Text/Isaac

According to data from the previous industry annual meeting, the total sales revenue of China's game industry will grow by more than 7% in 2024, and the number of players will increase by 0.94%.

Originally, this should be very encouraging news. But judging from the observation of Grape King, there do not seem to be many people who are amazed by this data, and there are fewer people who care about the market than before. Not to mention that in some articles, the game industry has been included in the "Top Ten Difficult Industries of 2024".

At the end of the day, everyone still believes in the current situation, accepts the trend of "stability over change" in the game industry, and understands that unless the next ecological opportunity appears in the industry, it is difficult to make any more amazing changes.

But is there really no sign of such an opportunity? In fact, there are really some changes that have quietly occurred - in the past year, Huawei, a giant that is enough to subvert the game industry, is slowly letting HarmonyOS native games take root in the game industry and grow wildly.

From some of the data and dynamics this year, you can see how exaggerated the speed of their development is:

•In January, the number of HarmonyOS ecosystem devices increased to 800 million, and more than 60 game manufacturers have joined the HarmonyOS ecosystem cooperation.

•In March, more than 100 games have completed the development of HarmonyOS native applications;

•In the first quarter of 2024, Huawei's HarmonyOS market share in China reached 17% (data source: Counterpoint Research), and the number of devices in the entire HarmonyOS ecosystem exceeded 900 million, making it the fastest-growing next-generation smart terminal operating system.

• In June, the HDC2024 was held at Songshan Lake, Dongguan. During the conference, the Game Service Forum announced the upgrade of the Huawei Game Center client, the release of Petal Game Developer Service 2.0, and the upgrade of the Hongfei plan

•In October, HarmonyOS NEXT was officially unveiled at the HarmonyOS Night Native Conference, with more than 1 billion HarmonyOS devices in the HarmonyOS ecosystem, achieving a historic breakthrough.

•In December, more than 200 partners joined HarmonyOS, and more than 1,800 HarmonyOS native games were released. Tencent's "Honor of Kings", "Love of Light and Night", "Call of Duty Mobile" and other well-known games have been launched......

With such scale and development momentum, it is really not too much to say that HarmonyOS native games may be the next eco-level opportunity.

Of course, scale alone isn't enough to disrupt the gaming industry. The greater value of HarmonyOS native games lies in the fact that they can use powerful underlying capabilities to enable a game product to achieve "evolution" in multiple aspects.

01

What abilities,

Can the game evolve in its entirety?

When it comes to upgrading or evolving the quality of your game, you may think that there is only one way to do hard work. However, in a new ecology such as HarmonyOS native games, its main value to the game product itself is to use several aspects of its capabilities to give the game a new look:

First, HarmonyOS's native smoothness can improve the performance and audio-visual experience of mobile games, allowing manufacturers to solve pain points and raise the upper limit in research and development, while also allowing players to play more happily.

As a new system independent of iOS and Android, HarmonyOS brings many new technologies and capabilities to make the game experience to a higher level. For example, the Ark Engine on HarmonyOS NEXT connects the software and hardware core clouds, which can optimize heavy-duty game scenarios in a targeted manner, and integrate physical animations, device-cloud compilation, and GPU Turbo to ensure high energy efficiency and make the gaming experience smoother.

At present, there are many games that have taken this opportunity to solve obvious pain points. For example, the roguelike action game "Cangyi: Chaos Effect", which focuses on refreshing combos, can directly obtain resources from the cloud side after being connected to Huawei's cloud compilation technology, and the startup speed of the game is directly increased by about 52%, which also significantly improves the energy efficiency and temperature control performance of the device, restores the gorgeous action and special effects performances in the game, and brings players a smooth and silky gaming experience.

At the same time, the improvement of graphics rendering has also brought a qualitative leap to the visual performance of the game. Lilith's magical strategy masterpiece "Awakening of Ten Thousand Dragons" uses airspace super-resolution technology to upgrade low-resolution images to higher resolutions, improving the performance of details, and even the details of the leaves of the otherworldly wonder firefly giant trees are clearly visible, and the detailed graphics bring players a more immersive experience. In other operating systems, this can be a quality that is difficult to stumble out in a short period of time.

Some products will say something like: we don't focus on high image quality, can these technologies still help? In fact, HarmonyOS native games not only have universal technology, but also often combine product experience and characteristics to make targeted optimizations.

For example, as a competitive game, stable frame rate is an important experience factor. Therefore, on Hongmeng, it uses the super frame technology of the Ark graphics engine to efficiently insert prediction frames between the game's native real rendering frames for high-target frame rate game scenes with heavy GPU load, realizing the original rendering image quality and improving the temperature control efficiency of mobile phones.

Second, HarmonyOS's native intelligence can combine AI capabilities with some extended services of the game both inside and outside the game, so that players can have a more convenient game experience and play more comfortably, and at the same time, manufacturers can better reach users.

There are many such examples. For example, in games, game products can quickly build video recording, editing, and export capabilities by accessing the Highlight Moments SDK, and support the design of video sharing landing pages. Players can use such a tool to automatically generate highlight moments, which can greatly promote the sharing and dissemination of content and attract new users to the game. We are familiar with "Snake Wars", after accessing this service, it increased the number of sharing times by 10% and the number of sharing users by 17% on Douyin and Kuaishou respectively.

