International Business Model Roundtable Forum and AI’s Impact on Game Industry

Recently, the International Business Model Roundtable Forum was held at Peking University HSBC Business School. The forum focused on cutting-edge theories of business models, discussing the opportunities and challenges faced by business models in the era of artificial intelligence, and how to respond to the wave of change through design and innovation.
On the first day of the conference, three heavyweight guests, Professor Raffi Amit from Wharton School, Professor Zhu Wuxiang from Tsinghua University, and Wang Haijun, general manager of Huawei Cloud’s game business, gave wonderful sharing. Wang Haijun, in combination with the current development of the game industry and the development of business model theory, deeply interpreted why hard technology needs business model transformation more, and the new business ecology and new business model of the game industry in this AI wave.


Business model theory and practice in the era of change. Generative artificial intelligence, as the hottest technological topic at present, not only stirs the core development path of technology giants but also gradually begins to affect these technology enterprises’ thinking about their business model barriers. The traditional search engine represented by Google and the answer engine represented by Perplexity are not only different in technology but also in business models.


The founder of Perplexity also clearly expressed that the way of obtaining benefits from advertising ranking is not applicable to Perplexity, and they are still working hard to explore new business models. Wang Haijun shared: ‘New technology enterprises must go through several development stages, from the initial technology verification to technology implementation, then competing with the traditional and old business ecology, and finally realizing their own business ecology.


In the process of competing with the original technology, business models occupy a very important position. Many enterprises cannot achieve differentiated competition with the original technology and thus disappear because they have not developed a business model that matches the hard technology they master.’ However, risks and opportunities coexist in the era of change. As a general-purpose technology, generative artificial intelligence will certainly promote the development of other emerging technologies and create a new blue ocean.


Wang Haijun concluded: ‘As a driving force for the development of the new era, AI will bring growth momentum to more businesses. For example, AGI will reshape the Internet industry, that is, the industrial chain of promotion and search, as well as terminal business, software business, scientific computing business, computing power and chip business, embodied intelligence business, and the space industry, etc.




In the second half of 2024, an important milestone has been achieved in the field of AI and games: relying on neural networks to realize the generation of real-time gameplay of the classic shooting game Doom without using traditional game engines throughout.


Wang Haijun mentioned that the game industry, as a testing ground for generative artificial intelligence, is an incubator of new technologies and an application field. With the development of world basic model technology and as the work of academic leaders such as Li Feifei and LeCun gradually becomes clear and is implemented in the game industry, every pixel of future games will be generated.


When new technologies completely change the industrial technology path, its business form will also inevitably change. Understanding the industrial form of future games from the perspective of business model will provide different thoughts and discoveries compared to the technical path. Professors Wei Wei, Li Fei, and Zhu Wuxiang refined in ‘Principles of Business Model Studies’ that ‘business model is the collection of business activities and the transaction structure of stakeholders’.


Focusing on the new business ecology and business model of the game industry in the AGI era, Wang Haijun shared: ‘The business activities of the industry will evolve from the previous industrialized and assembly-line production methods to the key decision-makers of game enterprises and agents in corresponding fields jointly completing the two key links of design and development. At the same time, AGI will also empower the creative ability of game players and drive the simple bilateral transaction between game manufacturers and game players to evolve into a composite transaction of PGC + UGC.


From the perspective of transaction subjects, in the AGI era, game production efficiency is improved, content is more diversified, the audience is broadened, and the number of game players will also increase significantly; the number of small and micro enterprises such as ‘one-person companies’ will surge, and they will also become the main transaction subjects in the game industry. And the intelligentization and personalization of game IP derivatives and a batch of new ‘merchandise’ will emerge.


..’ Regarding transaction rights, responsibilities and risk management, Wang Haijun mentioned: ‘We cannot enumerate one by one the qualitative changes caused by the integration of games and GenAI, but we can see that as a carrier of digital technology, games can be fully combined with cultural industry, education industry, digital entertainment industry, e-sports industry, and comprehensive cultural, business and tourism industry under the support of generative technology.


Entrepreneurs in the game industry need to think about the transaction rights, responsibilities and risk management of ‘game plus’ under such a background.’ The essence of game company founders’ transformation to AI is seeing the possibilities under the trend. Through business model insights and theoretical analysis, new technologies can better achieve business success and make new ecosystems become mainstream.


Hard technology has a bright future in the game industry. If good business model innovations emerge随之出现, perhaps the next golden age of games is coming.




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