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If we were to select the "most popular exhibition among young people in the world", ChinaJoy, which was just held at the Shanghai New International Expo Center, should be on the list.

On July 26, the China International Digital Interactive Entertainment Expo (hereinafter referred to as "ChinaJoy 2024") kicked off again. Although Bilibili World, which was held not long ago, has demonstrated its strong appeal in ACG culture and even digital aspects, as one of the most influential game exhibitions in the world,ChinaJoy 2024, as always, attracted a large number of manufacturers, players and media.

In fact, probably because he entered from the "professional audience" channel, when he entered the ChinaJoy exhibition hall at around 9 am on the 26th, Xiao Lei saw that the flow of people was not large. But as he continued to go deeper into the venue and more ordinary players poured in, he saw that the crowd of ChinaJoy became more and more turbulent, and when the Snapdragon theme pavilion was approaching the opening ceremony, it was almost impossible to find a place to stay.

Photo/Lei Technology

On the one hand, this shows that ChinaJoy still has a strong appeal to Chinese players in its second year after returning to offline events. One player even told Xiao Lei that he came all the way from Jiangxi and took the high-speed train back home overnight after the opening day. On the other hand, it is also because players generally attach great importance to gaming equipment.

Electronic games are inseparable from terminal devices. Even the product form of terminal devices directly affects the design of games and user groups. For example, there is a big difference between PC games and mobile games. In addition, the performance of the device determines the gaming experience to a large extent. The experience of the same game on different devices is very different.

This is not difficult to understand, as game exhibitions often gather a large number of hardware manufacturers and even herald new changes in the hardware market.

Diversified display devices, seamless gaming experience

There is a saying in the video game industry that "everything can be Doom". In the past decade, players have tried every possible means to make Doom run on all devices with display functions, such as calculators, refrigerators and even pregnancy test sticks.

In addition to the fact that the game "Doom" itself is a legend, "Everything can be Doom" also represents an idea of ​​players to a certain extent: play your favorite games on any display device.

At ChinaJoy 2024, you can see players playing "Sword Star" on the 100-inch Hisense E8N Pro ultra-large screen TV; you can also see players playing "Cyberpunk 2077" on the monitor; you can also see players playing "World of Tarris" with the Realme GT Neo6.

Photo/Lei Technology

In fact, Rokid AR Studio allows you to play a completely different gaming experience from traditional 2D flat games. The XR version of "Honkai Impact 3" is the game with the longest queue in the entire E4 Snapdragon Theme Pavilion, without a doubt.

Playing games on a super-large screen TV like Hisense E8N Pro has a visual effect far superior to other display devices. As we all know, enlarging the picture can bring stronger visual shock on the one hand, but on the other hand it may also magnify some pain points of picture quality.

As the global official partner of Black Myth: Wukong, Hisense E8N Pro not only has a screen size of up to 100 inches, but also as a ULED X high-end TV, it adopts the latest generation of Mini LED display technology, relying on the self-developed "Hisense" AI picture quality chip, the pre-trained large model, the screen and optical full-link technology, and has achieved first-class picture quality. In addition to higher brightness, contrast, and viewing angle, it can better meet the picture quality analysis requirements of games, sports and other scenes, and avoid the appearance of "tailing" phenomenon.

When gaming monitors become an emerging category, high-end TVs themselves becoming gaming monitors has become the trend.

However, for players, there is no absolutely perfect gaming display device. TVs and monitors lack portability, mobile phones and handheld game consoles are portable and easy to operate but have limited screen sizes, and the gaming ecosystem and performance of XR devices are not strong enough. These problems determine that a single display device cannot meet the players' extreme requirements for game graphics. You know, players are the group of users who pursue the ultimate experience the most, so there are countless gaming peripheral brands and products.

At ChinaJoy 2024, players' extreme and diverse pursuit of equipment was fully reflected, and manufacturers actively met their needs and provided them with enough.

Photo/Lei Technology

In the Snapdragon exhibition area, many XR devices were exhibited, including Rokid AR Studio, a representative of lightweight AR glasses, Pico 4, a representative of VR headsets, and Dream MR, which is quite close to or even better than Apple Vision Pro in some aspects of experience. (Editor's note: XR extended reality is a concept that includes AR, VR, and MR.)

