Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1666
Tencent integrates game-related businesses, and Huya has a new chairman
“LatePost” exclusively learned that Lin Songtao, vice president of Tencent, will succeed Huang Lingdong as the chairman of Huya (HUYA.US). After resigning, Huang Lingdong continued to work in Tencent Interactive Entertainment Group (IEG).
Huya is China’s leading independent game live broadcast company. Its products include Huya Live, games and pan-entertainment live broadcast platform Nimo TV focusing on Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In April 2020, Tencent became its controlling shareholder.
The new chairman, Lin Songtao, joined Tencent in 2003. He was the first product manager after Tencent established a product manager post. He successively served as the core person in charge of QQ, Qzone, open platform, and Yongyongbao. In 2016, Yongyingbao won the Tencent Hall of Fame Award, and Lin Songtao was promoted to vice president of Tencent in this year. From 2021, he will serve as the president of Tencent Online Video .
A number of people from Tencent told LatePost that Lin Songtao is good at doing platform business. When he was in charge of Qzone, he first proposed the concept of “open platform” in Tencent, and introduced social games such as Happy Farm with a wide audience; With the integration of Yongyingbao team, Yingyingbao has also become the industry’s No. 1 third-party application store. Huya, which he is about to manage, is also an important publicity platform for the game industry.
In recent years, the game live streaming industry has undergone tremendous changes. With the rise of comprehensive video platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Station B, the living space of vertical live broadcast platforms has been squeezed.
The advantage of a comprehensive platform lies in its huge user base. “LatePost” learned that Douyin’s daily active users in 2022 will be around 750 million, live broadcast daily active users will be close to 100 million, and live broadcast revenue will reach 130 billion yuan.
In contrast, Huya Live had around 84.3 million monthly active users and revenue of 9.22 billion yuan in the same year.
Due to the large scale of game user groups and strong consumption power, major platforms are also increasing their investment in game live broadcasting. In 2020, Station B will introduce Wang Yuyang, the former CEO of Big Goose Culture, to join in and be responsible for the live broadcast business.
Huya is not willing to be buried. It has made many attempts in recent years, including successively signing the copyrights of “Glory of the King” and “Cross Fire” and other events, and in 2021, it won the five-year live broadcast and three-year on-demand rights of the “League of Legends” LPL league. These events helped Huya retain its existing users, but at the cost of higher operating costs for Huya.
A person close to Tencent Games said that the game live broadcast business is indispensable to Tencent. When game distribution channels become more and more dispersed, core players need to find their own gathering places, and the value of vertical and professional platforms is re-amplified. This is an opportunity for Huya.
Such as Pocket League of Legends and King’s Camp, these communities allow players to continue to maintain players’ attention to the game through content, news, events, social networking, etc. during non-game time. TapTap provides the value of public comments on the game version. Players still need an efficient way to understand the quality of the game and express their opinions. TapTap is a game community established by Xindong.com in 2016, and currently has more than 30 million monthly active users.
At present, Huya’s existing advantages in products are still stable, and most of the top game anchors are still concentrated here. In this industry, where the anchor is, there are the core users.
A senior person in the live broadcast industry told “LatePost” that games are just a vertical category for Douyin and Station B, and it is difficult for them to continuously invest high-quality resources in a single field. Huya is different. As a vertical platform, it is more friendly to game anchors in terms of traffic mechanism and community atmosphere. In 2022, station B spent hundreds of millions of yuan to sign Huya’s head anchor Uzi, but then its attention and popularity continued to decline. A year later, Uzi returned to Huya.
As the game version number begins to be issued regularly in mid-2022, the game industry will resume growth, and content supply will no longer be a problem. For Huya, how to transform into a game community is the next biggest test.
In the past, Tencent, which was linked by investment and connection, adopted a relatively free-growing management model for many of its businesses and subsidiaries. The advantage of this is high flexibility, but low synergy and slow advancement of grand strategies. Now, Tencent is changing this strategy in its core business.
“LatePost” previously reported that Hou Xiaonan, president and CEO of China Literature, also served as the head of Tencent’s animation business ; earlier, Liang Zhu, the former head of QQ, was transferred to the CEO of Tencent Music Group , and Yao Xiaoguang, president of Tencent Games Tianmei Studio, also served concurrently. The person in charge of QQ . These businesses have already begun to interact with each other. Huya will be another one. (Text｜Editor Gao Honghao｜Song Wei)
In the wave of large-scale entrepreneurship, there are two more technical leaders of large factories, from Ali and Xiaohongshu respectively
“LatePost” learned that many technical business leaders from Internet companies have recently resigned to participate in large-scale model-related entrepreneurship.
These include Jia Rongfei from Alibaba’s Amoy Technology Department, and Yan Shengen, head of Xiaohongshu’s AI Platform Department. It is understood that the former will do 3D technology-related application layer startups; the latter will do general-purpose large models.
Jia Rongfei worked at Alibaba before leaving the company. He served as the person in charge of product 3D reconstruction and AI design algorithm in the Taoxi Technology Department, and assisted in building the industry’s first 3D product modeling based on Neural Radiation Field (NeRF) technology through two-dimensional images. The tool ObjectDrawer.
Before joining Ali, Jia Rongfei was promoted to the highest advertising algorithm director in Sogou. During his tenure, he participated in the construction of Sogou video search, web search, personalized news, accurate display advertising and other products.
The other is Yan Shengen, the former head of Xiaohongshu’s AI platform department. He once led the design, construction and optimization of Xiaohongshu’s AI computing power system.
According to public information, Yan Shengen graduated from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences with a Ph.D. in 2014, and then joined Baidu Research Institute as the technical leader to develop the Minwa supercomputer project. A year later, he joined SenseTime as the Executive Research Director of the Data and Computing Platform Department, responsible for building a large-scale high-performance AI computing platform and a deep learning training framework. During his tenure at SenseTime, he also spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he published papers on distributed computing, machine learning and algorithm optimization.
At present, there are basically two types of options for participating in large-scale model entrepreneurship. One is to develop a model from scratch, which means spending a lot of money to purchase computing power, clean data, and design a model framework. The other is to make fine-tuning based on the existing large model, and use more proprietary data and industry knowledge to make vertical applications. The former has higher requirements for resource integration capabilities and is also the home of competition for major domestic Internet companies. In contrast, the latter is more suitable for start-up companies to try.
In a conversation last September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was skeptical about the ability of startups to train models, but believed that they could play great value in linking basic models with industry needs. “The 1% of the training they do is crucial to the application.” Startups that can do this well will be able to use the flywheel effect to obtain more user data and continue to improve, thereby widening the gap with competitors. (Text丨Edited by Sun Haining丨Gao Honghao)
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