Douyu and Huya product analysis report!

After several rounds of reshuffles, the game live streaming market has formed a duopoly of Douyu and Huya . So what are the characteristics of the game live streaming track, and what are the similarities and differences between Douyu and Huya? This article analyzes the obvious differences between Douyu and Huya based on their data, then analyzes the industry characteristics of game live streaming and proposes the core differences between Douyu and Huya - Douyu is lively, Huya is efficient. And explore the different logics of Douyu and Huya through product comparative analysis.

When it comes to game live streaming, many people probably think of the two major live streaming platforms, Douyu and Huya. In April 2018, Huya went public on the New York Stock Exchange and became the first game live streaming stock. In July 2019, Douyu also successfully went public in the United States. After experiencing the chaos of the Thousand Broadcasting Wars, the gaming market gradually reshuffled and formed a duopoly.

They are both in the same game live streaming track, were both founded on the eve of the live streaming explosion in 2014, have experienced the regulatory wave, major industry events such as the Thousands of Live Streaming Wars, and even recently have the same major shareholder, Tencent. Betta fish and tiger teeth seem to look very similar. But if we analyze in depth, there are still differences between the two giants of game live streaming. To sum it up, Douyu is lively and Huya is efficient.

1. Product differences from the data

Douyu and Huya are both U.S.-listed companies. The time for them to disclose their financial statements is roughly similar, so comparisons are always inevitable after the release. Judging from the data disclosed several times, Douyu is better at attracting popularity, while Huya is better at attracting revenue.

Judging from the two most intuitive data, monthly active users and revenue, Douyu continues to lead in monthly active users, while Huya has always maintained an advantage in revenue. However, both sides cannot relax their vigilance on their own advantages. The monthly active users and revenue data in the Q1 financial report are the closest between the two. In Q1 2020, both parties' advantageous subjects showed negative growth - Douyu explained the abnormal decline in DAU as people were unable to go to Internet cafes to watch live broadcasts during the epidemic, and Huya's revenue also declined slightly after a sharp rise at the end of 2019.

Judging from the data from Q1, the monthly active users of Douyu and Huya are gradually approaching each other in terms of revenue. However, when looking at the user data, the difference between Douyu and Huya is even more obvious.

Douyu is good at attracting more users to watch and pay . Its 4% paid user ratio is slightly higher than Huya's 3%-4%. Its total monthly active users are also better than Huya's. For four consecutive quarters, its number of paid users has been more than one million ahead of Huya.

Huya is better at getting users to spend more money , and with its impressive ARPPU, it has surpassed Douyu in total revenue. Huya's ARPPU has remained high and grown rapidly, even reaching a high of 460 yuan in Q4 2019, 1.8 times that of Douyu in the same period.

Both sides have their own advantages, and have recently put a lot of effort into their relatively disadvantaged areas.

Douyu planned 2019 as the "Year of Monetization" and made every effort to reduce costs and increase efficiency. In the first quarter of 2019, Douyu finally declared profitability after burning money for several years. In 2018, Douyu's full-year gross profit margin was only 4.2%, which was only about a quarter of Huya's gross profit margin in the same period (15.7%). It took a year for Douyu's gross profit margin in Q4 to rise to 18.2%, only 0.7% away from Huya. Huya focuses on user growth, spending 400 million on marketing in 2019, and its total monthly active users increased by nearly 30 million in one year (20Q1 compared to 19Q1).

Judging from the data in the financial report, the images of the two giants in game live streaming have been roughly portrayed - Douyu is lively: there are many people, and many paying users. Huya makes money more efficiently: high profit margins, users are willing to spend more money on Huya. This difference in the financial reports is also reflected in the history, logic and design of the two products.

2. Product logic analysis

2.1 Analysis of the characteristics of game live streaming

The logic of game live streaming is similar to that of show live streaming, both of which are content consumption products that harvest user time. Users watch the host's live broadcast and pay, and the platform guides the connection between users and the host and shares the profits with the host. However, in terms of performance, game live streaming has many unique features.