Photo/Lei Technology

The equipment on site was more of a "novel" digital device for display, and there were not many games installed, but many players still tried it out themselves, and would occasionally sigh at this new experience. It is particularly worth mentioning that on the first day, in addition to a booth that specifically provided Vision Pro experience, Xiao Lei saw at least three people wearing Vision Pro to visit ChinaJoy. As a 20,000 yuan device, such a "popularity rate" is not easy.

Not only XR devices, the rise of handheld game consoles has also attracted more players to buy and use them. Not only can a large number of handheld game console products be seen in the ChinaJoy exhibition area, but there are also many players playing games with handheld game consoles outside the exhibition area.

Huawei participated in ChinaJoy this year, but it did not launch hardware products(Warm up: Huawei gaming laptop will be released soon, Lei Technology will go to the scene to report, so stay tuned), but focuses on Hongmeng native games (such as NetEase's "Naraka: Bladepoint") and Hongmeng's cross-screen gaming experience.For example, the experience of playing the same game on a regular phone, a folding screen phone, and a TV, or pushing a mobile game to a TV to continue playing. As Lei Technology has previously reported on the Hongmeng OS ecosystem many times: games are one of the most important application tracks for Hongmeng.

Photo/Lei Technology

All of this shows the diversity of players' needs and the diversity of their demands for gaming equipment.

In addition, the trend of "seamless" gaming experience across devices is also very obvious.In the past, the differences between mobile games, PC and console games were quite large, but in recent years,More and more mobile games will launch PC versions, and some are even launched with the goal of cross-platform games from the beginning; more and more PC and console games are also coming to mobile terminals, whether developing dedicated mobile versions or using mobile terminals to significantly improve performance and perform lower-cost platform porting.

Game manufacturers and equipment manufacturers are all keeping up with the times to meet the needs of players.

Mobile games are becoming AAA, and mobile phones are also becoming AAA

In recent years, it is a recognized fact that the graphics performance of mobile games has made great progress. Behind this is game manufacturers represented by MiHoYo, which have brought more 3A-level mobile games (high cost, high investment, and high return) to the forefront, but this also puts a great test on the progress of mobile phones in software and hardware.

At the beginning, Genshin Impact really stumped mobile phone manufacturers and even Qualcomm. In addition to forcing mobile phone manufacturers to improve heat dissipation and performance scheduling, it even promoted the development of mobile phone heat dissipation manufacturers. In the past few years, both chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and mobile phone manufacturers such as Realme and OnePlus have greatly improved the performance and energy efficiency of mobile phones.

Photo/Lei Technology

MiHoYo did not attend this ChinaJoy, but OnePlus brought it to ChinaJoy in another form, and the entire exhibition area was full of MiHoYo elements. One of OnePlus's important promotional points was that the OnePlus Ace 3 Pro achieved 120 frames of gaming performance in "Genshin Impact".

In fact, it’s not just OnePlus. The gaming performance of smartphones in general has improved significantly in the past two years.

Qualcomm has certainly put in a lot of effort. From Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the performance and energy efficiency have been improved beyond expectations. At the same time, it also launched Snapdragon Elite Gaming in the gaming ecosystem, allowing mobile phone manufacturers and mobile game manufacturers to jointly improve the gaming experience of mobile games.

At the same time, we cannot ignore mobile phone manufacturers. Lei Technology has reported almost every new phone launch conference (if any) in recent years. We found that at most mobile phone launch conferences (even iPhone launch conferences), challenging "Genshin Impact" to prove the performance of mobile phones has become a landscape. Among them, Android mobile phone manufacturers now often emphasize "bottom-level" improvements, whether it is improvements at the bottom of the operating system or improvements at the bottom of chip hardware in cooperation with chip manufacturers. These improvements are of great practicality, not only allowing the daily experience of Android phones to be continuously improved, but also making the most performance-intensive gaming experience better.

So last year, "Honkai Impact 3" was still a "performance barrier" for many mobile phones, but today the performance of flagship phones has improved a lot.In addition, more and more 3A-level mobile games have appeared and won the love of many players. All of this is based on the "3A" performance of mobile phones. Game manufacturers are more confident in launching 3A-level games.

