An AI short drama blogger recently took to social media to complain about missing out on a one-minute AI comic drama order worth over 100 yuan, saying the frustration kept them awake at night.
This complaint struck a chord with many industry practitioners.
While the blogger viewed it as a lost money-making opportunity, peers see it as a symptom of a price anxiety crisis in the AI comic drama space that has reached a breaking point.
From 5,000 yuan per minute at the start of the year to just 200 yuan per minute, and even as low as a few dozen yuan per minute, prices have collapsed dramatically.
Given that most AI comic dramas run only one minute per episode, such a steep decline vividly illustrates the unprecedented level of competition in the industry.
In conversations with BUG, multiple seasoned industry insiders acknowledged that the price drop in AI comic dramas was long foreseeable, as rapid advances in AI technology are causing production capacity to explode at more than ten times the previous rate, with corresponding production quotes dropping to one-tenth or even lower of what they once were.
What is even more brutal is that since the overall audience for AI comic dramas remains around the hundred-million mark, the explosively growing production capacity is diluting the probability of quality comic dramas being noticed to one-tenth or even less of what it used to be.
Without professional institutional promotion and traffic investment, the difficulty of an AI comic drama breaking into the mainstream increases dramatically.
The Core Reason Behind the Price Collapse
Currently, AI comic dramas in China can be roughly divided into three tiers: low-end dynamic comics, which can be understood as animated PowerPoint presentations; mid-tier premium comic dramas; and high-end 3D-modeled comic dramas.
The production quotes for these three tiers range from low to high, but all have seen significant declines over the past year, with the low-end segment experiencing the most intense competition.
According to Peng Xiang, an AI comic drama creator and founder of the brand Mao Pai Xing Xing, low-end dynamic comic costs have already dropped to just a few hundred yuan per episode.
Because they can be mass-produced with AI, this segment has become the epicenter of the price war, with some creators quoting as low as a few dozen yuan per minute, and one episode typically runs just one minute.
The second-tier premium comic dramas have also seen prices fall to between 1,000 and 2,000 yuan per episode.
These require deep human involvement to control art style and camera movement, with gacha artists, prompt specialists, and directors providing multiple layers of manual quality checks, making labor the core cost.
Prices for this category have dropped from over 5,000 yuan at the start of the year to the thousand-yuan range.
The third tier of high-end 3D-modeled comic dramas has no clear cost ceiling.
The expense lies mainly in labor, as director and modeling fees vary widely, rather than in AI computing power itself.
These customized works can still command a premium, but with AI modeling capabilities improving after the release of GPT-6, this premium has also declined noticeably.
The core reason behind the price collapse is the explosion of production capacity on the supply side.
AI has enabled assembly-line mass production.
Low-end dynamic comics only require purchasing online novel IP, feeding it into a workflow that automatically breaks down scenes, generates images, and converts them to video, with minimal human intervention.
Peng Xiang admitted, "I've encountered a comic drama company that, at its extreme, could produce 600 episodes in a single day — that's absurd!"
A flood of newcomer teams has poured into the industry, continuously undercutting quotes to win orders, directly driving prices down by dozens or even a hundred times.
Small Budget, Massive Profits? That Is Pure Survivorship Bias
According to media reports, in the first eight months of this year, 430,000 micro-short dramas were released in China, 13 times the total for all of last year, with AI dramas accounting for over 90 percent, mainly due to the widespread application of artificial intelligence technology in micro-short drama creation.
AI technology has opened up new possibilities for cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and innovative expression in micro-short dramas, while also bringing new challenges in rights protection and content quality.
With supply exploding and competition intensifying, once an AI comic drama is produced, securing traffic exposure has become its own discipline.
In conversations with BUG, Chen Shaofeng, vice dean of the Institute for Cultural Industries at Peking University, stated bluntly that AI short dramas have "no future," but AI short dramas combined with brand communication are becoming a "big business."
When paid short dramas first became popular years ago, the industry saying was "ten percent production, ninety percent traffic investment."