(1) The willingness to pay for game live streaming is low, and its ability to attract revenue is far weaker than that of show live streaming

As mentioned in the previous live broadcast analysis article, users generally have two motivations for paying: one is to agree with the host's content and express affirmation; the other is to show off themselves, strive to interact with the host, and express the self-satisfaction of the privileges of aristocratic players. The latter is the reward motivation for the vast majority of high-paying users, and more revenue for live streaming platforms comes from self-display motivation. However, game live streaming is difficult to meet this demand.

Giving gifts during a live show can easily trigger interaction between the rewarders, the anchor and other viewers, enriching the live broadcast content. The absolute core of game live streaming is the game content. The host and the audience focus more on the game content and pay more attention to the host's operations and analysis.

Relatively speaking, users pay less attention to gifts from other users, are not interested in the display of gift messages, and even feel that frequent gift messages and displays of noble levels disturb their viewing of live broadcasts. The anchor's main focus is on the game and he is unable to interact with the gift givers. Most of the time he just reads the gift giver's nickname to express his gratitude.

At the same time, the audience of game live streaming is difficult to support a high average order value. Unlike YY, which has many wealthy people who like to spend money lavishly, the main audience of game live streaming is young game players aged 18-24. There are fewer wealthy users and the overall economic level is not high.

Due to the dual influence of content and users, the revenue capacity of game live streaming is far weaker than that of show business. Even Huya, which has the strongest ability to make money in game live streaming, has an ARPPU that is only half of that of YY, the originator of show business (YY's ARPPU exceeds 700 yuan).

(2) Users have a strong desire to express themselves through interaction. The platform is very popular and it is easy to create stars and memes that break the circle

The main audience of game live streaming is mostly young game players, who are the most expressive group on the Internet. Games can stimulate a lot of discussion. On the one hand, many users discuss game strategies and tactics in the live broadcast room of the game. On the other hand, the gaming behavior of the anchor can trigger a lot of comments. "666" and "What a great show" when performing brilliantly, and "Enjoy the meal", "Don't send me off", and "Plant rice in my mouth" when performing poorly can all instantly cause the screen to be flooded with comments.

In addition to discussions about the game content, there will also be a lot of discussions about the host's performance and behavior. To become popular on a live broadcast platform, superb gaming skills are one aspect, but being interesting, chatty and humorous is also very important.

The host's classic events or catchphrases can easily attract attention and become secondary creation memes and buzzwords. For example, Lu Benwei's 17 cards being killed in seconds in the early years, PDD's reverse smoking and "I'm cracking open", and Eggplant's "wdnmd" have all become famous memes circulating on the Internet.

Take "PDD smoking backwards" as an example. The origin of the incident was that the former professional player and anchor PDD was smoking and holding the cigarette upside down while chatting with people in the live broadcast room. The live broadcast scene was indeed hilarious. Later, the ghost video made by the B station up master Qi Xiaodian "I am the most naughty pig in the whole League of Legends" made a secondary creation of this, making this meme really popular. The ghost video released by Qi Xiaodian in May 2016 has been played nearly 30 million times so far, and was among the top ten videos in terms of playback volume on B station for a period of time.

In general, game live streaming does not generate enough revenue because its users tend to be younger and the content requires more focused viewing, resulting in active interactions but insufficient revenue . With an understanding of the characteristics of the industry, let's look at the differences between Douyu and Huya.

2.2 Douyu is lively and good at attracting a lot of users' attention and promoting activity

Douyu was derived from the two-dimensional website A站, and became an independent operation in January 2014. From the very beginning, Douyu has demonstrated an operating style of spending lavishly and attracting a lot of attention. In March 2014, Douyu launched the "Road to King" campaign. As long as you change your nickname to start with Douyu TV, play 70% of the effective qualifying games in Douyu Live and finally obtain the title of "King" in the LOL national server, you can get a reward of a minimum of RMB 10,000 and a maximum of RMB 200,000, which has brought a huge promotion effect to Douyu.

