At China's Biggest Gaming Expo in 2016, Games Are No Longer the Main Event

Games haven't been reduced to mere tools yet, but the ambitions of the big companies clearly now stretch as far as the imagination can reach. Games, today, are a capital concept.

"Ten years ago, ChinaJoy was nowhere near this big, and it was almost entirely a games-industry event. But today ChinaJoy draws film and TV companies, literature companies, music, even theme parks," Perfect World president Zhang Yunfan said at an industry forum.

Games — playable demos, to be exact — are in decline. According to the ChinaJoy exhibitor guide, more than 1,000 games were shown at the 2014 expo; this year the number is just over 400. And out of those 400-plus you still have to subtract the familiar old faces: Dragon Nest at Shanda's booth, NetEase's Fantasy Westward Journey series. Across the whole expo there were only about 50 new titles, half of them VR games — most of those not very accomplished, confined to one or two platforms, made to be sampled rather than played.

Apart from the booths of foreign publishers like Blizzard and Sony, you rarely saw a queue at anyone's demo stations. Walk into the booths of the big Chinese game companies and what you mostly found were MMORPGs of every description and mobile games that all looked alike. The longest lines usually ended at a prize draw, a merchandise giveaway, or even a claw machine.

Claw machines were the most conspicuous thing at Alibaba Games, placed right in the middle of the floor space. In January this year, UC Jiuyou, which Alibaba had acquired, was renamed Alibaba Games. This company, which concentrates on distribution channels and publishing, brought to ChinaJoy 18 phones showing 10 games nobody had heard of, such as Bao Bao Tang (《爆爆堂》) and Sing and Dance Troupe (《唱舞团》).

ChinaJoy, the biggest gaming expo in China, now has a new theme: "A New Era for Games, Embracing Pan-Entertainment." Here you could hear no end of industry concepts: film-game crossovers, livestreaming, esports, and the nearly worn-out "pan-entertainment."

In 2011, Tencent group vice president Cheng Wu first put forward the idea of pan-entertainment. Four business groups under Tencent Interactive Entertainment — games, literature, animation and film — were set up one after another, and Tencent thereby built a system in which a single IP runs through different entertainment forms. Led by China's biggest game company, pan-entertainment became an industry consensus, and was then bent into whatever shape each company needed.

When Movies and Games Hype Each Other, It's Called a "Film-Game Crossover"

EntGroup, which got its start counting box-office receipts, set up a dedicated film-and-TV zone at ChinaJoy. Linekong Interactive, which had just founded Linekong Pictures, announced it would turn Monster Hunt into Monster Hunt Go, a game along the lines of Pokémon Go. Perfect World, which owns a film distribution company, announced it would "create worlds with two engines" — film and TV, and games.

Perfect World had just taken the domestic distribution rights to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, one of the most popular shooters in the world, and the sixth International, the most important tournament for Dota 2, which it also distributes, was about to begin (though days earlier it had run into another round of domestic server failures). None of that carried as much weight as the film-game crossover, which Perfect World treats as its strategy for the future. On this company's map, the back-and-forth between the Legend of the Condor Heroes mobile game and a new TV series has already started, and Jade Dynasty (《诛仙》) and The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber (《倚天屠龙记》) — which began as novels and already carry film and TV IP (intellectual property) — are priority products too.

Then there is iQiyi Games. Last year it was still squeezed into Hall E on the east side alongside mid-sized and small companies like Tiancity and Baofeng Mojing; this year it had a booth in Hall N more than twice the size. Hall N, on the north side, is where the big domestic game companies gather: Tencent, NetEase, Shanda. And inside the iQiyi booth, besides games, the TV sets on the walls showed a great deal of television and variety-show content.

"This year we're getting the film-and-game side going, and as it happens Beautiful Rivers and Mountains (《秀丽江山》), The Mystic Nine (《老九门》) and Star Wish (《明星志愿》) are all coming out, and each has a matching game," said Xu Songsong, iQiyi's senior marketing director. The film-game crossover, he said, is a business that pays back quickly and "also makes it easier to pick up players."

