King of Glory has taken the first steps in the journey to conquer the international market, is this the end for Lien Quan Mobile?
Honor of Kings has long been known as the “myth” of the world MOBA village in general and the mobile MOBA game platform in particular with a revenue of more than 14 billion USD after 6 years of official release in Vietnam. Chinese domestic market. For many years in a row, VGVD and PUBG Mobile alternately took the leading position in the ranking of revenue of the phone segment. However, in terms of popularity or recognition by the international community alone – VGVD is far behind its “cousin” of the same company (Tencent), mobile MOBA fans to experts alike. VGVD is like a domestic king when completely sealing itself off in the domestic market. The gameplay orientation and character creation of the game itself are focused on serving the Chinese people, which is understandable when the average mainlander spends more than 5 million USD per day on their national game.
From the end of 2021, the momentum for the export of the “baby” game has been revealed by Tencent, through the announcement of the AWC 2022 tournament (taking place in October 2022) with super huge rewards. up to 10 million USD (Need to know the previous tournament the total prize pool was 500k USD). AWC 2022 will be a common international tournament for both Lien Quan Mobile (LQMB) and VGVD, where the professional teams of both games will compete together on a new map with more than 50 familiar generals. belonging to VGVD and LQMB. Not letting fans wait until October, recently via Twitter of Level Infinite (Tencent’s global game publishing division) – The product “Honor Of Kings” for the international market has been announced. announced, with the following announcement: “We have great news for you, the Honor Of King product by Timi Studio will be introduced later this year. Closed testing will be started next month. Please be patient and wait for the next information.”
Publisher Tencent’s recent moves for VGVD are no coincidence, in fact Tencent and its game are having problems maintaining their unique position in their home market. Specifically, according to China’s Finance Sina (financial site), Tencent and its games are having problems reaching new players. Need to know, Tencent owns WeChat, the social networking platform with the best user traffic in the country of billions of people with 1.288 billion users, but TikTok (Douyin) is growing very strongly with 600 million active users. daily, there is also the Kwai (Kuaishou) platform with more than 300 daily users. The common point of these platforms at the moment is that they have a very young age distribution of users, suitable for promoting games. The data shows that the effectiveness of these two platforms in promoting newly launched games is not inferior to WeChat, although Tencent’s platform has a better user base.
The second problem is that until now, the “father” of VGVD is very cautious in investing and developing new products, they are not too salty in terms of creativity. Tencent always chooses to buy back or invest in famous game studios in the world such as Riot Games, Turtle Rock, Epic Games or Ubisoft. However, Tencent’s round of buybacks and investments doesn’t always seem optimal. The proof is that there are still studios like MiHoYo, even though they don’t receive any money from the giant Tencent, they still launch a “super product” in terms of revenue and downloads – Genshin Impact. The domestic press believes that the success of Genshin Impact is proof that the “empire” that Tencent is trying to create has certain “cracks”. China’s largest game publisher has also realized its problems, as it gives more creative power to newly signed studios to develop games. Typically, the cooperation deal with studio Shanda Games (The place where games like Dragon Net M, Dragon Net or Company Of Heroes is created) – Tencent signed an agreement not to interfere with Shanda’s product development progress. , as well as split agreements, the stake will be 80 – 20 (80% for Shanda and 20% for Tencent with games released directly on Shanda’s platform).
The appearance of VGVD international version is really the “death knell” for LQMB, when compared to the graphics or gameplay quality of the senior game, it is superior to the younger brother. This is most noticeable through the recent co-productions of twin costumes between the two games, most notably the costumes of Condor Wu Jian Ho Toan and Lauriel Phi Thien, to the extent that gamers when Owning both skins has been compared as follows: “You guys are weak with low graphics, the silk baby Lau is like 2 steel wires”, “Probably the first batch. The next one has a name (it’s very similar to Violet and Ton Thuong Huong in the first collaboration)” – “Except for the scene where Dieu Thuyen’s stolen appearance looks ok, the skin is really boring. Not to mention the color of the coalition map is not beautiful, mixed with the pale looking skin x2. The silk band skin is stiff, the gait looks weird, because the game is 10gb with 2gb, so it loses some effects. In general, whatever your money is, if it’s cheap, you’ll accept it.”
Creating an “international” style is the only outstanding point of LQMB compared to VGVD, but in the Vietnamese market, this is not necessarily an advantage.
The only plus point of LQMB compared to VGVD is probably the design style, character creation not in Chinese style. But if the new version of VGVD in the international market includes generals from LQMB, it will be very dangerous instead of the national MOBA game in the Vietnamese market.
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