At the end of the same year, Douyu spent tens of millions of dollars to sign former professional player Ruofeng and commentator Xiaozhi, starting a war to spend money to recruit talent in the game live streaming industry.

From the beginning, Douyu has been accustomed to being in the spotlight and being the center of attention . Sponsoring e-sports, cross-border cooperation, signing big-name anchors, and frequent high-profile actions, spending money without hesitation, the platform is also star-studded, and has gathered a large number of super popular anchors. When Douyu was at its peak in 2017, famous anchors such as Lu Benwei, Feng Timo, Zhang Daxian, A Leng and others all appeared on the same stage, and Douyu also ushered in the most popular stage.

Douyu has a large number of top star anchors, so naturally it has to play the live streaming card around the top anchors. Therefore, in Douyu's operating system, top anchors and the attention they attract occupy an important position . Douyu's special feature "Yu Bar" can be understood as a fan forum for big anchors. Every Douyu event will attract a large number of fans to like and send gifts. The goal of high monthly activity and high payment rate can be achieved just through the anchor's appeal and popularity - liveliness is Douyu's top priority.

After 2018, top Douyu anchors such as Lu Benwei stopped broadcasting one after another, and Zhang Daxian, Feng Timo and others also left Douyu one after another. At the same time, Douyu’s first attempt to go public failed, reminding Douyu that it can no longer burn money and cannot rely too much on top anchors. Douyu, which was enlightened, began to reduce costs and increase efficiency, stopped chasing top anchors, gave up renewing the contract with Feng Timo, and focused on cultivating an ecosystem of mid- and lower-level anchors.

But despite this, "liveliness" has long become Douyu's DNA and a major pillar supporting Douyu's popularity. Sorting out Douyu’s major updates since 2019, there are quite a few “fun”, “new ways to play” and “new activities”. Douyu is still working hard to mobilize users’ enthusiasm for participating in activities and interactions.

2.3 Huya is efficient: focusing on content and user payments

Huya is a project incubated by YY and was established in 2014. At that time, Douyu was poaching YY anchors at high prices, so YY established Huya to fight back. Huya and YY are closely connected. Huya only officially became independent in 2016, and its controlling shareholder was changed from YY to Tencent in April 2020. Therefore, Huya's products and operating style are very similar to those of YY (for an analysis of YY, please refer to the previous article "Why is YY still making money when the show is receding?")

Huya places more emphasis on high-quality content , purchasing a large number of domestic and overseas e-sports competition copyrights, and organizing its own events such as the YSL League, which greatly enriches the platform content. Unlike Douyu, which spends huge amounts of money to buy top anchors, Huya, while investing in top anchors, also puts a lot of energy into the middle and lower anchors on the platform to build a live broadcast ecosystem.

Huya, which has learned the essence of YY in terms of making money and spending money, appears to be more experienced . It has effective cost control, has gradually reduced the proportion of cost to revenue, and has restrained its marketing expenses. Before 2018, its marketing expenses were less than a quarter of the total. It is rare for it to spend money lavishly like Douyu. In addition, it has adopted YY's mature guild model in the management of anchors, and the anchors are managed by the guild, which greatly reduces the platform's operational management pressure. When it comes to making money, Huya is unambiguous. It has always attached great importance to revenue and has various means of making money. Through various product designs and activities, it attracts users to make long-term and high-frequency paid rewards. The ARPPU is more than 100 yuan higher than Douyu all year round.

Huya's high revenue efficiency is based on rich content and excellent user experience . After sorting out Huya's important product iterations since 2019, it can be found that Huya's iteration frequency is relatively low, the update intensity is relatively small, and the iteration is also centered around content and experience optimization - the content update frequency is almost synchronized with major e-sports events (LPL, KPL), and each iteration of the experience has small-scale optimizations.