In 2015, iQiyi may have produced a landmark by accident: the mobile game named after The Journey of Flower, the drama that aired on its video site, held a high chart position for more than a month over the summer. At this year's ChinaJoy forums, The Journey of Flower was invoked by speaker after speaker as evidence that film-game crossovers work. Few mentioned the plagiarism fight between The Journey of Flower and Taichi Panda. And no one asked whether the market was getting tired of the genre.

Smilegate, the South Korean company that developed CrossFire, also used ChinaJoy to announce a run of spin-offs built on the game. They include a film made with Hollywood, to be shot by Original Film, the company behind xXx and Fast & Furious 6, and two TV dramas made specifically for Chinese viewers with Shanghai Yaoke Culture Media, whose credits include Ice Fantasy, the novel adaptation that had just been a ratings disaster.

"We want to take CrossFire, this Global Online Game, and build it into a Global Entertainment IP," said Zhang Ren'e, Smilegate's legal representative in Korea.

If You Can't Latch On to a Crossover, Try Livestreaming

Zhu Jiayin, founder of the gaming site ChuApp, posted a meter reading to his WeChat Moments: the sound inside the halls was 110 decibels. His caption: "A jet taking off is about 120 to 130 decibels."

The noise came from stage events of every kind. Commentators shouting, dance music thumping to match whatever was happening on stage, and the roar of the crowd all ran together, so that to say anything you had to put your mouth against the other person's ear.

Livestreaming platforms had in fact turned up at ChinaJoy long before. Last year both Douyu TV and Zhanqi TV had booths of their own. But now people walked around everywhere holding phones pointed at their own faces, and the livestreaming booths scattered through the halls told you the same thing: this is the age of livestreaming.

Livestreaming is no longer the preserve of the old game-streaming platforms, and no longer confined to esports titles either. The streamer has become the most important element of a stream. On NetEase's booth, CC Live gave official billing to a taekwondo expert, a well-known cosplayer and a sweet-faced Meipai host. Longzhu TV, at ChinaJoy for the first time, claimed it was building "the best-looking booth": not only hot dance numbers from Korean female streamers and Idol School, the girl group Longzhu put together itself, but Edison Chen, pulled in to sing and catch eyes. This non-game entertainment took up half of Longzhu TV's four days of stage programming.

Panda TV had a bigger draw than Edison Chen. At midday on July 28, the queue at the Panda TV booth wrapped all the way around it; ask why and it turned out founder Wang Sicong had come in person to hand out merchandise to players. Founded last October and at ChinaJoy for the first time, the platform had a sizable patch of Hall N5, and besides assorted esports matches, the Korean girl group EXID came to the booth to perform their pelvic dance.

Huajiao Live, one of the apps that rose with the mobile livestreaming boom, came to ChinaJoy as well. At this year's expo Huajiao sent its female streamers to the floor as the "Huajiao TV press corps," roaming the halls to photograph show girls and cosplay enthusiasts. At Huajiao TV's main booth, one activity had the audience scan a QR code to make a sheet of "frosted glass" on the booth's second level gradually turn clear. When it was fully clear, three show girls dressed as bunny girls, all in black, appeared behind the "glass." Below them, several female streamers danced without stopping in their live rooms.

Those variety-show streams, combined with ChinaJoy's old tradition of show girls, became the best available means of appealing to male hormones.

Can Esports on a Phone Still Be Called Esports?

"The thing that stayed with me most this year is that everybody is doing esports," said Zhan Zaozao at the Blizzard booth.

Zhan Zaozao is brand manager for Overwatch at NetEase's Blizzard cooperation division, and the game in his charge was arguably the most popular demo at the whole of ChinaJoy this year. Most of the people in the lines outside the Blizzard booth — routinely two hours or more — were there to try this new game. On site, 24 computers were laid on for players not yet willing to spend 198 yuan to buy it, either to sample it or to play a 6-on-6 match then and there. One father brought his ten-year-old son along to play with him.

