TecRah

Wen Renxi

At the TGA Awards on December 13th, Black Myth Goku and Game of the Year lost out to Sony’s Cosmic Robot. As soon as the news came out, regrets and skepticism pushed the TGA into the limelight.

Known as the Oscars of the gaming industry, why is TGA the most influential gaming award in the world? Behind the controversy, the key to TGA’s standing is the sponsorship and support of the game industry’s top three companies, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. These three companies played a key role in the golden age of game consoles, which also earned them a significant voice in the gaming world.

Looking back, the history of the Goshamis’ beginnings is also the history of gaming and technology moving forward in parallel. As the gaming industry relies on the rapid development of technology, it has also become the invisible hand that pushes the progress of technology.

The history of the game Gotham’s rise to fame.

Counting the games of the three of them, the host game golden age of prosperity, can not be separated from the promotion of scientific and technological development.

From simple pixel graphics, to the emergence of 2D 3D graphics, to the formal introduction of the physics engine, each hardware product innovation and technological breakthroughs, have injected new vitality into the game market.

As a company that started out selling poker, Nintendo showed the world that the fusion of gaming and technology can bring incredible results. Since 1980, when the red and white machine officially opened the console gaming market, Nintendo has once occupied as much as 95% of the global console market.

A few years later, Sony, which had its eye on the console gaming business, rolled in its own hardware technology and that of its partners to overtake it with the PlayStation.

In the era of 2D, Sony successfully pushed console gaming into the 3D era. After the suspension of cooperation with Nintendo, Sony applied the CD ROM accessory developed for the former to the PS1 to expand the console’s storage space. It also introduced 3D graphics processing technology, making the PS1 the world’s first game console to realize 3D real-time rendering without any peripherals.

At this point, the father of PS, Ken Kudoroki, was still not satisfied. In order to further improve the performance of real-time 3D rendering, Sony developed the PS2 through the complex design of the EE Emotion Engine GPU graphics processing unit, which allowed games such as Final Fantasy 10 to be rendered more vividly and realistically.

Sony’s successful bet earned it a place alongside, or even ahead of, Nintendo. The popularity of Final Fantasy VII helped Sony’s PS1 sales quickly exceed 10 million, surpassing Nintendo’s N64 at the same time.

While Nintendo and Sony were stealing the market, Microsoft announced its entry into the gaming market in 2001 with the launch of its own gaming console, the Xbox, which differed from its predecessors in that it added Ethernet ports to every Xbox and launched the Internet-based Xbox Live service in 2002, which allowed gamers to easily play against online users. Since then, the Royal Three format has been officially formed.

In the process, the extreme pursuit of hardware performance and technological capabilities not only improved the quality of games, but some of these technological achievements were also applied in other fields

Nintendo’s orders not only fed most of the semiconductor companies in Japan, but the gyroscope and acceleration sensor technology it used in its own game, Wil, became a standard capability in today’s cell phones. Microsoft’s Kinect somatosensory technology for the Xbox, on the other hand, is being used in the medical field to help the elderly rehabilitate their lower limbs with comfortable limb control.

In addition, the technology serving the gaming industry has led to the development of upstream and downstream industries. Microsoft in 2009, the cloud game with data center servers to run the system is still stuck in the conceptual stage, the next year, the full volume of Microsoft cloud on-line, and so far has become one of Microsoft’s core business.

In the global game boom in the 1990s, Chinese games have gone to the other end of the spectrum. Although there was no shortage of high-quality games such as Fairy Sword and Regulus, the less accommodating market environment, coupled with the prevalence of pirated software and copycat devices, caused China to miss out on the golden era of gaming’s rise to prominence.

In particular, the ban on video games in 2000 brought the domestic game market to a standstill, and we missed the opportunity to develop the hardware systems and technologies that support console devices.

Until 2003, online games were officially included in the national 863 program, the game market has been gradually recovered.

Another path of game and technology development

After a brief period of disorientation, China continued to follow the pace of global game development and took another path of exploration.

After 2000, China’s tech industry, which lost out at the starting line in terms of hardware, began to catch up head-on in the Internet era.

Advertising E-commerce Gaming, as one of the three major business models of the Internet, has been an important driving force in the development of China’s Internet industry. in 2015, China’s gaming market revenues reached $37.9 billion, accounting for more than 1 4 of the global gaming revenues. Since then, China has officially replaced the United States as the world’s largest gaming market.

Compared with the PC market, the handheld game market has long surpassed the former, supporting the vast majority of the market share. According to the above report, in 2023, China’s mobile game market size will be about 327.5 billion yuan, accounting for 78 9 .

In the process of accelerating the game industry, in addition to its own prosperity, it has also driven the development of a series of related technologies of mobile terminals, 5G communications, cloud computing, VR AR, and has helped China to realize curved-track overtaking in many important technological fields.

In 2022, the China Audiovisual and Digital Publishing Association (CADPA) and the Industrial Culture Development Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) jointly released a report on the study of gaming technology and innovative application of the super digital scene, which for the first time quantifies the contribution rate of gaming technology across fields with a supernumerary index.

The report shows that in 2022, the contribution rate of game technology to the cross-industry technological progress of the chip AI cloud computing cell phone XR automatic driving and other industries was 18 65 31 37 51 08 46 76 72 45 and 57 19 respectively.

