Why is the gaming market segment always the life-saving straw for hardware manufacturers?

Starting from the first half of this year, China's mobile phone market has experienced its first decline in mobile phone sales in 20 years, and this decline has lasted for 7 months.

Why is the sales volume of the ever-popular mobile phone market declining? The reason is not difficult to understand. Judging from the current mobile phone products on the market, homogeneity has become more and more serious. There are thousands of phones that look the same, and there are fewer personalized products with characteristics and selling points, which makes consumers less and less interested in different brands.

In addition, new functions of mobile phone products are becoming less and less. Although there have been many new mobile phone products launched in 2017, there are few products with new functions. Apart from hardware and performance, these new mobile phones have almost no major updates compared with the products in consumers' hands, which also makes consumers lose their enthusiasm for buying mobile phones. The most typical example is that after Apple launched the new iPhone 8, the iPhone 7 sold better.

Therefore, in the face of such a downturn, hardware manufacturers need to come up with some new selling points to stimulate consumers and ignite their enthusiasm for changing phones. In this regard, mobile phone manufacturers have a very good precedent in front of them, that is, PC manufacturers.

Since 2011, global PC sales have been declining for six consecutive years, and consumers' demand for purchasing and replacing computers has also been declining. However, as a sub-segment of the computer market, gaming PCs have been bucking the trend and outperforming the overall market in the sluggish PC market.

The huge PC player community and the growing popularity of e-sports have brought new business growth points to PC manufacturers in the gaming segment. While facing a similar downward trend, gaming, a segment that has already achieved impressive results in the PC market, has also become a lifeline for mobile phone manufacturers.

According to iMedia Research data, the number of Chinese mobile eSports users reached 154 million in 2016, a 75.0% increase over 2015. This number is expected to reach 225 million in 2017.

It is obvious that the number of mobile game players far exceeds that of PC game players. If mobile phone manufacturers can be the first to seize this huge group, then as long as they can spend a little more time on products and selling points, they can bring in excess returns.

Games have always had extremely high requirements for hardware performance, so the price of gaming PCs has always remained high. However, in order to play games, players are willing to spend this money, because they absolutely cannot accept the lag in the game.

This also applies to mobile game players. As mobile games continue to innovate, the performance requirements of mobile phones are getting higher and higher. The 2-3 GB size of mobile game installation packages poses a great challenge to the memory of mobile phones, and the processing and rendering capabilities of CPU and GPU have also become hard parameters.

Last week, JD.com teamed up with many mobile phone manufacturers to launch a set of gaming phone standards, which set strict requirements for gaming phones in terms of hardware configuration. Judging from the standards themselves, there are not many mobile phone products on the market that can meet the standards.

Therefore, it is conceivable that in the future, the mobile phone market will usher in a large number of gaming mobile phone products that meet this standard, which will boost the enthusiasm of the huge group of mobile game players to change their phones and bring new growth points to the mobile phone market.

In fact, this is not the first time that the mobile phone market has launched gaming products. As early as the era of feature phones, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung, etc. have launched professional gaming phones, and the series of gaming phones launched by Nokia have also brought great success and become classics of the era.

In summary, the main reason why hardware manufacturers love games is the rigid demand of the market. As an important carrier of mobile gaming entertainment, the gaming performance of mobile phones will be increasingly valued by consumers. After the industry shows a downward trend, relying on the huge potential of the market segment to reverse the situation is also the wisest approach.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.