3. Product Comparison Analysis

3.1 Product overall design comparison

The overall product design of Douyu and Huya is as follows:

Betta:

Tiger Teeth:

Similarities Analysis

(1) Entertainment and companionship functions

The overall product design differences between Huya and Douyu are greater than the similarities, but there is one obvious similarity: both sides place entertainment and companionship functions in a relatively prominent position.

Douyu and Huya both put the entertainment section in the second channel after the homepage, giving important display position to entertainment live broadcasts. In addition, entertainment content is also recommended in recommended places such as the homepage and discovery. Among the eight live broadcasts that you may like in the drop-down list on Douyu’s homepage recommendations, more than three are entertainment content. Among the six live broadcasts recommended on the opening screen of Huya, more than half are entertainment content.

The companion play function is a function recently developed by game live streaming platforms. Huya’s companion play function was launched in May 2019, and Douyu’s companion play function was launched in September 2019 (in terms of finding ways to make money, Huya is ahead of Douyu).

Douyu and Huya both attach great importance to the companion play function. Both parties have inserted the companion play function into the discovery and follow functions, and displayed the companion play orders on the personal interface. The screening function for accompanying play orders is even more sophisticated. Moreover, at present, Douyu and Huya have gradually seen major game anchors going to the play companion area to find people to play with them during live broadcasts, further increasing the exposure of the play companion function.

The author believes that entertainment and companionship functions will continue to be the focus of Douyu and Huya in the future, and the core purpose is to increase and diversify revenue.

As mentioned earlier, a major drawback of game live streaming is the low average customer spending, which averages around 100 yuan, resulting in low platform revenue. As various video players such as Kuaishou and Douyin have entered the game live streaming market in a high-profile manner, Douyu and Huya are in urgent need of improving their payment capabilities to stabilize their key user base, while also using better revenue data to attract capital in the capital market. The average customer unit price for entertainment live streaming is around 1,000 yuan, almost ten times that of game live streaming. Therefore, focusing on game shows has become a must.

On the other hand, live streaming accounts for more than 90% of Douyu and Huya’s revenue, and the revenue is single. When faced with an overall impact on the industry, the risk resistance is low and it is often criticized by investors. Both parties are exploring new revenue channels, and the companion game function is one of them.

(2) Short video function

Since 2018, with the rise of TikTok, short videos have begun to take up all user time. Under the impact of short videos, the model problems of show live streaming have been fully exposed (see "Show live streaming is facing difficulties, can Momo-ization save the traffic crisis?"), and both the number of users and revenue have experienced a serious decline.

Currently, game live streaming has temporarily alleviated the impact of short videos and maintained its growth by relying on rich game content and real-time interactive mechanisms to cater to the needs of game players. However, the convenient and fast consumption method of short videos and the higher-density content carrying efficiency still pose a great threat to game live streaming. Game live streaming needs to develop and utilize short videos to enrich platform content, guide users to discover anchors, and thus increase user usage time.

Douyu and Huya have both added short video functions, and divided short videos into two modules. On the one hand, they provide video updates of the hosts (Douyu’s Follow-Video, Huya’s Follow-Updates) to increase the hosts’ content display space and strengthen the connection between users and the hosts they follow. On the other hand, it recommends short videos of other anchors on the platform to users, thereby enriching users' content consumption and attracting users to pay attention to the anchors.

At present, a large proportion of the recommended short video content is entertainment anchor videos, and Douyu and Huya are also using this method to divert traffic to entertainment functions.

Douyu has made greater efforts in investing in short videos. Its short video recommendations are directly introduced into the vertical screen information flow mode of TikTok. This aspect will be analyzed in detail in the next part of the difference analysis.

Difference analysis:

There are many differences in the product designs of Douyu and Huya. Next, we will select some of the more distinctive product differences for analysis.

