CATDOLL: Tencent will make great efforts in animation IP in the future

Ma Huateng made it clear at this year's two sessions that the development of Internet companies must be integrated with traditional cultural industries, and the entire cultural industry ecosystem depends on intellectual property (IP). In fact, based on this idea, Tencent's interactive entertainment has gone through three years. Based on games, it has successively launched three major content business platforms: animation, literature, and film and television, completing the initial construction of a pan-entertainment ecosystem with IP as the core. On the same day that Ma Huateng spoke at the two sessions, Jack Ma's Alibaba announced that it would invest 2.4 billion yuan in Guangguang Communication, continuing its strategy of quickly entering the market with capital means. Today, the official website of the Ministry of Commerce of China also forwarded the article "Building a Pan-Entertainment Ecosystem with Copyright as the Core", stating that Internet giants such as Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba have entered, and cross-border integration has driven industry upgrades. In particular, it mentioned that animation and games have become the new favorite of the capital market.

After the integration with Shanda Literature, Tencent has become the industry leader in the field of online literature. Various signs and internal information show that Tencent's next focus in the content field in 2015 is animation. Everyone knows that there is potential, but it has not been developed for so many years.

In China's cultural industry, comics are the most underestimated part. Although Tencent Comics has always been the undisputed No. 1 domestic animation platform, this "No. 1" is somewhat awkward. Compared with the popular animation industry in Japan and the United States, the Chinese "animation industry" has been difficult to develop an industrial chain 14 years after the government proposed the animation industry. It is already very good for a professional cartoonist to have a fixed income of 4,000 yuan, let alone the subsequent ecology.

But since last year, China's comics industry has been booming: Tencent Comics' mobile game IP copyright of the comic "Zombie Brother" was sold at a sky-high price of 50 million; the movie of the same name adapted from "One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes" easily grossed over 100 million yuan; and a large number of Japanese comics IPs were snatched up by Chinese mobile game manufacturers...

This series of events all have the same characteristics: comics are no longer an isolated industry, they are deeply integrated with industries such as games, film and television to release new value and influence - just like what happened to the comics industry in the United States and Japan. For the Chinese comics industry, this may be a moment of "qualitative change" - because the value of comics has been unprecedentedly extended due to pan-entertainment.

Today, even the most obtuse people may sigh: If you ignore the pan-entertainment thinking, you may miss the best opportunity for the transformation of the comics industry.

Tencent's pan-entertainment plan

Among China's major business players, Tencent was the first to discover this trend and has become the biggest beneficiary.

At present, the latest hits of the comic "Zombie Brothers" are 4.8 billion, the hits of "Mr. Marvelous China" are over 1.7 billion, and the hits of "Ace Inspector" have exceeded 100 million in less than half a year... In three years, Tencent Animation has raised the value of Chinese comics to an unprecedented height. With the animation and gamification of these works, their influence has been further released - on major video websites, the animations adapted from these works have been widely praised.

Tencent Animation's development track, which discovers high-quality content through production platforms and gathers popularity and monetizes through cross-field linkage, confirms Cheng Wu's judgment that "games, movies, and animation are no longer isolated, but have formed a closely connected organic whole. An industrial chain spanning the three major industries has been formed and is constantly integrating and moving forward." This industrial trend is not unfamiliar in Japan. Shueisha, Bandai Namco, and Tokyo TV are all beneficiaries of this model in the fields of comics, games, and videos. In China, Tencent is the best practitioner of this model.

What links all the major business modules of Tencent's pan-entertainment together is IP. Through cross-domain derivation of IP, the value of animation is developed in a more in-depth way, rather than being limited to the most basic reading value. Zou Zhengyu, head of Tencent Animation, once expressed his understanding of the value of IP in this way: "We hope to showcase a big IP. A big IP, in addition to having good commercial realization capabilities, also has a life cycle of decades or even hundreds of years, which is extremely valuable to us. However, the process of creating a big IP cannot be satisfied by a certain link or a certain product form. It requires many links to support it."

