Nowadays, the core consumer group has transformed from 80s and 90s into 95s and 00s. Their favour and value have gradually taken an influence on business. According to industry data, the new generation born in the 2000s and 1990s accounts for more than 24.5% of the cultural and entertainment consumption, which is much higher than that born in the 1980s and 1970s. From a macro perspective, all offline entertainment industries in China have maintained a steady growth trend. In 2017, the overall market scale reached a record with RMB 373.51 billion. With the help of the new generation, the total market scale is expected to reach RMB 490 billion in 2019.

Cinema, KTV, game & amusement centers and other traditional business formats always play important roles in attracting passenger flow for commercial real estate. Against the background of the upgrading of offline entertainment consumption and the continuous rise of emerging entertainment formats, commercial real estate, especially at the high-end, has also begun to change its strategy, and positively developed crane machine stores, Mini KTV, gashapon machine experiencing shops, VR parks, haunted housed, room escaped, wax work museums, e-sports pavilions, trampoline pavilions and so on. Newly created formats include immersive experiences through VR/AR, interactive games, intelligent central control, holographic projection and other technologies. Jay Chou’s J E-sport, iQIYI’s YuKer on-demand cinema, Tencent’s offline shop, teamLab’s art exhibition and other powerful enterprises in other fields have opened offline amusement businesses and fight for the “center” position. The status and survival of the commercial complexes where the game and entertainment markets are located are under attack by various parties. How do they change the situation?

Offline entertainment venues have unique advantages in social and face-to-face communication. While various forms of activities such as game events, fans' meeting and sharing activities organized by offline entertainment venues are increasingly enriching, they also play a guiding role in online entertainment and attract more potential users to try corresponding online entertainment forms. In the future, offline entertainment will become an increasingly important traffic entrance for online entertainment and play a significant role in the era when the demographic dividend of Internet users no longer exists.

Online entertainment has its own obvious advantages. With its high quality, rich and original content, it can meet the personalized needs of users. However, offline entertainment is facing the challenge of a lack of high-quality content and novel entertainment forms. Therefore, online and offline entertainments can start to integrate development and share content resources together so that they can create a content connected effect and reach common advantages. More and more online entertainment enterprises are laying out offline entertainment businesses, breaking down the business barriers between online and offline, and creating high-level entertainment experiences for users while complementing each other in the passenger flow.
※The article is published in the GTI Magazine Issue No. 176 in June 2019