On April 6th, Xinxin announced that it had completed its acquisition of LeanCloud. The two sides will be jointly responsible for the company's product line for developers. As part of TDS, LeanCloud will continue to provide stable services to both existing and new users.

Earlier on April 1, Bilibili Inc. (hereinafter referred to as "Bilibili Inc.") announced a strategic investment of about HK $960 million in Xinxin Company. After the deal was completed, Bilibili Inc. held a 4.72 per cent stake in Xinxin. In addition to Bilibili Inc., BABA will also subscribe for 3.658 million shares through Taobao China Holdings Co., Ltd., and is expected to hold a 0.76 per cent stake upon completion of the deal.

Behind the successive entry of Bilibili Inc. and BABA and the acquisition of cloud service provider LeanCloud by Xinxin Company, on the one hand, Bilibili Inc. and BABA have made contributions to their own content. On the other hand, after the game company's battle for the R & D side began, the claim to the channel business also slowly began.

In the past two years, Xinxin Network was once known as "China Nintendo". With its own R & D and distribution capabilities, and games carried by a large number of small and medium-sized manufacturers and independent game developers through its core mobile games community platform taptap, it can be said that Xinxin has formed a complete game ecology through self-research and TapTap.

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand, Bilibili Inc. BABA and other capital attention to the heart, and the heart of their own acquisition of LeanCloud on the upgrading of TapTap service capabilities.

On the day when Bilibili Inc. bought a stake, the stock price of Xinxing company was very good. As of April 1, Bilibili Inc. 's Hong Kong shares closed at HK $870, up 5.07%, while heart beat's shares soared more than 22%. In the pattern that the head game manufacturers are seizing developers and filling their own R & D capabilities, can the heartbeat network carrying a large number of small and medium-sized game distribution platforms find their own way?

"killing madness" of the two-dimensional, cloud games, B station heart content channel marriage?

After the release of the annual report in March this year, Xinxin Network Huang Yimeng mentioned the cloud game layout of TapTap. He said that through the understanding of the current situation of the industry and the pain points of users on TapTap, "We think that cloud games are still in a very early stage, because all cloud games just run ordinary Android games on top of the cloud, most of their functions are very rough, and the real advantages of cloud games have not yet been realized. We won't do the underlying cloud game infrastructure-there are too many companies that want to do it. But from the developer's point of view, we will help them save access and compatibility costs, so that the game on the cloud platform to achieve better results. "

Obviously, the acquisition of LeanCloud, can directly for the heart in the service content creator level, to provide more in-depth capabilities. As an one-stop back-end service for application development released by AVOS China team in September 2013, LeanCloud can provide developers with services such as data storage, real-time messaging, message push and statistical analysis. It is worth mentioning that game customers accounted for more than half of LeanCloud's revenue in 2020, according to the official website.

In addition to deepening the platform's ability to serve content developers, the self-research ability of the heart is also increasing investment, even resulting in a decline in the company's profits in the same period. According to the Xinxin announcement, Xinxin's spending on R & D also increased to 220 million yuan from 130 million yuan in the same period in 2019, an increase of 68.2% compared with the same period last year-which is one of the reasons for the decline in their profits in the same period.

It can be seen that last year, the five games that contributed the most revenue from online games were "Wonderland Legend M", "endless Urala", "sausage party", "Blue Yan Qing Dream" and "tomorrow's Ark", which can be said to have been for some years. According to the game conference held by Bilibili Inc. in 2020, it announced the release of 11 blockbuster games, most of which are secondary products.

In fact, Quan Yuan has become a "crazy" track in the past two years. "Onmyoji", "Breakdown 3", "Blue Route" and "FGO" seem to have become a front wave. The new generation of second-generation mobile games represented by "the original God", "tomorrow's Ark" and "Raima Niang" not only play culture, but also spell skills. For example, since September last year, the two-dimensional mobile game "original God" self-positioning is a "service-oriented" mobile game. It costs $100 million to go online, and it costs $200 million a year to maintain it.

According to the entertainment unicorn Tencent participated in more than 30 game-related investments in the first quarter of 2021, it is not difficult to see that more than 1/3 were invested in QR-related R & D companies. In addition to Tencent, large manufacturers such as NetEase, Inc are also constantly expanding the layout of second-dimensional mobile games products. And as a two-dimensional gathering place, head game release platform Bilibili Inc., this time with the heart can be said to be a content marriage.

Not only the head factory, the firepower of the two-dimensional group has spread to various platforms. According to the data given by the China Game Industry report 2020, the actual sales revenue of China's game market was 278.687 billion yuan in 2020, and "cartoon animation style" accounted for 65% of the top 100 mobile game products by revenue. And brought 47.18% of the income.

