A new wave of mobile e-sports is really here: Will there be new players outside the giants?

The existing barbaric growth opportunities in the game industry have been exhausted, and new technologies and platforms are not yet mature. Delineating user development and increasing user viscosity and duration has become one of the most important topics for all game companies at this stage. Pan-entertainment and e-sports are both paths explored by game companies for this issue. E-sports is relatively more mature, and the attributes of competitive sports and social also make its extendable industrial chain and industry scale larger.

The existing barbaric growth opportunities in the game industry have been exhausted, and new technologies and platforms are not yet mature. Delineating user development and increasing user viscosity and duration has become one of the most important topics for all game companies at this stage. Pan-entertainment and e-sports are both paths explored by game companies for this issue. E-sports is relatively more mature, and the attributes of competitive sports and social also make its extendable industrial chain and industry scale larger.

In the past two or three years, game companies have been exploring the entry of e-sports into the mobile game field, but it was not until 2016 that there were some substantial breakthroughs.

The e-sports achievements of mobile games such as "Glory of the King","Crossing the Fire Line","Battle of the Ball", and "Vanity" have enabled mobile e-sports to be put into practice from concept. The mobile e-sports industry chain composed of event operators, content providers, and live broadcast platforms, e-sports teams, etc., has really started to operate under the drive of the market.

Games of large companies

According to iResearch statistics, the overall number of e-sports users in China will reach 170 million in 2016, an increase of 34.9% from last year. Among them, the main source of growth in e-sports users is mobile e-sports users. It is predicted that the overall scale of e-sports users will reach 280 million in 2018, of which the number of mobile e-sports users will exceed the number of end-game e-sports users.

This is of course a "gold mine". In the initial stage of mobile e-sports, many small and medium-sized companies in the market hope to catch this train. Like the wave of mobile games back then, before the giants set out, they first went to dig for the first pot of gold or took advantage of the east wind to become giants.

But unlike mobile games, mobile e-sports has not seen many new stars so far. It can even be said that up to now, when the market really started to take off, all you can see are big companies and giants, and almost no small and medium-sized companies have successfully boarded this train.

The foundation of mobile e-sports is mobile games. Giants and large companies far exceed small and medium-sized companies in terms of mobile game product reserves and development capabilities. Talent and capital are not something small and medium-sized companies can compete with. What's even more terrible is that "people who are richer and more talented than you are more diligent than you." Unlike the long-term wait-and-see period in the early days of mobile games, in developing mobile e-sports, the speed and intensity of large companies are in the market. They are all in a leading position.

The reason why it is a game for a big company is that most of the games are similar to or even ported to end games in current mobile e-sports games. For example, the gameplay of "Glory of the King" is similar to "League of Legends", while "Crossing the Fire" is an FPS game. In putting many end-games into end-game e-sports, large companies have accumulated enough experience, data and talents. In this dimension of competition, you can imagine the cards in the hands of small and medium-sized companies.

The rise of casual light e-sports

does not mean that Mini games companies have no chance at all. It is precisely because the new mobile e-sports model is still absent, which means that there is still hope for counterattack in the blank space. The rise of leisure light e-sports is a typical case.

Typical representatives are "Ball Battle" and "Snake Battle". In addition, Tencent's "Crazy Snake" is about to join the battle, and other game companies also have related plans, which also indicates that 2017 casual light e-sports will definitely become the new Red Sea.

The "Snake Battle" development company is Wuhan Weipai Network Technology Co., Ltd., which belongs to the Small and Medium Mini games Company. Although "Ball Battle" is produced by Giant, it is completely different from all Giant's previous game products. It was originally released as Superpop&Lollipop studio, and it wasn't even branded as Giant. These two games can be classified as counterattacks by small and medium-sized CPs.

However, popular games are moving towards mobile e-sports. The problem for small and medium-sized Mini games companies is that they are weak in expanding the industrial chain. Both belong to casual light e-sports, and the development speed and intensity of "Snake Battle" are still much slower than "Ball Battle".

Data shows that in January 2016,"Ball Battle" had 5.5 million DAUs (daily active users), and at the end of December, it surpassed "Legend of the Knife Tower" with 3.5 million DAUs. By November, data showed that "Ball Battle" had exceeded 220 million global users, and DAU exceeded 20 million.

This has a lot to do with the strong support of Giant Network after "Ball Battle" was initially explored. Moreover, in September 2016, Alibaba Sports and Giant Network reached a strategic cooperation on mobile e-sports. Alibaba Sports will invest 100 million yuan to jointly move the e-sports ecosystem with "Ball Battle" as the entry point.

At present, Giant Network has created e-sports events for "Ball Battle", including the online open, the "Tatar Cup" elite challenge, professional leagues, global finals, third-party events and college competitions. In January 2017, the Giants will also hold the Global Finals and Year-end Ceremony of the Big Battle.

It can be seen that for small and medium-sized companies, although they can produce hot products, it is too difficult to independently build a mobile e-sports ecosystem. The future direction is likely to be the same as the current state of mobile games. Developers and channel operators are obviously vertical, which may be a cooperative relationship. At present, mobile e-sports is still in its infancy, and everything is in the exploration stage.

Editor: yvette