Not only that, based on the characteristics of the HarmonyOS system, online games can also have more innovative gameplay. For example, "touch a touch" - through near-field perception technology, two mobile phones can perceive and connect as long as they are close, and share Taobao links, B station videos, and KEEP team running with each other...... For the game, this function has become a touch to form a team and enter the game, which brings natural convenience to social networking.

Games such as "Decisive Victory", "Tole Chinese Chess", "Best Club" and other games suitable for teammates between friends have already supported the function of touching and teaming up, quickly creating a friendly match room, allowing friends to directly click on the pop-up card to join the room and start the battle, greatly simplifying the process of offline friend battles, improving the interactivity and convenience of the game, and becoming a more popular way for young people to open the black. In the future, Hongmeng may have more innovative gameplay like this.

Third, the multi-terminal interconnection characteristics of HarmonyOS can bring new growth space to the game industry, as well as a breakthrough in the upper limit of innovation. This is even more important - it allows game makers to find new battlefields, but also discovers completely different game scenarios and fun for players.

Why? First of all, HarmonyOS is the first pan-terminal operating system to break through device boundaries and achieve seamless connection across devices. The opening of devices and scenarios will bring many new requirements. Imagine, between multiple devices such as mobile phones, tablets, watches, smart screens, car machines, etc., users can naturally and efficiently choose the most suitable device to play, and can also improve and expand the experience through multi-device collaboration, how many new ways to play?

For example: on the Hongmeng system, "Cangyi: Chaos Effect" has been able to be played on mobile phones at the same time, seamlessly connected to the smart screen, car machine operation. If you switch to the smart screen, the mobile phone becomes a computing center and a touch screen handle; And when it comes to the car machine, the ambient lighting and surround sound on the car turn the car into an e-sports house.

This is only the convenience brought by the seamless flow of the device itself, if the targeted interactive equipment and gameplay, it will be more imaginative. For example, in "Happy Fishing Master", throwing rod fishing is a very key interactive action, compared to throwing the mobile phone itself, through the interaction between the watch and the smart screen, this rod throwing action can achieve an upgrade in experience.

With these capabilities, HarmonyOS native games have the opportunity to be upgraded and evolved in all aspects, and truly lead in all aspects.

02

How difficult is it to adapt to the new ecosystem......

Seeing these abilities, you should be able to feel the potential of HarmonyOS. So the question is: will it be difficult for game manufacturers to develop or adapt to HarmonyOS native games? Will it cost more to get these capabilities than expected?

In fact, on the contrary - in the process of rolling out the ecosystem, HarmonyOS is also paving the way for game manufacturers, HarmonyOS NEXT and developer services are constantly being upgraded, and the convenience services that HarmonyOS brings to game manufacturers are becoming more and more comprehensive. Adapting games to HarmonyOS NEXT is getting easier and easier.

At the main forum of the Game Industry Annual Conference, Zhang Sijian, Vice President of the Global Ecosystem Development and Sales Dept of Huawei Device Cloud, delivered a speech entitled "Technology Empowers Native Games, HarmonyOS Ecosystem Grows New". He said that the comprehensive revamp of HarmonyOSNEXT has greatly improved the development efficiency of the original HarmonyOS games, saving development time by more than 80%. This is an unprecedented opportunity for game developers.

Since its release in 2021, HUAWEI Game Center has been continuously iterating to help game developers solve pain points at all stages of project establishment, development, and operation. In 2024, Petal Developer Service 2.0 will be officially released, and version 2.0 will fully support HarmonyOS NEXT game adaptation, based on native HarmonyOS technology innovation and tool kit, to help developers develop HarmonyOS native games more efficiently.

With these strong technical supports, the development of the original game ecology of HarmonyOS is thriving. As of December 2024, more than 200 partners have joined HarmonyOS, and more than 1,800 HarmonyOS native games have been released.

After all, such a huge opportunity for game companies may be one of the few eco-level opportunities in recent years with a high degree of certainty. In other words, it's probably going to be the next big thing for the gaming industry.

03

The gaming industry is far from reaching its limit

On the basis of this year's growth, the changes that Hongmeng can bring to the game industry have a very clear imagination.

We can calculate an account: in terms of all the current capabilities, it can help game products improve the most intuitive visual performance, optimize performance problems, improve social experience, operational pain points, bring new scenarios, expand new users, and even break through the upper limit of gameplay......

In the context of the general quest for stability, this is already a kind of subversion.

With such changes, we can perhaps say that the gaming industry is far from reaching its limit. As Xiao Jian, Chairman and CEO of CMGE, said at the "Harmony Thousand Sails Launching Ceremony": "This is a controllable and independent innovation operating system full of possibilities in the future. This is the pride of the Chinese people, and it is also the most imaginative and proud thing for us to deal with future international competition. ”

epilogue

Before the article was released, Grape Jun saw in the application trial area of Huawei AppGallery that the official version of "Peace Elite" Hongmeng had been quietly launched. After downloading and playing, I found that the Hongmeng version seamlessly inherits the data of Android, which can be matched with Android and Apple players, and opens up 120Frame ultra-clear image quality.

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