As a veteran with nearly a decade of experience whose team produces 2,000 to 3,000 live-action short dramas annually, Wang Xukun, founder of Xiaoxiang Yinghua, also acknowledged: "Teams that only do pure production without controlling distribution actually have very thin profit margins."
He pointed out clearly that the real major cost in the AI comic drama industry has always been traffic investment — "traffic investment accounts for about 60 percent of total costs."
AI has made it easier to "produce" content, but the threshold for "being seen" has actually risen — with massive content flooding the market, audience attention is diluted, and the traffic investment cost needed for a work to stand out only increases.
He further revealed that with the substantial increase in short drama supply, the approach of top short drama and comic drama players has shifted from a "hit-driven mindset" to a "stable supply, protect capital" strategy of small steps and quick sprints: "My top priority in making short dramas is to break even, to get my money back in the shortest time possible. I never pursue making a hit — making hits is for fame, but I treat this as a business."
Wang Xukun believes the core advantage of top teams is having stable production capacity and guaranteed work quality, which makes platforms willing to rate scripts before short dramas even begin filming or get approved, calculating the return on investment in advance.
But not everyone has this qualification — "80 percent of teams cannot achieve this."
The result is that the vast majority of small and medium-sized comic drama and short drama teams follow the path of "finding a script, pooling money, producing, then selling the finished product," much like "selling a used car" — "the longer you wait, the more it depreciates," which is essentially gambling on probability.
Qi Yu, a seasoned micro-short drama industry practitioner, also stated bluntly: "The stories circulating online about small budgets earning tens of millions are all survivorship bias."
Platforms will not bet on "the next hit director," and the works of most small and medium-sized teams will ultimately sink to the bottom of the content pool, ignored by all.
Trainees Turned Into Cheap Gacha Artists
The hotter the industry, the more training programs proliferate.
Alongside the improvement in AI comic drama and short drama production capabilities, a large number of low-cost AI comic drama and short film production training courses have begun appearing密集ly, with prices ranging from a few dozen yuan to tens of thousands of yuan, and training advertisements emerging endlessly.
In conversations with BUG, multiple industry insiders admitted: "The vast majority of AI comic drama training on the market is full of fluff — AI training programs are basically all scams."
Frontline creators are even more direct: "This stuff you can just figure out yourself — why would you need training? It's like learning to ride a bicycle, it depends on personal intuition."
The operational threshold for AI tools is extremely low, and the basic workflow can be self-taught.
What training programs teach is mostly superficial, and the truly core abilities of aesthetics and content judgment simply cannot be taught through short-term training.
Even more concerning is the emerging "training plus factory" scheme.
Many training institutions themselves own short drama companies, collecting around 20,000 yuan in tuition while converting trainees into cheap "gacha artists" — AI video creators — using the guise of hands-on training to generate gacha content for their own projects.
"They need a large number of gacha artists, no high technical skills required. Once you understand the workflow, you become a cog in their machine," one practitioner admitted.
The real purpose of many institutions' recruitment is to screen for low-cost assembly-line production workers.
Trainees pay their money and end up becoming the other party's production tools.
Faced with the industry's price wars and production capacity explosion, the interviewees gave highly consistent advice: do not get trapped in price wars; build genuine content barriers.
"Don't try to do every genre — like a chef, someone good at Sichuan cuisine may not be good at Cantonese cuisine," Wang Xukun advised newcomers to find their niche anchor: "Make your niche narrow and deep, for example, specializing in revenge-themed comic dramas for middle-aged women, thoroughly understanding that audience, their aesthetics, and their topics."
Do not fantasize about covering all genres.
Second, do not blindly believe tools are omnipotent.
"AI can only create short-term sensory stimulation; genuine emotion still comes from people."
As a top micro-short drama producer, Wang Xukun admitted that screenwriting skills and insights into human nature and society — these traditional abilities — will never be replaced by AI.
That is the true core competitiveness.
Finally, control risk — surviving long matters more than running fast.
"Compliance is a moat, not an entrance ticket." Ignoring compliance will directly lead to project losses.
At the same time, control costs and maintain cash flow: "The industry goes through a generational shift every three months — you need to ensure you can survive at least two full cycles."
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