Now, Tencent Animation has a package of business modules such as games, literature, and film and television that run in parallel, providing it with a steady stream of content support - among which games are Tencent's best business model, which gives Tencent an inherent advantage in cross-domain IP operations, and this content support, combined with Tencent's user advantages and operational experience, undoubtedly further increases the chances of success. Under such a mechanism, cartoonists on Tencent Animation can earn a stable income of several thousand yuan per month. If they receive a huge monthly ticket (equivalent to a reward for online literature), it may mean a huge income, not to mention the share obtained after IP authorization. In short, cartoonists do not need to worry about the promotion and adaptation of their works - as long as they can contribute good works, this powerful platform can help them obtain a steady stream of commercial value and social value.

Good content is always king

In the eyes of the outside world, Tencent's product style is quite low-key - it is cautious and patient. When the wind comes, the product will be detonated, such as WeChat and Tencent's game works. Tencent Animation has been around for 4 years since its launch in 2011. During this period, Tencent Animation has accumulated enough potential energy, and driven by the dual drive of pan-entertainment and mobile Internet, it is actively embracing changes to welcome the arrival of the "wind".

The so-called "change" is actually a common change faced by the content industry. With the demographic dividend and technological changes brought about by the terminal revolution, users' consumption patterns are being reshaped - one cloud, multiple screens, consumption at any time, IP connection, and social drive are changing everyone's entertainment consumption.

Under such changes, Tencent Animation has become faster and more agile. The traditional web page is no longer the core option, so Tencent Animation quickly equipped all terminals - mobile phones, Pads, web pages, so that users can get what they need. Social drive has become more important, so cooperation with QQ and WeChat has also been put on the agenda. And pan-entertainment is more frequent - in the field of animation, Tencent Animation will have more than ten works animated, and "Zombie Brother" is preparing for a big movie. In the field of games, "Zombie Brother" frequently cooperates with products such as "Ace Duel" and "Reverse War". The heroine of "Ace Inspector" Huang Xiaoyan appeared in the Japanese mobile game "Monster Strike"...

Terminal expansion and pan-entertainment extension are to meet users' changing consumption habits, but users' demand for content will never change - they need diverse and high-quality foreign masterpieces, as well as exciting and down-to-earth domestic comics.

At the beginning of its establishment, Tencent Animation felt a bit like "no rice to cook", so introducing popular foreign works became the best choice. During that period, works such as "Naruto", "One Piece" and "Bleach" became the signature of Tencent Animation. Since then, with the change of the market environment, a large number of excellent Chinese comics have emerged, and they have become an important support for Tencent Animation together with imported works. At present, there are more than 6,000 Chinese comics with self-owned IP on the Tencent Animation platform, of which 440 are excellent and 43 have exceeded 10 million clicks.

In 2015, Tencent Animation continued to expand the breadth of its animation works. According to previous news, Tencent has increased the priority of its animation business and will increase its efforts in copyright introduction, original comics and business promotion. The budget may be 2-3 times the original. In terms of copyright introduction, Tencent may have already won the popular Japanese works "Tokyo Ghoul" and "Assassination Classroom".

This is a far cry from the situation two years ago. At the 2013 Tencent Games Conference, Cheng Wu said: "The current copyright protection of animation is still very imperfect. It is too early to talk about how much money Tencent has invested in animation, how much money it has earned, and how much money the writers have received."

But what Cheng Wu wanted to tell at this year's Tencent Interactive Entertainment Conference was probably another story: Tencent Animation brought IP advantages by consolidating content reserves, spread influence through animation, brought in a wide range of users through omni-channels, and even brought IP monetization through pan-entertainment derivatives - ultimately magnifying the value of animation and allowing the entire industry to develop more healthily.

This is a story that has never happened in the Chinese animation industry in the past decade.