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Mobile gaming giant Tencent has had great success in China, its home country, Honor of Kings, which has attracted 55 million players. But an expansion in Europe and North America did not work out as planned, which allowed the company to learn valuable lessons about expansions.
renowned Arena of Valor for new markets, on which it was launched in the summer of 2017, the game was worth about $ 145 million a month out of the 55 million daily active users in China. However, according to two sources that spoke to Reuters, several development and marketing mistakes as well as cross-border disagreements between Chinese and American teams have led the company to abandon more or less the game in new markets.
"In these markets, we just let live or die on our own way," a source told the news agency. They added that the game has only 100,000 users in Europe and 150,000 in North America. The initial plans for the growth of the game abroad have now been abandoned and its marketing team disbanded.
Following this failure, which was painful given Tencent's willingness to develop its services outside of China, the company is adapting. It will require: increased regulation of the Chinese government and repression of addictive games have increased the pressure to occur abroad.
Despite the mbadive growth potential of Chinese brands abroad, Tencent's changes were revealing: first, it started to pay attention to local needs and brought in specialized partners in certain fields. such as marketing, through the agency based in Singapore Sea Ltd
Analysts pointed to the lack of expertise in key areas – the distribution and demographics of users – due to the inability to be competitive in these markets.
First, there were infrastructure issues. Compared to China, a large part of the European and North American player community does not have access to fast 4G networks. As such, the most avid gamers prefer to play on their computers, which tend to have faster connections, needed for a rich online game.
In addition, Tencent has a natural advantage in promotion, given the predominance of its WeChat and QQ platforms in China. In the West, it quickly became clear that Facebook did not occupy this position for PC gamers.
Other problems stemmed from strange badumptions. Honor of kings, The original Chinese version contains characters inspired by the vast mythology of the country. In the version of Overseas, the company chose to inspire European stories and comic book heroes popular throughout the West. This has created a problem in the increasingly important world of electronic sport: two versions of the same game limit the potential of international tournaments.
Source: Reuters, WARC
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