Author | Zhang Qianqian
Production | Zero state LT (ID: LingTai_LT)
Zhao Zhao, a game enthusiast, often jumps across the four platforms of Tiger Teeth, Douyu, B Station and Douyin. "The specific platform to use depends on the content." According to her, for world-class e-sports competitions, whoever has the right to broadcast and who has higher definition will use the platform. Everyday, she will follow the anchor, "she will go wherever the anchor is."
"Doinb, who loves fighting fish, watches it almost every day. On the one hand, he supports the anchor, and on the other hand, he downloads the games he recommends." As an absolute "white monkey" (super fan), Zhaozhao said that Doinb recently opened a small red book account, which has attracted a large wave of traffic for the small red book.
It seems that the scenery of super game anchors is still there. However, the platforms they rely on have been a bit miserable recently: Chen Shaojie, the former Douyu CEO, was exposed to be out of touch, and later Tiger Teeth reported continuous losses recently.
As the live broadcast "Gemini" of the game, Tiger Teeth and Betta are facing the same dilemma - that is, continuous losses and uncertain future. What happened to the live game industry? Has the sun really gone down? The two players who still stand on their own after the merger is fruitless are actually facing a common destiny.
In 2023 and now, even in the future, where will the ship of destiny take the two "brothers in distress"?
Never short of money to blood loss
"One Dream in Ten Years" of the live game platform
Once upon a time, the live broadcast of the game was very lively, and the grand occasion of "thousand broadcast war" was once staged. Tiger Teeth, Fighting Fish, Battle Flag, Panda, One Hand, Dragon Ball, Fire Cat... But after thousands of sails, there are only two strong players on the market - the representative of Happy Times, "Tiger Teeth Live", and the other is Fighting Fish, which started in Station A.
Tiger Teeth Live is the first live broadcast platform focusing on games in the market. Its original name is "YY Live Game". For example, Dong Xiaocrazy, Chen Yifa, the pigeon king of Ningbo, and other early generation game online celebrities, the first platform of life is basically "YY live game".
In the market qualifying match, the live broadcast of fighting fish quickly broke out of the tight encirclement, not only obtaining traffic and resources in the battle of thousand broadcasts, but also obtaining investment from well-known capitals such as Tencent and Sequoia China. Since 2014, it has changed its name to fighting fish, and is dedicated to webcasting. That is, in the same year, "YY Game Live" was renamed "Tiger Teeth Live".
Since then, it has been ten years since they fell in love and killed each other. When the industry was booming, they made money together. When the industry was in downturn, they also thought about holding together for warmth. Although they failed, they also realized to the outside world that they were a pair of "brothers in distress".
▲ Picture: Feng Timo, a former Betta anchor
For example, in the capital market, tiger teeth and betta will be listed in 2018 and 2019 respectively. The US share price of Tiger Teeth once hit the US $50 mark, but then it has been declining, and now it is around 2 yuan. Betta is even worse, with the highest price up to $20.5, and now there is less than $1 left.
Recently, under the influence of the rumor of Chen Shaojie's loss of connection, the share price of Douyu plummeted the next day, falling as low as 13.35% in the session, hitting a record low of US $0.81 per share. By the end of the day, the share price of Douyu had fallen 10.04% to 0.84 US dollars per share, with a market value of 270 million US dollars. At this time, compared with the peak price of 20.54 dollars/share in 2021, the price of Betta has dropped by 95%.
From 2020 to 2022, the revenue of Tiger Teeth will be 10.9 billion yuan, 11.4 billion yuan and 9.2 billion yuan respectively, and the growth will stagnate. At the beginning of 2021, the share price of Tiger Teeth reached a maximum of 36.33 dollars per share, and has dropped by 90% so far.
Faced with such a situation, the two families had to take measures.
This can be clearly perceived from the financial reports of tiger teeth and fighting fish. For example, in 2022, the development directions of the two industries coincide, emphasizing "cost reduction and efficiency increase".
For example, Tiger Teeth emphasizes fine operation, and sales and marketing expenses, R&D expenses, broadband costs and other expenses have declined; Bettas reduces losses mainly by significantly reducing the cost of content, supplemented by refined operation.
Cost reduction and efficiency increase seem to have become the key word of all enterprises in the past three years. Regardless of efficiency increase, tiger teeth and fighting fish are working hard at the level of "cost reduction".
In 2022, the MAU on the mobile end of Betta will decline by 7.7% year on year. Users come because of the content. Bettas that "save" on the content finally receive the same effect under the revenue. The financial report shows that in 2022, the adjusted net loss of Betta will be 7.6 million yuan, far less than 439 million yuan in 2021. In the first quarter of 2023, Bettas finally turned losses into profits.
But this profit comes at a cost.
Because the loss of Bettas has been greatly reduced by shrinking the content, sacrificing the scale of users and paying users. The result is a rapid reduction in revenue and user growth.
What is content?
For the live game platform, the copyright of the head race, the rights and interests of the anchor, etc. For platforms that rely on content, it is not wise to cut content to make financial reports look good.
Some people in the industry said that the practice of fighting fish seems to be "a big loss on the plate. Simply use the way of making the plate smaller, making the investment smaller, and then making the loss smaller. The essence is to diet for the winter. But it is not good to say how long this cycle will be."
The tiger's teeth, which also cost less, are not much better.
