The announcement that the 2014 WCG World Esports championship will no longer be held left everyone in esports shocked and heartbroken. As the saying goes “When God closes one door, he will open another”, WCG came to an end, ushering in the rise of mobile esports.
2015 is the first year of mobile esports. In this year, the General Administration of Sport of China paid attention to mobile esports and promoted the competition for it, taking the first step of mobile esports. Subsequently, Tencent, Giant, netease and other industry giants have laid out mobile e-sports, further promoting the development of mobile e-sports, mobile e-sports has formed a relatively complete market industry chain so far.
The proportion of mobile e-sports in China’s e-sports market has jumped from 21.7% in 2015 to 53.74% in 2017, successfully overtaking PC e-sports and becoming a significant part of China’s e-sports market. The daily independent audience of the first KPL of King of Glory professional League reached 350 million, while the audience of LEAGUE of Legends S6 was only 390 million. This shows the huge development potential of mobile esports and will definitely become the main force of e-sports in the future.
On May 14, 2018, the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) officially announced that six games were selected for the Asian Games, including three mobile games. The trend of e-sports mobile has been unstoppable.
Four conditions make mobile e-sports a new star in the industry
Data from “China Mobile e-sports Market Research Report” by Airui showed that the size of China mobile e-sports market reached 46.2 billion in 2017, while the size of China mobile e-sports market was only 5.8 billion in 2015. In just two years, China’s mobile esports market has grown by 785.6%. Then what is the reason for the geometric growth of mobile esports?
The rise of competitive mobile gaming. “One cannot make bricks without straw”, the rapid development of mobile esports to today’s scale is inseparable from the rise of competitive mobile phone games, which is also the most fundamental reason for the rise of mobile esports. 2015 saw the emergence of many competitive mobile games, such as Total Gunfight and King of Glory. Among them, Honor of Kings is the main force driving the development of mobile esports.
In 2015, Two months after the public beta of Honor of Kings, Tencent launched TGA Spring 2016, and the game’s search index hit a new high. When the first KPL opened in September of that year, honor of Kings attracted 350 million unique viewers per day. Since then, the phenomenon game “King of Glory” frequently held events, providing enough users and heat for mobile esports, thus promoting the explosive development of mobile esports.
Handset hardware configuration support. Esports took off during the computer hardware explosion, and now mobile esports is taking off during the mobile hardware explosion. The memory of flagship phones has changed from 512M in 2012 to 3G in 2015, the CPU running score has also changed from 20,000 to more than 100,000, and the screen has changed from 3.5 inches to 5 inches. These great advances in hardware provide material guarantee for mobile competitive games.
4G network push. The development of e-sports cannot be separated from the network, just like fish cannot be separated from water. Another important reason for the rise of mobile e-sports is the popularity of 4G network. E-sports requires not only fast network speed, but also small network fluctuation and low latency. Compared with 3G network, 4G network has the characteristics of high speed and low latency, which just meets the requirements of e-sports for network.
Gunfight is the first e-sports game to be launched on the premise of 4G network penetration. Gunfight is an FPS game, and it has extremely strict requirements on the network, because e-campaign players have the same technical level. If the network is delayed, the game will lag, lag and other phenomena, which will seriously affect the game experience. The popularity of 4G network solves the network requirements of competitive games, thus creating conditions for the popularity of mobile e-sports. Events are more in line with the “fast pace” of the current era. In today’s society, the pace of life of people is getting faster and faster. Whether it is work, eating, sleeping or even entertainment, it has entered the “fast pace era”. Mobile esports fits into the “fast-paced era” in two ways.
First, compared with traditional games, mobile games are generally faster and more intense in terms of game duration, which is more in line with the “fast-paced era”. Taking king of Glory professional League KPL and League of English Professional League LPL as an example, a game in KPL usually lasts 20 to 25 minutes including BP, while a game in LPL lasts 40 to 45 minutes. The competition duration is not only a test of the players’ energy and physical strength, but also for the audience. The shorter duration makes it easier for the audience to focus on the competition. In addition, shorter competition times also increase the intensity of the competition, which allows players to make more exciting moves.
Second, it is easier to watch the games. The audience can watch the video anytime and anywhere, regardless of time and space. For the short duration of the game, they can watch the game anytime and anywhere, no matter when they are queuing, taking a bus, waiting for a bus, resting at noon or coming back from work in the evening. Its convenience is more in line with the “fast-paced era”.
The industry’s woes are hard to hide
Mobile esports achieved 46.2 billion yuan in 2017. The development of mobile esports seems to be on the right track, but in fact, there are many risks and problems.
