Article | Game Observation
Recently, 37 Mutual Entertainment replied to investors' questions about the company's foreign investment and performance growth:
The company pays close attention to the development of science and technology. It also invests in entertainment technology fields such as computing power, optical display, XR machine, entertainment content, semiconductors and materials, space computing engine, artificial intelligence, new sensors and AIGC game social platform. The company will constantly explore the possibility of combining business and scientific and technological development through the linkage of internal and external resources in the field of science and technology, and steadily promote the high-quality and sustainable development of business.
On the same day, Huayi Bo'ao (Beijing) Quantum Technology Co., Ltd. completed the Pre-A round of financing, with a financing amount of more than 100 million yuan. Among the investors, there was a mutual entertainment venture capital fund.
In the middle of April, Anhui Taiyun, a subsidiary of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, invested in Shanghai Linguniverse Technology Development Co., Ltd., accounting for 3.33%. Before the March 7th mutual entertainment, Wuling Technology behind the Spirit Universe had received 100 million yuan of financing led by Shangtang Technology.
According to the previous disclosure of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, the company's investment in AI has risen to the strategic level, which is the main focus of the company's current investment.
The reason why we pay so much attention to the AI field is that we can also answer investors' responses with 37 Mutual Entertainment:
Focusing on the main business of games, the company has always taken high-quality content as the strategic direction on the basis of self-developed brands, and has long-term in-depth cooperation with excellent game developers through investment layout and other ways to form a rich external R&D reserve and carry out diversified layout on the product supply side.
With the action of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment in the investment field, it can be clearly seen that Sanqi Mutual Entertainment has begun a deep layout for the combination of AI and games at the stage of exploration and wait-and-see in the industry.
March 7th mutual entertainment has also stood at the forefront of the industry.
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For a long time, what focuses on the representative game company in South China, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, is its game buying volume.
In fact, there is nothing wrong with this point. Sanqi Mutual Entertainment can always find the changes of the game industry traffic at the first time, the most typical of which is the embodiment of the play method of buying.
There are two earliest mobile game distribution modes in the game industry, one is intermodal transportation with Android channels such as mobile app store and 360 mobile assistant, and the other is cooperation with Tencent.
However, the rapid rise of short video platforms has given game manufacturers another option, which is to gain customers through buying. This model has become the mainstream of the game industry in recent years, completely replacing channels such as 360 mobile assistant, and has a great impact on the hard core alliance.
In this path, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment is the first company to start to play the buying model, but many people focus on the word "buying", thus ignoring how Sanqi Mutual Entertainment buys.
Looking at a data, the explosive growth of the performance of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment was in 2019, when the mobile game revenue reached 11.989 billion yuan, an increase of 114.78% over the previous year.
As the direct driver behind this, what we can't ignore now is that at the end of 2018, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment launched the "Quantum" and "Tianji" systems, two intelligent platforms specifically launched to optimize the purchase volume.
Among them, "Quantum" is an intelligent delivery platform, which helps greatly improve advertising efficiency; "Tianji" is an intelligent operation analysis platform, which helps to achieve differentiated marketing of thousands of people and faces.
That is to say, as early as the end of 2018, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment has realized the great changes brought by deep intelligence to the game industry.
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It is such a case that comes first, so when AI starts to make great strides, Sanqi Entertainment may be more aware of the opportunities behind it.
The 2023 Unity Gaming Report released by Unity last year disclosed such information. Why does the number of game products that developers can produce increase rather than decrease in the general downturn?
The report points out that in 2022, 62% of independent games and 58% of medium-sized studios will spend less than one year in the process of game project development and release. For small studios, five years of hard work has become a thing of the past.
At the same time, the working hours of independent developers, medium and low studio developers actually decreased by 1.2%. Independent developers no longer develop every project from scratch. Instead, they will turn to third-party resources for rapid prototype design and testing. 62% of independent developers have used 5 to 14 asset packages in the game, and 46% of independent game prototype design stage is less than one month.
Improving productivity through technology improvement and effective use of tools is the real key word of AI and games.
Some time ago, Liu Wanjun, the design director of 37GAMES, an overseas brand of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, shared at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where he mentioned that during the process of making works and publicity maps, the overall visual output time was 8 working days through AI intervention, which was 8 days less than the original process, and the human efficiency was improved by 100%.
In addition, according to his sharing, at present, AI has started to bind with game products in terms of game CG short films, game role generation, game prop design, role action generation, game music, level design, and programming development.
In conclusion, the assistance of AI algorithm can help solve the problems of digital content design and production, further improve the efficiency and quality of game digital content design and production, and the proficiency of AI will become an important indicator of game talents in the future.
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This is only Phase 1.0.
The currently displayed 2.0 stage, no matter NPC's behavior setting or intelligent action application, has begun to show its related functions and functions in game products.
At the 2023T-EDGE Global Innovation Conference at the end of last year, Hilary Mason, the founder and CEO of Hidden Door, shared an interesting point of view in his speech, "The impact of AI generation on creativity. I don't think it raises the upper limit of creativity, but it does raise the bottom line. Playing with AI partners, any content can become a game, and anyone can create a game. The content begins to expand from consuming the same game with others to a community that co creates games. "
If the cost reduction and efficiency increase of production pipeline automation is the standard 1.0 mode, then intelligent NPC provides different senses and game experiences for different players according to the current environment and situational intelligence. In fact, it has touched the core of game AI 2.0, from "doing things with ease" to "how to do better".
While making use of AI tool attributes to reduce costs and increase efficiency, leading enterprises still need to pay attention to the frontier exploration of the combination of creativity and content, study more possibilities of game play unlocking after AI tool upgrading, and reserve and cultivate talents who make good use of tools to produce personalized content.
As stated in the Microsoft announcement, the purpose of improving content productivity is to help creators focus on exploring "more creative ideas". In fact, similar to Mason's upper and lower limit view, the improvement of 1.0 production efficiency is used to improve the lower limit of game development. The improvement of this lower limit standard is just the ticket for the change of game production relations.
From this point of view, the investment and layout of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment in AI technology, as well as the clearly stated direction of combining with the main games, we can see what Sanqi Mutual Entertainment is doing.
Luo Juan, vice president of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment Group, mentioned in a public speech that "AI technology is gradually becoming the key force to promote the innovation of the game industry. Whether in game design, player experience improvement, or in market analysis and operational decision-making, AI application has an infinite prospect."
In the financial report of March 7th Mutual Entertainment in 2023, there also appeared such a sentence: "The company focuses on games and other pan entertainment content, as well as human-computer interaction hard technology track, and continues to pay close attention to hardware and technology development, so as to invest in enabling innovative and sustainable development of business and build new competitive advantages in industry."
The technological innovation faced by the game industry this time is a comprehensive and thorough innovation. Sanqi Mutual Entertainment is opening this new door through external investment and internal practice.