(1) Betta

Playlist function:

Douyu’s follow function allows you to not only follow the anchor, but also follow multiple anchors at once through the playlist function, which is the playlist function. The playlist function was launched in July 2019. It is similar to the playlist function of NetEase Cloud Music. The playlist gathers similar anchors. Users can create their own playlists or collect (follow) playlists created by other users.

The playlist function is a content distribution function that also recommends similar content, but the recommender is replaced by the user instead of the algorithm. The function of the playlist is to quickly increase the number of anchors that users follow, saving users the time of opening live broadcast rooms one by one to find the anchors they are interested in, and replacing it with "one-click follow".

However, judging from the browsing and collection (follow) data of the playlist, the activity of the playlist function is not very high. The most popular playlist found so far is "Douyu's top Garen anchor", with a total of 260,000 views and 12,000 total favorites. Another popular playlist discovered, "Very Interesting Anchors", has a total of 84,000 views and 82,000 collections. Many recommended playlists on the popular page have only a few hundred or a few thousand collections. Considering that Douyu has 150 million monthly active users, this number is not outstanding.

The author analyzed that the reason why the playlist is not very active is, on the one hand, because the promotion of this function on the site is limited, and on the other hand, there is a certain conflict between the rapid attention of the playlist and the viewing characteristics of game live broadcasts . In terms of the promotion of the former, the playlist function itself has not been updated since it was launched in July, and the promotion efforts given to the opening page, banner, tasks and other on-site resources are also very limited.

On the other hand, the target range of game live streaming users may be very narrow. Some users only watch League of Legends, while others only watch jungle position anchors of Honor of Kings. However, a playlist often includes more than 20 hosts covering multiple zones, and the recommended content is not precise enough. The content consumption model of live streaming is relatively heavy, and the time cost for users to watch live streaming is high. It is a very costly process to unfollow the hosts after finding that the hosts in the playlist do not suit their taste. If Douyu wants to make the playlist function better, it needs to put more effort into this function itself. It can officially release more accurate playlists, or add playlists to recommend new users to follow.

Fish Bar Features:

Yuba is a special section of Douyu and was launched as early as 2016. Douyu has a special entrance for the fish bar below the homepage. Yuba is similar to Baidu Tieba and includes interest Yuba and anchor Yuba. Anchor Yuba is a Tieba built around big anchors. Users who follow the anchors discuss in Yuba. The discussion content is not limited to anchors and live broadcasts. Many users will talk about game strategies and even life in Yuba.

The Fish Bar function can be said to be the best embodiment of Douyu's "lively" feature . Through the Fish Bar, more content of the anchor can be displayed (whether it is the anchor himself participating in the discussion or the anchor's videos posted by other viewers), and more connections are established between the audience and the anchor, and between the audience and the audience, effectively improving user activity and user time. On weekends, an ordinary post in the fish bar of Douyu's big anchor PDD can be read thousands of times a day, with hundreds of thousands of people participating in the discussion, further increasing the anchor's popularity. At the same time, you need to follow the anchor before you can enter the anchor bar, which increases the number of viewers

Yuba was developed when Douyu was at its peak, and its product design also showed certain historical characteristics. The most obvious aspect is that Yuba relies heavily on big anchors, and the popularity boost provided by Yuba to big anchors is far greater than the help it provides to mid-level anchors.

Discussions in the bar forums of big anchors like Xu Xu Baby and PDD are very active, and the content of the discussions goes far beyond discussions about the anchors themselves. However, the bar forums of small and medium-sized anchors have relatively less frequent discussions and more spam posts - small and medium-sized anchors themselves have fewer followers, and their viewing time is average. The audience pays less attention to things other than the live broadcast content, and does not have much interest in posting in the bar forums.