Quantification of the cross-sectoral contribution rate of gaming tech Figure Source CCTV

Under the vigorous promotion of game companies, Chinese game makers have begun to feed advanced technology into other fields Tencent, for example, not only applies game engine technology to flight simulation systems, introduces artificial intelligence technology into the field of astronomical research, and uses digital scanning and other technologies to restore the Mogao Grottoes scenic area at 1 1 millimeter level.

Focusing on the application of game AI technology in the field of astronomical observation, Tencent game AI multi-intelligence body algorithms and the particle astrophysics center of the Chinese academy of sciences institute of high-energy physics, the whole variable source tracking hunter constellation CATCH program cooperation, to realize the constellation of the orbit of the autonomous collaborative observation and other functions.

Previously, Tencent Game’s AI multi-intelligent body algorithm was applied in PVP games such as League of Legends handball game Naruto handball game. Through multi-intelligence deep learning and reinforcement learning training, Tencent uses technology to optimize the AI’s battle level, making its ability sufficient to match the level of most players.

And the CATCH program aims to build an intelligent X-ray astronomical observation constellation consisting of hundreds of microsatellites to monitor massive erupting celestial bodies in an all-weather, no-dead-angle, non-stop manner.

Imaginary image of CATCH constellation observing target objects in collaboration with AI technology Source Tencent

In this program, Tencent Game’s AI technology plays a key role By applying multi-intelligence body reinforcement learning algorithms, CATCH satellites are able to autonomously track targets and team up to complete observation tasks just like game AIs. This type of collaborative observation not only improves observation efficiency, but is also expected to significantly increase the probability of scientific results output.

Double-wheel drive of science and technology and game

The core of the first industrial revolution was the loom and the steam engine. It was driven by the use of cotton and coal The second industrial revolution successfully promoted the widespread use of internal combustion engines and electric motors, from the utilization of oil and electricity.

And in the information revolution, which is seen as the third industrial revolution, games became the invisible engine that drove this revolution forward.

In fact, games not only drove the development of computer hardware, but also trained a new generation of technologists who led the way in technological innovation.

From the early days of arcade games to the rise of the Nintendo NES and Sony PlayStation home consoles, the demand for performance and presentation in games drove processor speeds and graphic innovations, and became a key driver of advances in semiconductor technology, graphic processing, and storage.

Looking back at the history of the tech giants, video games have also been the starting point for many of their entrepreneurial endeavors.

One of the developers of Pong, the world’s first video game, was Steve Jobs, the genius who built Apple’s empire Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates was not only a game developer, but he also pushed Microsoft to solve the hardware/software conflict between games and computers, and thus invested a lot of research and development resources in operating system adaptability.

However, in the domestic game market during the millennium, the stigmatized demand for entertainment, the rampant pirated games and the enactment of domestic bans hindered the development process of the domestic game industry to varying degrees.

This also led to the fact that, comparing the business models of domestic and overseas games around 2000, domestic games were far less profitable than overseas.

At that time, overseas game companies usually invested a lot of money to develop high-quality games and relied on strong IP to attract players to play and pay for them. Assassin’s Creed, for example, cost more than $100 million to develop. The high investment has resulted in high returns in the game market. According to statistics, the game sold more than 5 million copies in the first week, and the total revenue has exceeded 1 billion dollars.

Assassin’s Creed: The Hall of Valor Image Source Steam

With the demand for gaming curbed, the development of the chip and PC industries naturally failed to keep pace with overseas developments. around 2000, China’s semiconductor industry relied heavily on imports, and the country’s domestic chip manufacturing capacity was limited, while overseas had already been dominated by Samsung, TSMC and other companies.

Well, in more than 20 years of pursuit, China is catching up with the pace of the global game forward, the game has also become an important driving force of China’s Internet industry. According to a report issued by Ai Rui consulting, in 2023, China’s online game market size reached 415 billion yuan, an increase of 8 3, the overall scale for the first time exceeded 400 billion yuan.

Along with the rapid development of China’s gaming industry, technologies developed based on the pursuit of game quality have been applied to the development of thousands of industries in China.

For example, combining Tencent’s self-developed game engine technology and SAC’s virtual image display technology, the two have jointly promoted the landing of the FFS Vision System product.

In the new-generation vision system, by using the vision data assets generated by Tencent’s PCG asset creation tool, it realistically restores effects such as weather and lighting, helping simulators create a variety of realistic flight scene experiences.

Meanwhile, with the technical support of its self-developed game engine, its production efficiency has been increased by more than 10 times, and Tencent’s self-developed multi-channel fusion calibration algorithm has solved the problem of distortion, stretching and color deviation of the image on the curved screen of the simulated cockpit, providing efficient and safe flight training for more than 80,000 civil aviation pilots.

In recent years, gaming technology has been frequently applied to global aviation manufacturers. CAE, a manufacturer of full-mission flight simulators, has developed a vision system subsystem, Image Generator, based on the Unreal engine, to provide a sense of immersion and realism. The partnership between Tencent and China Southern Airlines makes China the third country in the world to independently develop a complete view system.

Talking about the relationship between technology and games, Tencent Senior Vice President Ma Xiaoyi once answered The relationship between games and technology is similar to the concept of double-wheel drive Technology moves forward so that the quality of the game can progress Games move forward, which in turn can drive more and more powerful technology to the ground.

The best incubator for technological innovation is a market with a friendly environment and full of vitality and competition.

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