Is there still hope for the silent Android TV games in this cold wave?

Looking back at the whole year of 2015, the TV game market experienced an "explosion" at the beginning of the year and then a "cold winter" of development bottlenecks at the end of the year. The development prospects of TV games are becoming increasingly slim. Originally, with the lifting of the ban on domestic game consoles in 2014, many entrepreneurs wanted to make achievements in this blue ocean, but after a year of hard work and struggle, they gradually withdrew from this market with sadness and disappointment.

Although the weather has started to warm up, the cold still shrouds the Android TV game industry. Facing the new year, is there still spring for TV games?

Android game consoles still depend on NVIDIA?

As early as last year, with the development of TV games, Android game consoles also emerged. Even NVIDIA itself launched Shield TV to enter the console market. Of course, although Shield TV is based on the Android system, it relies on NVIDIA's technical support, eight-core Tegra X1 core, supplemented by 3GB RAM + 16GB ROM space, and 4K-level high-definition picture quality is also catching up with the next-generation consoles.

As a result, domestic manufacturers followed suit, and many Android game consoles equipped with NVIDIA Tegra series chips continued to emerge. However, the reality is cruel: Android game consoles that focus on "games" are nicknamed "game boxes" by users because they come with video content, and porting mobile games wastes the performance of Tegra chips, and the experience is not satisfactory, which makes domestic Android game consoles a short-lived product.

However, this does not mean that Android consoles have failed in China. Not long ago, NVIDIA's global vice president and general manager of China, Mr. Zhang Jianzhong, posted a Weibo: The Chinese version of Shield has achieved milestone progress and hopes to meet domestic players soon. According to online inquiries, NVIDIA has indeed moved into the Shanghai Free Trade Zone. The company name is "NVIDIA Entertainment Equipment (Shanghai) Co., Ltd." and is engaged in the production and sales of game entertainment equipment and other related businesses.

Regardless of whether NVIDIA's move is really optimistic about the development prospects of the TV game industry, the development of Android game consoles in China is obvious to all, given the failure of Ouya and the bumpy development of many "game boxes". Although it can indeed give players a good experience with the help of the powerful Tegra chip, under the multiple restrictions in China, it is difficult to guarantee that Shield TV will not become a new "game box".

Will the battle axe be the sharp blade that cuts through the thorny road?

At this stage, domestic TV games are still at the stage of porting and research and development of light and medium games. Although high-end smart TVs provide a better experience, they only move mobile games to the TV screen. The user experience is greatly reduced and users cannot be satisfied.

In the field of TV games, PS4 and Xbox One can be said to have occupied the vast majority of the market. Although policies have been relaxed, the entry of next-generation consoles into China is still lukewarm. The reason is that domestic users have a shallow understanding of TV games and do not have a good payment habit. In the short term, it is difficult for game consoles to reach the same level as mobile phones and computers in the minds of users, and ordinary "game boxes" are also difficult to arouse players' desire to buy, which has also kept TV games at a low point.

Under such circumstances, the emergence of the Tomahawk console can be said to be an alternative. Although the actual product has not been seen yet, the game information released one after another shows that the Tomahawk, like traditional consoles, focuses on games. However, the fact that it is based on the Android system still makes people a little worried. After all, whether it is porting or developing large-scale games, it is not an easy task under the Android system.

On the other hand, the pace of life in China is too fast, and people spend less time at home. Most people rely on mobile devices to play games in fragmented time, which has also reduced the usage rate of TV games. Faced with such an unfavorable situation, although the Tomahawk console has reached cooperation with many game manufacturers, it still has a lot of detours to go before changing the Chinese people's perception of TV games.

Could cloud gaming be the future of TV gaming?

After many development directions have been abandoned one by one, the winter of TV games seems to be even colder. For TV games whose hardware technology and game content cannot catch up with traditional consoles, cloud games seem to have become a life-saving straw for TV games.

The so-called cloud gaming is based on cloud computing. All games are run on the server side, and only the rendered game screen is compressed and transmitted to the user through the network. On the client side, the user's gaming device does not need any high-end processor or graphics card, only basic video decompression capabilities are needed.

From this perspective, it seems to be a feasible solution for many smart TVs that have Blu-ray and 4K video decoding and decompression technology. However, cloud technology is still in the development stage. For game manufacturers, cloud technology not only has strict requirements on the network, but also requires a corresponding space to provide players with a gaming environment and data storage. As a result, the server and carrying capacity are also a huge problem.

It has to be said that such a defect is indeed an obstacle for TV games at this stage. After all, the flow of funds between maintaining servers and downloading free games does make many game manufacturers want to quit. However, in the era of smart phones, large-screen TVs still have great development value. Similarly, the development of TV games is still in its infancy, and the cultivation of the market when the winter tide comes requires more patience.

The beginning of spring has long passed and the weather is gradually warming up, but for the video game industry, the cold wave still remains. Whether it can really break the ice and ignite the silent market still requires the joint efforts of all parties.

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.