One: the lack of widespread social acceptance. The Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) announced on May 14, 2018 that six games have been selected for the Asian Games, including three mobile video games. While this is a very exciting news for esports people, it also reflects the great prejudice against mobile esports in society.
Many people in society regard e-sports as “playing games in air-conditioned rooms”, a kind of unprofessional practice, and electronic “heroin”. For example, the KPL professional league of King of Glory is popular recently. A large number of Internet users say that the league is just a group of people playing black games in an air-conditioned room. It is a group of teenagers addicted to the Internet who enjoy themselves and has nothing to do with sports.
Second: the industrial chain is not perfect. The maturity of any industry is inseparable from the improvement of the whole industrial chain, so is mobile e-sports. Due to the late start of mobile e-sports, the industrial chain is still not perfect, especially in the physical output and sales of mobile e-sports, there is a phenomenon of “who produces who sells”.
In iresearch e-sports market research report “China mobile” clearly pointed out that China mobile e-sports industry chain is complete, the content of authorization, event participation, event production, content production, content, regulation is more perfect, but in e-sports peripheral products production and sales of electric business platform between fault.
Third: lack of professional talents. The development of mobile esports is inseparable from professional esports talents. However, at present, there is a serious shortage of professional talents in mobile e-sports, and the phenomenon of talent fault gradually appears. There are two main sources of talents at the current stage of mobile esports: first, part of the talents of PC esports are transferred to mobile esports; The second is the mobile terminal game hero into the club mobile e-sports industry. These two types of talents have one thing in common: lack of professional knowledge of mobile e-sports, which is prone to talent fault.
Fourth: the particularity of mobile e-sports crowd. According to analysys data, the majority of mobile e-sports users in China are under 30 years old, accounting for 74 percent. Although the youth of users can bring vitality to esports, it also limits the audience of mobile esports to only the young generation, and fails to let the middle-aged group with greater social influence participate in it, thus greatly affecting the popularity of mobile esports.
To promote the healthy development of mobile e-sports
It is undeniable that mobile esports is the inevitable trend of The Times, and it is only a matter of time before mobile esports become the mainstream of esports. However, we can solve the current problems of mobile esports from four aspects, so that the era of mobile esports will come to you and me faster.
First: standardization, scale. The biggest obstacle to the current development of mobile esports is the lack of recognition from the public. To be widely recognized by the public, the public’s deep-rooted concept of esports can only be changed through the standardization and scale of mobile esports.
At present, mobile e-sports have not been recognized by the public because of their own politics, fragmented, not standardized, large-scale. To achieve the standardization of mobile e-sports, the scale must first improve its corresponding competition rules, welfare treatment and punishment mechanism; Secondly, it is necessary to form a tripartite linkage mechanism of game manufacturers, organizers and media platforms to fully mobilize other broadcasting and publicity channels; Finally, the game manufacturer should support the event organizer technically and maintain the game character balance to be fair.
Second: to establish a complete industrial chain. If mobile esports want to achieve stable and healthy development, it cannot do without the support of a complete industrial chain. In order to establish a complete industrial chain, the following two points should be started: First, focus on improving the e-commerce platform, so that the ancillary products produced by mobile e-sports can be fully used to feed back mobile e-sports; Second, we need to continue to optimize other industrial chain aspects of mobile esports, so that esports users can have a good user experience.
Third: broaden the major of e-sports, cultivate professional talents. Young strong, is strong; With more talent, mobile e-sports will be on the right track. At present, a major problem faced by mobile esports is the shortage of talents, and the emergence of talent fault, to solve the problem of talent shortage, we must start from education.
Until September 2017, national e-sports professional university started to 17, according to each specialty points three small, a small professional 50 people 17 universities nationwide annually produce e-sports talent to a maximum of 2250 people, but, according to a foreign institutional analysis data analysis, China e-sports talents loss up to 260000 people, half of them for mobile e-sports talent, Therefore, more schools should be encouraged to open e-sports major to fill the gap of talent shortage of mobile e-sports.
Fourth: improve themselves, expand the audience of e-sports. The main reason why mobile e-sports limits its development is that it is not perfect and its audience is limited to young groups. To further develop, mobile esports should improve itself, such as launching competitive games suitable for middle-aged and elderly people, launching game programs for middle-aged and elderly people or using the additional output brought by esports to expand the audience of esports.
All in all, mobile esports is no longer the mobile esports that lived in the shadow of PC esports, and has become a significant part of the esports industry. However, although the development of mobile esports is facing many problems, there is still a long way to go to dominate the esports industry, but the mobile esports is bound to be the trend of historical development, mobile esports will be a new opportunity for the development of the esports industry.
Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110