, among the top 30 Chinese mobile games going overseas, "Jeopardy Zero" ranked sixth, ranking behind "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" and "Genshin Impact".

"Jeopardy Zero" does not ride the Savior alone

"Competition" reported that after the launch of "Jeopardy Zero", the total revenue of miHoYo's three products was not much higher than the revenue of a single product of "Genshin Impact" in 2022, "We can find that the growth brought by products with the same commercialization and cultivation model to miHoYo has gradually peaked, and the competition for users between its three products has become more and more intense."

Correspondingly, the rise of opponents represented by "Singing Tide".

Although the gap between "Singing Tide" and "Genshin Impact" and "Jeopardy Zero" is visible to the naked eye, it breaks the belief that "only miHoYo can defeat miHoYo", and successfully makes miHoYo show a "blood bar", thus stimulating opponents to increase their weight.

"Game + AI", become the winner and loser of the game

As a result, miHoYo expanded its product line and intended to tear off the two-dimensional label; While increasing AI, it is trying to consolidate the basic market by reshaping product power.

After all, AI has become an integral part of gaming.

With the gradual fading of game dividends and the gradual escalation of market competition, the industry has shifted from fighting for increments to grabbing stocks, and "game + AI" has become the winner or loser of stock competition.

This is because the AI revolution has entered a breakthrough era, empowering thousands of industries, and the game industry is a natural application scenario for large models.

Shi Yuzhu, the founder of Giant Network, once said: "Where is the way out for the game industry in the future? The first one that we have researched internally, and which our team is now preparing, is 'Game + AI'. ”

Nowadays, embracing "game + AI" has become the consensus of the industry, and miHoYo is no exception.

On August 28, 2024, Cai Haoyu, the founder of miHoYo, publicly stated: "AIGC will revolutionize the game development industry, and it is only a matter of time before this phenomenon fully unfolds. ”

There are three reasons behind this.

On the one hand, it opens up the way to play.

With the blessing of AI, the gameplay of the game is more varied, which can further increase the freshness and user stickiness.

For example, traditional NPCs call preset content to interact with players, and the dialogue is mechanical, and after being connected to the large model, it is iterated as "intelligent NPCs", just like a living person and a player are answering each other, thus having a higher emotional value.

For example, traditional teaming relies on real social networking, such as smooth sailing when encountering reliable teammates, and difficult to describe when encountering unreliable teammates, the emergence of AI teammates perfectly solves the problem of lagging, so that i-player players get a sense of satisfaction, and reduce the cost of socialization.

Soochow Securities said: "The maturity of AIGC text has given birth to AI interactive gameplay applications such as Character.AI, Glow, and AI Dungeon, and has the prototype of text adventure games and otome games, but the degree of freedom of gameplay far exceeds that of traditional games, and with the gradual maturity of AIGC images, 3D assets, codes and other technologies, it is expected to produce more AI native gameplay." ”

In other words, miHoYo is eager to give greater vitality to its products with the help of large models.

On the other hand, it improves efficiency.

In the past, game products had long had the problem of high quality, high performance and low cost, but the emergence of AI has broken this "impossible triangle".

Taking "Genshin Impact" as an example, since its launch, it has maintained an update rhythm of about 25 days for a minor version and a major version for about 45 days, which has high requirements for content production.

In this regard, "Heike Finance" said: "The content is too long, and the difficulty of innovation will naturally increase. The plot and character settings are easy to repeat, and it is difficult for players to fall back when their expectations are raised, and it is easy to have a sense of gap. ”

With the blessing of AI, it is easier to improve quality and efficiency.

Zhang Wei, vice president of Tencent, believes that AI has become the standard configuration in the field of games: "We launched a new self-developed AI engine this year, which has a variety of AIGC capabilities such as 3D graphics, plots, and levels, which can improve the efficiency of some work in game scene production and content generation by more than 40 times. ”

To compete for large models, you have to compete for hard power

It should be noted that reshaping the game with the power of large models has long been in full swing, and even some companies in the waist of the industry are enjoying it.

Among them, Giant Network is a typical representative of the waist of the industry.

As early as 2023, Giant Network required all developers to learn to use AI tools to improve cost reduction and efficiency increase, and in 2024, it released the game AI model GiantGPT and the voice model BaiLing-TTS, covering AI painting platform, UGC script creation tool, anthropomorphic intelligent question and answer system, AI native gameplay, etc.

Still, the big play has to be sung by the giants.

Large models are a rather money-burning track, due to the high cost of research and development, if the coverage is insufficient, it is difficult to maintain, so only powerful Internet giants can be at ease.

"AI products face challenges in commercialization, with 5% of heavy users consuming 85% of tokens." Ding Chaofan, head of the AI Lab of Giant Network, said, "Limited by the current inference cost, it is difficult for us to open it to all players, if we want to open it to the whole people, the inference cost will be an astronomical amount, and our products must consider ROI (return on investment). ”

In fact, Tencent, ByteDance and others have made great efforts in "game + AI".

Taking ByteDance as an example, the Volcano Engine game AI solution based on the Doubao model has large-scale business support capabilities, which can meet the requirements of massive resources, high-speed response, and elastic calls, and can help game manufacturers meet their related AI needs.

In addition, you can also call and connect the latest content of byte-based platforms such as Douyin, Xigua Video, and Toutiao, as well as public content on the Internet, so that the "intelligent NPC" is more comprehensive and there is no knowledge blind spot.

Jiang Nan, head of the pan-Internet industry solution of Volcano Engine, said: "In order to make players feel that they are talking to a living 'person', we will carry out many detailed targeted tuning for the bean bag model according to the specific situation of each product. ”

From this point of view, there is nothing wrong with miHoYo's idea of betting on the large model, but the human, material and financial resources consumed by continuous investment are relatively large, which tests the wisdom and patience of the management.

Then, miHoYo's "game + AI" road still has a long way to go.

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