The single column on the discovery page displays short videos and live broadcasts:

As mentioned before, Douyu’s recommended short videos are displayed more vigorously, which is reflected in the design of Douyu’s discovery page. Douyu’s discovery page recommends live broadcasts and short videos in the same way as Tik Tok’s vertical scrolling information flow. The short videos on the discovery page are all content uploaded by the anchor, and the live broadcast is a display of the content of the live broadcast room that starts broadcasting during this period.

The way short videos are displayed on Douyu’s discovery page is similar to that of TikTok. It can be understood as adding barrage and entering the live broadcast room function (if the anchor is broadcasting) to the Douyin short video page to make the attention more eye-catching. Because the Douyu Discovery page has a lot of horizontal screen game live broadcast content, the vertical screen display will leave a lot of blank space at the top and bottom. The barrage function utilizes these blank spaces and enriches the content. Entering the live broadcast room and the eye-catching follow function reflect Douyu’s hope to use short videos to guide users to follow the anchor and enter the live broadcast room. Short videos are also a tool for Douyu to attract traffic to its anchors.

The functions of the live broadcast recommendation on the discovery page are relatively simple, with the only obvious functions being sharing, (entering) the live broadcast room, and following. If users are interested in the recommended live content, they will click on the live broadcast room to watch. It can be seen that Douyu hopes to guide users into the live broadcast room to consume content through the discovery page rather than keep swiping in vertical mode.

In general, the purpose of the Douyu Discovery page is to use the advantages of efficient recommendations in vertical screen information flow to output content and guide users to follow more anchors. It is an effective means to improve the efficiency of content distribution.

(2) Tiger Teeth

From the perspective of overall product design, Douyu’s playlists, fish bars, discovery pages and other functions either provide users with more interactive space or improve content distribution efficiency and recommend content to guide users to follow the anchors.

Huya’s overall product design is more concise, focusing on how to improve the efficiency of live content recommendations and how to enable users to find live broadcasts of interest more quickly. The overall design has two features: homepage recommendation design and e-sports event recommendations.

Home page recommendation:

Home page recommendation is the first interface that users see when they open the APP. Its main function is to recommend live content to users who have no obvious viewing purpose (if users have viewing preferences, they will go directly to the ones they are already following). Therefore, the key factor for home page recommendation is recommendation efficiency.

Unlike most video or live broadcast products that use banners and partitions to enrich their homepage, Huya’s homepage recommendations can be said to be extremely efficient and focused. When users open Huya, the first thing they see is the six live broadcast rooms. Other information has been deleted or faded, highlighting the primary position of the live broadcast rooms: the search box at the top is lighter in color and slender in shape, with no space for avatars, leaving more space for the live broadcast rooms; the channel partition is placed at the bottom and users need to pull down to display the entire section, and banners, advertisements, and live broadcast previews disappear directly from the homepage and require pulling down to see them - in general, the core of Huya’s homepage recommendations are the six live broadcast rooms, and the others are hidden below and users need to pull down to see them.

Such a design makes sense. For people who have viewing preferences, the homepage recommendations are just a transit station. Clicking on them will immediately jump to other interfaces: people who like a certain channel will click on the channel partition, people who love e-sports events will click on Discover-Events, and people who follow anchors will click on Follow. So the target users of the homepage are those who have no obvious viewing preferences and just want to watch a live broadcast to entertain themselves and pass the time.

For this group of users, the key service is to reduce the user's selection cost and directly recommend the live broadcast room - reducing the interference of other information, and even saving the user's browsing time, giving users a better experience.

E-sports event zone:

Among the users of game live streaming, there are some users who only pay attention to e-sports events and have little interest in other live streaming content. Huya has been focusing on e-sports for a long time and has purchased a large number of exclusive copyrights for e-sports events. In order to take advantage of this, Huya has set up a separate event section on the discovery interface.

The event section has rich e-sports content, including events for various games such as DOTA, CSGO, Honor of Kings, and Peace Elite. Users can check the schedule of events they are interested in and can choose to subscribe to the competition. After subscribing, they will receive notifications when the competition starts. You can also watch replays of events that have already ended.