And Bilibili Inc. also continues to work hard in the field of games. According to statistics, Bilibili Inc. has invested in nearly 21 game companies since 2013, covering the whole industry upstream and downstream. Among them are game research and development companies, production companies, service companies, distribution companies and so on. According to Bilibili Inc. 's financial report for the fourth quarter of 2020, Bilibili Inc. contributed 1.13 billion yuan in revenue and maintained a year-on-year growth rate of about 30%. Therefore, some voices in the industry believe that subscribing for heartbeat network is a portrayal of Bilibili Inc. facing the reality.

In this context, the multiplier effect caused by the fit of content attributes is also part of the reason why Bilibili Inc. chose to invest, but compared with the attractiveness of TapTap, the largest mobile game community in China, it is obviously far from enough.

Non-intermodal transport, zero points, 25.7 million monthly active users of TapTap become Bilibili Inc. 's new "city wall"?

Let's first take a look at the "hot" TapTap results. The results of the exciting results in 2020 are not satisfactory. TapTap's advertising revenue growth slowed to 12.2% from 50% in 2019, and the advertising value of monthly active users has declined.

Even so, TapTap still attracts capital coming in. Before Bilibili Inc. and BABA bought shares, including byte beat, Miha you, Lilis and paper folding, NetEase, Inc, Gibbit, Flying Fish, Panax Notoginseng, Rangers, IGG and other manufacturers have successively invested in Xinxin or TapTap.

On the one hand, TapTap has a strong community culture, and the industry places high hopes on it as "the Douban of the game world". It has become a pan-game platform that integrates watching game content, playing games and socializing. In 2020, the average monthly MAU size of the TapTap platform reached 25.7 million, an increase of 43.7% over the same period last year, while the average monthly active users overseas was 4.81 million, an increase of 330.9% over the same period last year. The number of new posts was 5.8 million, an increase of 64 per cent over the same period last year. It can be seen that Xinxin's planning for TapTap is the same as that of the industry, and the number of monthly active users of the platform is still on the rise, which is expected to become the entrance of users' pan-game behavior.

This coincides with Bilibili Inc. 's platform attribute. Bilibili Inc. is open and inclusive in the cooperation mode of the game business. Joint distribution, agency distribution, cooperative R & D and investment projects, and the diversity of cooperation models have also made Bilibili Inc. the main release battlefield of two-dimensional head games, such as the agent identity of "FGO" and the Android intermodal transportation platform of "original God".

On the other hand, the problem of benefit distribution between developers and channel operators has accumulated for a long time and intensified last year. Last year, Yuanshen and other Mesozoic mobile games IP jointly launched a protest against channel vendors, announcing the abandonment of app stores for mainstream Android phones such as Huawei, XIAOMI, OPPO and vivo.

The recommendation mechanism of TapTap platform is in line with the demands of small and medium-sized content manufacturers. In order to encourage developers of all kinds of small and medium-sized games, TapTap has a recommendation similar to that of App Store editors, which is completely recommended by editors according to the content of game game. because of this, even a small game, as long as it has bright spots, can be recommended by the platform, experienced by players, and has a very meticulous operation.

In terms of heartbeat, it has also said that it plans to focus on the operation and research and development of the TapTap community, complete the integration of community dynamics and game forums, improve community content recommendation algorithms and increase community popularity ranking and other functions.

"the original God" and "the Awakening of all Nations" finally achieved a successful way of bypassing the channel distribution, and also gave practitioners a new channel distribution option. TapTap's "zero share" model, which is different from the traditional channel sharing model, has also made the popular mobile games of the Mesozoic era, such as "original God" and "Universal Awakening", launched one after another on the TapTap platform, greatly promoting TapTap to become a vertical channel independent of the traditional Android mobile app store channel.

According to Analysys "2020 China Mobile Limited Game Market Annual Analysis": in terms of the growth trend of the channel industry, compared with stable hardware channels (hard core alliance, official application market of mobile phone manufacturers) and tripartite channels with lower month-on-month growth rate (YingYongBao, pea pod, etc.), the growth trend of vertical channels (TapTap, Nine Tour, etc.) is obviously better than that of other channel industries. It can be seen that the vertical channel represented by TapTap is obviously fertile ground for the Mesozoic companies with popular game products.

On the other hand, Bilibili Inc., the agent distribution and development platform in his game section are not only the two major events of the platform, but also the barriers set up by the platform. At the agency distribution level, Bilibili Inc. 's competitors are Tencent, NetEase, Inc and major game companies such as "Shanghai four Little Dragons" (Miha you, Lilith, Eagle Corner, Paper folding). At the development level, the TapTap platform is actually a competitor to Bilibili Inc..

This "inclusion" heart, no matter from the perspective of product research and development or channel distribution, for Bilibili Inc., it is a two-way expansion based on platform content construction and distribution site. As for Xin, what we can wait and see is that in the ever-changing situation in which game manufacturers are seizing developers and filling their own R & D capabilities, how will the "China Nintendo" heartbeat network use TapTap to kill the bleeding road?