"Just in, Black Shark has officially closed access to the Black Shark community." This recent Weibo post from a user identified as a Black Shark technical support engineer, along with the delisting of all Black Shark products from the Xiaomi Mall, serves as a quiet, belated final chapter for the once-pioneering gaming phone brand. These events didn't cause a major stir, but they signify a definitive end.

 

 

From Boom to Bust in Just Five Years

Black Shark's last phone was released in 2022, with the planned Black Shark 6 in 2023 never materializing. With its community now gone and official sales channels empty, the brand's journey is effectively over. It was a rapid rise and fall. Launched in 2018 as a key part of Xiaomi's ecosystem, Black Shark experienced a brilliant but brief peak. In 2019, it shipped over 1 million units globally, capturing over half of the gaming phone market. However, the decline was just as swift. By 2022, sales had plummeted to just over a hundred thousand units.

The reason for its initial success was clear: mainstream smartphones offered a poor gaming experience, often throttling due to heat. Black Shark addressed this with specialized solutions like liquid cooling and physical shoulder buttons, delivering a demonstrably better gaming performance. But the mobile industry evolved quickly. Chip efficiency improved, and mainstream flagships began adopting gaming-centric features like enhanced cooling and dedicated game modes, eroding the niche that gaming phones had carved out.

Sensing the crisis, Black Shark attempted to pivot to VR, with a potential acquisition by Tencent in the works. However, when Tencent abandoned the deal, Black Shark's fate was sealed. The company underwent massive layoffs, cutting its workforce from over 1,000 to just over 100, and its mobile phone division was shut down, leaving only its peripherals business.

The Black Shark Brand is Now Just an Empty Shell

While Black Shark's official website is still active, selling accessories like phone coolers and controllers, the hardware is no longer developed by the original company. In 2023, the peripherals team was sold to another enterprise, Shenzhen Mingyuan Dianwan, which now uses the Black Shark brand and patents for its products. In essence, "Black Shark" is now just a label. The community forum had long become a ghost town with minimal activity, so its official closure was merely a formality.

Gaming Phones Die, Mainstream Performance Phones Thrive

The end of dedicated gaming phone brands doesn't mean the demand for mobile gaming has vanished. On the contrary, it has become so crucial that all major brands now cater to it. We've seen a rise in mainstream "performance phones" that integrate gaming features like active cooling, large batteries, and fast charging. These devices succeed because they offer a great gaming experience without compromising on being an excellent all-around smartphone for daily tasks. Users are unwilling to buy a secondary, specialized device just for gaming.

Furthermore, major manufacturers possess resources that niche brands lack: superior supply chain bargaining power, extensive retail channels, stable software updates, and budgets for marketing and partnerships with game developers. The core attributes of gaming phones have been dismantled and absorbed into the flagships and performance-focused lines of major brands. This is why even Xiaomi, a major shareholder in Black Shark, abandoned the category, with executive Lu Weibing publicly stating that gaming phones have no future.

 

Black Shark's exit highlights a harsh reality: there is little room for small, independent brands in today's consolidated smartphone market. Even sub-brands are increasingly integrated into their parent companies. The gaming phone as a separate category has become economically unviable. It fulfilled its historical mission by proving the importance of features like advanced cooling, high frame rates, and responsive controls. Now that these features are standard in high-performance mainstream phones, the dedicated gaming phone has lost its reason to exist. The era of the glowing logo and shoulder buttons is truly over.