3.2 Comparison of live broadcast rooms

The live broadcast room is the main scene for users to consume content on the live broadcast APP, and it is also the function where users spend the longest time on the live broadcast APP. The live broadcast room is responsible for content display, revenue generation, and event promotion, and can be said to be the core function of the live broadcast APP.

Common points analysis: What are the general functions of a live broadcast room?

The general functions of game live streaming include the following four aspects:

• Live broadcast function settings: often located in the upper right and left side of the live broadcast room, mainly some tool functions, including playback settings, clarity adjustment, forwarding, screen lock, screen recording, etc. Douyu and Huya are similar in terms of live streaming function settings;
• Anchor display function: usually on the upper left side of the live broadcast room, including popularity display, follow button, and other live broadcast recommendations;
• Activity function: usually placed in the center of the right side of the live broadcast room, including viewing time gift, guessing, lucky draw and other activities;
• Interactive functions: including barrage, gift giving and rewards, are the most important functions of the live broadcast room. Because game live streaming has average money-making ability, the gift function is designed with fewer gifts than show live streaming, and low-priced gifts account for the majority.

(1) Analysis of differences: How can a live broadcast room be lively and efficient?

Huya: Focus on content and efficient in revenue

Huya’s focus on content and efficiency in revenue are reflected in the live broadcast room: making the most money in the least disruptive way to the live broadcast viewers.

Making money is the purpose, and not disturbing the live broadcast is the bottom line. Let’s analyze the purpose of making money first.

There are two ways to make money from live streaming. One is to directly reward the anchor, and the other is to participate in platform activities. The two correspond to the interactive function and activity function of the live broadcast room respectively.

The focus of the interactive functions of rewarding the anchor is gift rewards and barrage. In terms of gift rewards, Huya's one-click continuous sending function has an optional number of 7 continuous sendings, with an upper and lower limit of 10 and 1314 respectively, which is more practical. The continuous sending function effectively increases the average customer spending on a single gift, and also encourages users with lower budgets to participate in continuous sending.

At the same time, Huya has set exclusive gifts based on the user's noble level. Super fan users and guardian users have exclusive gifts to show the presence of the rich. In terms of barrage, Huya introduced colored barrage and linked the colored barrage permissions to the fan level. Users need to send a certain number of gifts or reach a certain fan level to unlock the corresponding color barrage.

Huya has even richer platform activities, with a large number and a wide variety of activities. It can be seen that most of Huya's activities are linked to payment. There are four paid lottery activities alone, and the way to participate is also very simple.

Taking Huya’s classic paid lottery function “On TV” as an example, users send barrages after giving gifts, and the anchor draws prizes from the audience who sent barrages. Users can send their messages by clicking "One-click Participation", which is very convenient. Whenever the anchor turns on the TV function, the screen is often filled with comments about going on TV.

Moreover, the paid functions have different payment standards for users with different consumption levels. Users can choose to pay just a small amount of money to participate or participate in a large amount at once. The lottery results will be announced in the live broadcast room to further attract others to participate in the event.

So, how can Huya increase payment while reducing the disruption to live streaming content?

The core driving force for increasing payment in entertainment live streaming is the user’s self-display and vanity. To increase payment, it is necessary to give users’ rewards and high-paying users’ speeches more display weight. However, the content of game live broadcasts requires a higher level of viewing concentration, and interruptions to the live content need to be controlled. Huya’s response is to set display thresholds and link display to user payment levels to filter information and strengthen payment privileges .

In terms of live broadcast room design, Huya’s information displays such as gifts from the rich and official prompts are set to be smaller and narrower to reduce distraction, and gift messages are integrated into the interactive barrage for horizontal display. Moreover, there is a threshold for the display of Huya gifts, the minimum threshold is 66 bags of tiger food (equivalent to RMB 6.6). Single gifts below this price will not be displayed in the horizontal screen live broadcast room.