Even that could not match the heat of the esports matches on the Blizzard stage. For an event starting at 1:30, the seats were full by 12:30. Wang Qing, Blizzard's brand PR, said many players didn't leave when the previous match ended — they just sat down and waited for the next one.

The same scene played out on Perfect World's Dota 2 stage and Tencent's League of Legends stage. Since 2014 Tencent's booth has done away with show girls and their stage acts, giving the whole stage over to game competitions.

"After a few years of this we've found that what draws people most is still esports matches," said Tencent's head of brand communications. "Some titles don't have as many spectators — FIFA Online, for instance — but they still have a fixed group of fans."

Esports is warming up fast. Not only do all the big livestreaming platforms run competitions; tournament booths have grown more prominent too. The World Cyber Arena, which last year was crammed into Hall E5 with AcFun, Mtime and the cosplay stage in the China International Comics and Derivative Products Licensing Expo zone, this year had an 800-square-meter stage in the main Hall N3 — the only tournament-themed booth in the N halls. LeEco Games, the money behind the WCA, took the chance to show off LeEco bicycles and televisions on site, to fairly mild interest.

Mobile esports was the hottest topic of 2016.

The exemplary case on the floor was Giant Network's Battle of Balls. A big-fish-eats-little-fish game, it went into testing last June and became one of Giant's most popular titles. Inside Giant's booth almost everyone was playing it; the demo phones were nowhere near enough, so players, most of them young people and children, sat on the floor, resting and playing at the same time.

On Giant's stage, a four-day "Tatan Cup" Battle of Balls tournament was held. Twelve teams and 60 players took part, the contestants swiping away at their phones on stage, steering their own ball to eat the other side's. The matches looked far less thrilling than a traditional esports event, but the crush of spectators proved the game has a world of its own.

Worth noting: although Giant Network calls Battle of Balls an original work from a studio inside the group, both its interface and its play closely resemble the popular game Aagar.io. Yet when Tencent later brought the licensed version, Everyone's Planet (《全民星球》), to China, it was the one denounced in App Store reviews as a knockoff, and it ended up doing poorly.

Giant Network chairman Shi Yuzhu handed over the championship trophy himself, declaring that casual competitive mobile games like Battle of Balls are the trend of the future and adding: "Going forward Giant Network will put everything into building out Battle of Balls tournaments, making them more professional and specialized." In the fourth quarter of this year they will also start a professional league for it.

Asked whether mobile esports betrays what esports was meant to be, Zhang Yijia, marketing director at Tencent Interactive Entertainment, argued that the phone is only a tool.

"In the early days of League of Legends, people asked whether it was esports at all — there was real doubt about it. Everyone felt Dota was esports and StarCraft was definitely esports, but once League of Legends made changes to lower the barrier, was it still esports enough? People were arguing about that five or six years ago, and today the same question, put to mobile, still stirs up plenty of dispute," Zhang Yijia said. "The way we see it, competition is more of a concept... whether a game is played with 10 controllers or on a phone, there's no real difference. Among Honor of Kings players we've seen some who play with four fingers, and some better ones who can play with two, using the two middle fingers to control the action and the others to work the minimap — though not every player can do that."

At this ChinaJoy, Tencent Mobile Games said it would build around competitive "phenomenon games" like Honor of Kings and "draw on the system of traditional sporting events to build a professionalized mobile esports ecosystem."

Also worth noting: the control system in Tencent's Honor of Kings has been accused of copying Fight For Freedom (《自由之战》), a game released ten months earlier. On the first day of ChinaJoy, at the Honor of Kings area of Tencent's booth, the team that made Fight For Freedom raised a banner reading "Domestic games are dead — plagiarism is the killer," and handed out flyers around the venue accusing Tencent of copying.

On Zhihu, game producer Mao Xinliang posted the control-system patent he had applied for, along with details of the game's development. Other respondents pointed out that the patent's claims were drawn too loosely, so that Mao and his team would risk losing if they sued, and some said similar technology had existed well before. The dispiriting part is that under this question, some people's view was: Honor of Kings is well run, so who cares whether it copied — to the victor go the spoils, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Tencent's final official response to the whole affair: no response.