On November 14, Tiger Teeth released its financial report for the third quarter of 2023. Data shows that in the third quarter of 2023, the total revenue of Tiger Teeth will be 1.65 billion yuan, down 31% from 2.379 billion yuan in the same period of last year and 10% from 1.82 billion yuan in the previous quarter. It can be seen that even though the cost has been reduced, the revenue of Tiger Teeth has not come up. Anyway, there has been such a big decline.
This reality also makes the outside world worried about the upcoming release of the financial report of the fighting fish - will the spring of live games come?
Extrusion of emerging platforms, departure of anchors and loss of users
The recovery of the industry needs to cross the "ten thousand mountains"
The industry is not surprised by this situation, and even many industry people believe that this may be the inevitable result of the industry development.
Although Tiger Teeth and Betta have always been the leading players in the industry in the live game track, the game is a very vertical and niche track, and its user base itself will not be too large. Compared with the popular pan entertainment live broadcast platforms such as Tiaoyin, Fasthand, and Station B, the commercial space of Douyu and Tiger Teeth is much smaller. Moreover, with the continuous crossover and accumulation of these platforms in the game track, the living space of the original live game platforms must be continuously squeezed.
From the perspective of user size, the base of dithering, fast hand and station B is larger. According to QuestMobile data, the number of active users of dithering has reached more than 700 million, and the average monthly usage time has reached 36.6 hours; According to the second quarter financial report of Fasthand in 2023, during the reporting period, the average MAU of Fasthand exceeded 673 million, the average daily active users increased by 8.3% year on year, and the MAU of station B was 324 million.
In contrast, the data of tiger teeth and betta are much worse. Among the core data released in the financial report of the second quarter of 2023 released by Betta, its mobile terminal quarterly average MAU is 50.3 million. In the same period, the number of tiger teeth was 82.9 million. In Q3, the quarterly average MAU of Tiger Teeth increased by 86 million.
It has become an indisputable fact that users are attracted by the large platform. Many leading anchors have left the traditional live game platform and started to move towards a larger platform in the commercial market.
According to the White Paper on China's Game Live Industry in 2022 released by TalkingData, in June 2022, the number of game talent anchors on the dithering platform at the 10000 fan level increased by 25% compared with the same period last year.
Recently, Dou Yu anchor Doinb opened an account on Little Red Book, and made a "new call" during the live broadcast of Dou Yu to create momentum for his Little Red Book account. "We white monkeys went to Little Red Book to pay attention after Doinb said that. Doinb should attract a large number of fans." Zhaozhao is very concerned about the trend of idols on the new platform.
Public information shows that many well-known betta anchors have begun to look for new platforms. For example, SKY Li Xiaofeng and Leng Yanhua moved to Douyin; Zhang Daxian Jumps to Tiger Teeth; Ru Xuxu Baobao opened live broadcast in Tiao Yin, and Feng Timo, "Sister Douyu", signed a contract with Station B; Ah Leng, the "leading actress", will not renew his contract when it expires
At the same time, many well-known anchors such as Mu Yingying also switched to other live broadcast platforms.
It is difficult to make profits, which has always been a difficult point for the live game platform. This has been clearly reflected in the financial reports of the two companies. If we want to trace back to the origin, it is actually related to its mode.
Previously, Zhang Shule, an expert of the China Economic Media Think Tank and an analyst of the game industry, mentioned it in an interview with the media. "The biggest problem of Douyu is still the problem of profitability. The overall revenue scenario of live games and short videos is single. In addition to relying on Tencent IP to protect the city, the short videos of pan entertainment live broadcast are not more effective in balancing the vertical field of games. If it really wants to break out, or there is a great innovation in content creation, or there is a major breakthrough in e-sports events, but the above content level changes need to broaden the revenue scene. "
However, in the past and at this stage, the profit model of the mainstream live game platform is still based on rewards and advertising. Obviously, the commercial ceiling of this model has already peaked. Next, whether it is tiger teeth or fighting fish, we need to find a breakthrough in the derivative industry of e-sports events.
As a result, the outside world can see that players in the live game industry have begun to enter the stage of refined operation. For example, the strategy of Douyu is to focus on fine content and core users, which is the current strategy of Douyu. However, it should be noted that the user base of the game track is relatively stable, and it is difficult to attract new users by virtue of the game itself. At the same time, the popularity of self-made events is low, and it is difficult to bring new growth without the help of star anchors.
Judging from the continuous quarterly decline of the Betta MAU, its self-made content has not been paid by users, and Betta has to go back to the way of buying the copyright of LPL events. The lost users during the period when Bettas was absent from the live broadcast of LPL games are hard to return to the Bettas platform and continue to work for them. If you want to try your best to recover these lost users, you will inevitably increase the cost further.
From this attempt, it can be seen that although the cost reduction strategy of Beta has turned losses around for it in the short term, its competitiveness is constantly weakening in the long term. This phenomenon will also become the collective fate of players in this industry.
Write at the end
In terms of the external environment, the industry dividend disappeared and new platforms continued to grab the cake; Internally, there are many problems to be solved for our own platform, such as the mainstream leaving, user loss, difficulty in making profits, and more difficult regulatory pain points
In fact, this is not a problem for a certain game platform, but a collective dilemma that puzzles the industry to move forward. The difference is that the two giants have different ways of coping. But in terms of performance, it has the same fate: performance is still declining and users are still losing.
At this time, transformation has long been an inevitable choice. Only in this way can the live game Gemini get rid of the adverse fate of water.
(Statement: This article only represents the author's view, not Sina.com's position.)