Huya links the user’s payment level with the intensity of interactive message display. Only a small number of high-paying users can be given priority to display interactive messages, such as sending barrages of designated colors. Such a setting not only reduces distraction and makes the interface cleaner and tidier, but also encourages users to increase their payment level to obtain privileges.

However, this setting makes the live broadcast room display less paid behavior as a whole (the vast majority of paid rewards are below the threshold and will not be reflected), which also makes Huya's payment rate slightly lower than Douyu.

In general, in the design of Huya’s live broadcast room, the privilege settings are deeply linked to the user’s payment level, which is an important source of Huya’s live broadcast room’s high money-making ability. Depending on the payment level, users can enjoy exclusive gifts, exclusive barrage colors, entry prompts and other privileges. Every time users upgrade through payment, they can enjoy more benefits, which greatly motivates users to increase the amount of payment.

(2) Douyu: Lively gameplay

The design of Douyu’s live broadcast room focuses on gameplay, and has a special feature called “Fish Pond”.

In terms of activity functions, Douyu has integrated more than a dozen games, activities and function entrances into the "Interaction" section below the live broadcast room, leaving only three icons on the right side of the live broadcast room: a viewing time reward, a host challenge, and an advertising space. However, the game function integrated into the interactive partition has a long path to open, and you need to exit the original live broadcast room to enter, so the participation rate is not as good as Huya. Overall, Douyu’s event display is not as strong as Huya’s, and its efficiency in attracting payment through events is lower.

In terms of interactive functions, Douyu’s barrage settings are relatively complex, with 5 barrage options. A barrage roulette function has been set up, and users can choose popular barrages to send. There are no specific categories in the gift settings.

The special feature of Douyu Live Room is "Fish Pond ", and there are two entrances to the fish pond function on the right side - "Watching Gifts" and "Fish Pond". Fishpond is an interactive system based on a user activity reward system. Users can receive fish food by reaching certain activity standards (such as watching for a certain amount of time, sending barrage comments). Fish food can be used to participate in various activities, such as lucky draws, feeding fish food to the anchor (the "weight" data shown by the Douyu anchor comes from feeding fish food), going on expeditions, etc.

The purpose of designing the fish pond is to establish a set of games and interactive systems based on user activity to encourage users to participate deeply . It can be seen that Douyu even set up a separate currency for this purpose - fish feed. Douyu can consider optimizing the gameplay, making it simpler and the rewards more clear. After all, users' attention is mainly focused on the game content, and they pay less attention to activities outside of live broadcasts.

IV. Conclusion

Game live streaming is characterized by strong interactivity and low cost. The two giants of game live streaming, Douyu and Huya, were born out of different products and took different paths in the process of growth and development, which led to differences in their product design and usage data. To sum up, Douyu is lively and Huya is efficient.

The liveliness of Douyu means that Douyu is good at attracting attention and even better at stimulating user participation and activity. Huya’s efficiency refers to its focus on live streaming content and improving revenue generation capabilities. It is obvious that Douyu has put a lot of effort into content distribution and gameplay design, so that users can first follow the anchors before playing. Huya has set up many paid functions while reducing interference with live broadcast content, allowing high-paying users to enjoy more privileges, thereby increasing the average order value and boosting revenue.

Currently, the game live streaming track is very lively, and Kuaishou, Douyin and B have entered the game live streaming market by leveraging their traffic advantages. However, Douyu and Huya did not seem to be too worried about this during the earnings conference. Instead, they believed that the entry of new players would raise the ceiling of game live streaming and expand the entire market.

Indeed, Douyu and Kuaishou, which have been deeply engaged in game live streaming for many years, have a deeper understanding of games, and their products are built for games, which gives them considerable competitive advantages and appeal.

It will be worth looking forward to how the lively Douyu and the efficient Huya will perform in the upcoming competition in the game live streaming industry.

Author: Lin Xiqingyun

Source: Lin Xiqingyun