On the day before ChinaJoy, Alex Katouzian, general manager of Qualcomm Technologies' mobile, computing and XR business group, also revealed at the Snapdragon Gaming Technology Awards that the Oryon CPU will soon be available on the Snapdragon mobile platform.

Photo/Lei Technology

To put it simply, the next-generation flagship chip Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will use the Oryon CPU.

Digital enthusiasts are no strangers to Oryon CPU. As Qualcomm's self-developed CPU architecture, Oryon's predecessor was actually oriented to servers. When it was first unveiled, its energy efficiency ratio shocked the industry. But later, Qualcomm chose to use Oryon CPU in the latest generation of PC chips - Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus.

Now, Qualcomm is going to use the Oryon CPU architecture in mobile phone chips. It is conceivable that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will bring a big change in performance and energy efficiency to the next generation of flagship phones.

Bilibili poaches employees, ChinaJoy urgently needs to keep up with the times

In the past, when we talked about ChinaJoy, we couldn’t avoid E3. But now, when we talk about ChinaJoy, we can’t avoid Bilibili World.

As we all know, E3 has been suspended indefinitely, but Bilibili World has emerged. With the exhibition period being similar, more and more hardware manufacturers prefer to invest in Bilibili World rather than ChinaJoy.For example, Intel and NVIDIA, which participated in ChinaJoy before the epidemic, have now invested in Bilibili World; ROG only exhibited mobile phones at ChinaJoy this year, but released a number of new e-sports products at Bilibili World.

Not to mention that in addition to hardware and games, manufacturers of cards, figures, anime IPs, etc. also tend to prefer the more "idiotic" Bilibili.

Bilibili is changing the e-sports and gaming industries on its own. More importantly, it has the highest density of young people, which is the group that game industry chain players are committed to capturing. As a result, the users of Bilibili World and ChinaJoy are highly overlapped, and can be roughly classified as ACG enthusiasts, who are generally young and like games and ACG culture.

Photo/Lei Technology

However, unlike Bilibili World, which is backed by the "large social community" of Bilibili, ChinaJoy is a brand and exhibition that has nothing to do with its users. It relies more on its appeal among game manufacturers to attract many game players (offline exhibitions) and then attract related hardware manufacturers. Without the massive media coverage and social sharing of users, ChinaJoy's online influence cannot be compared with Bilibili.

Players have a growing influence on manufacturers. One example is the growing power of "channels" and "products" in the mobile game industry. More and more powerful game manufacturers are beginning to ask mobile channels to take less share.. Precisely because players care more about games they "like" rather than games that are "displayed through channels", for game manufacturers, "making good products" becomes more important than "making good channels".

On the first day of ChinaJoy, Lei Technology heard voices such as "CJ (ChinaJoy) is not as good as BW (Bilibili World)" in several different places. One time, I heard two Shanghai-based ACG enthusiasts talking about it outside the venue. Another time, I saw an article with the theme "ChinaJoy, becoming less and less joyful". In addition, I also heard voices such as "CJ is not joyful" and "not as good as BW" in different groups.

These comments may not be mainstream, but they are real. As game manufacturers, hardware manufacturers, and chip manufacturers continue to innovate, ChinaJoy needs to keep pace with the times.

In the first half of 2024, the technology circle is surging.
Big models are being put into practice at an accelerated pace, with AI applications emerging in an endless stream, including AI mobile phones, AI PCs, AI home appliances, AI search, and AI e-commerce.
Vision Pro is now available in China, setting off a new wave of XR spatial computing;
HarmonyOS NEXT is officially released, and the mobile OS ecosystem has changed;
Automobiles have fully entered the "second half", and intelligence has become a top priority;
Competition in e-commerce is increasingly fierce, with low prices and even lower services;
The wave of going overseas is surging, and Chinese brands are embarking on the journey of globalization;

In the hottest month of July, Lei Technology's mid-year review is launched, summarizing the brands, technologies and products worth recording in the first half of 2024 in the technology industry, recording the past and looking forward to the future. Please pay attention.