E3S Web of Conferences 235, 03028 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202123503028 NETID 2020 Analysis on Marketing Strategies of Tencent Games—Take Honor of Kings as an Example Dantong Shen1* 1 School of Management and Economics The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen, China Abstract.This paper mainly focuses on the marketing strategies of Tencent Games. Tencent Games has the largest revenue all over the world. It is considered that the effective marketing strategies play important roles in global competition. Many researches have been focusing on this topic. In this article, strategies are summarized into four main points: product marketing, entertainment marketing, cross-border cooperation and intellectual property creation. Then the author conducts out a deep case study of Honor of Kings, introducing the most striking and latest strategies of the game. The game has cross-border cooperation with a cosmetics brand, idolizes the in-game characters and gets hold of festivals to launch virtual products. The experience of Tencent Games indicates that different strategies fit different periods and the developer should listen to the users and follow the trend. 1 Introduction In the 21st century, with the rapid popularization and innovation of electronic products, more and more video games have penetrated into people’s lives. Games market is now promising and plentiful. At the same time, it is highly competitive. Tencent is one of the most important names of mobile games industry. The company owns a great number of famous games including Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), Honor of Kings, Fortnite, Cross Fire and other Fig2. Top 5 companies in gaming revenue in 2018. games. In the past decade, the annual online games The game market, especially mobile game market, is revenue of Tencent has shown a steady and unstoppable still expanding fast today, thanks to the rapid technology growth. In 2019, Tencent’s online games grossed 115 innovation in smart phones. With mobile phones, people billion yuan—more than a ten-fold increase compared to may click on game apps at any fragmented time when they 2010[1]. According to the Global Games Market Report are on buses or during class breaks. It is a crucial task for of Newzoo, Tencent has remained as the world’s top game game companies to promote their games, thus people will publisher by revenue in 2018, followed by Sony and subconsciously choose their games in an instant. Microsoft. Additionally, the companies need to think about how they can remain popularity and user loyalty from countless choices. Marketing strategies play key roles in this situation. Tencent Games, as an industry leader, surely has some distinctive and remarkable methods to make the products stand out. This paper will dig deeply into the marketing strategies of Tencent Games. The significance of the paper are as follows. 1) Summarize the excellent marketing strategies of Tencent Games and use them as reference for other companies or fields. 2) To see whether Tencent Games can develop more Fig1. Annual online games revenue of Tencent in the past ten marketing tools to have a further promotion of the games. years. *Corresponding author’s e-mail：[email protected] © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). E3S Web of Conferences 235, 03028 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202123503028 NETID 2020 3) To see how marketing on games brings the whole specific game products. company more revenue. Honor of Kings has been a hot topic among the The research on this topic is practical and concrete. It researchers. Yuxi Qiao concluded six main marketing is conducted in a qualitative way. The most typical strategies of this game in her research on innovative marketing strategies of Tencent Games are first marketing strategies[4]. The strategies are shown below. summarized and explained with examples. Then, there is 1) Use opinion leaders to expand game’s popularity. a case study of the success of Honor of Kings, which is 2) Network interaction (with QQ, weChat) for one of the most profitable and successful game IP of increasing user stickiness Tencent in recent years. 3) Launch a pattern for fragmented time 4) Use Star Effect to increase popularity 5) Launch multifarious skins and property in game at 2 Literature review low cost There is a considerable amount of literature on the video 6) Bring out derivative products and culture game’s marketing strategies. Some researchers have Her illustration is quite clear and concrete. However, already collected the promotion behaviors of game some of the points are not really relevant to the game companies. In Marketing strategy analysis of mobile marketing. Additionally, since the paper was published two years ago, the latest and most innovative strategies are games—Taking King of Glory Games as an example, Li not included. listed out several main ideas of game marketing, including Jing Zhang and Wuqiang Tan studied on brand integrated marketing, crossover marketing, brand communication strategy of League of Legends, another marketing and precision marketing[2]. A disadvantage of famous game of Tencent[5]. There are posters and theme her paper is that it only expressed in general term and did Internet cafes which are offline. As for online media, game not go into much details. videos, novice teaching videos and competition videos can Li pointed out that integrated marketing refers to attract the attention of players. We Media communication integration of individual marketing tools into a whole, complements with star effect marketing. In the creative which can achieve synergies. The mobile game industry mining of culture, television and animation industry are will make full use of huge network resources in promotion, booming. combine online promotion with offline activities, and Bingyu Zou and Xinji Chen investigated on a game integrate various resources to serve the promotion of the called Identity V, a game of NetEase[6]. They illustrated same game[2]. In his analysis of marketing strategies of that the game used cross-boundary cooperation to raise mobile game brands, Mingyang Ma indicated that through attention. Last April, Identity V cooperated with corporation with live broadcast platform, the game can Strawberry Music Festival to play game background have more exposure to the public and game users can have music at the festival. Last November, Identity V a certain understanding of the basic operation of the collaborated with animation “ITO run’s second surprise game[3]. Ma also raised an idea that some games had collection” written by the famous Japanese terrorist master urban and campus competition for attracting attention[3]. ITO runji and launched a new skin of characters. In Setting up prizes for game winners could not only addition, the game and Shanghai Happy Valley together motivate the players, but also improve the reputation of launch the map of “Moon River Park”. brand in public. These studies are more specific and practical. However, In terms of crossover marketing, Li gave some because of the rapidly changing games market, some examples[2]. One example is that users can get free mobile strategies may be out of date. In the study of Honor of data to play by downloading the game, and another Kings in this paper, the author tries to cover all the latest example refers to the interaction with film and and innovative marketing methods. The existing studies entertainment, including film and television implantation also seldom talk about the ultimate effect of strategies as and celebrity endorsement. Li also stated that precision the researchers are objective, which means that they stand marketing, which made use of new media means to push on the sidelines and has not thought as a game player or marketing information to specific target consumer groups, potential customer. This paper tries to turn off these flaws. is now prevailing and quite effective[2]. The above papers give us a general idea of how game companies may promote and spread their games. 3 Analysis of Marketing Strategies Unfortunately, some literature fails to combine viewpoints with concrete examples, namely games products. Instead In this part, the marketing strategies of Tencent Games are of focusing on the product strategy of one specific classified into four main aspects. The analysis covers the company, the researchers simply generalize the strategies, most typical and successful strategies, which which may be shared by other companies. Many questions distinguished Tencent Games from its competitors’ remain unanswered such as in which situation should a product. Some points are obtained from speeches on specific strategy be used? Should the promotion methods Tencent Game Developers Conference (TGDC), a be adjusted at different stages of the product life cycle? conference on which the developers share their ideas of What kind of methods enable a game to stand out in the game development and marketization. market? In short, the effect of marketing strategies has not Tencent has an innovation team called TGideas. been shown or determined in these papers. According to its manager Ruofan Li, TGideas commits to Several studies have focused on the promotion of help the products to communicate and connect with users 2 E3S Web of Conferences 235, 03028 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202123503028 NETID 2020 effectively through creative design means and high- the following two years, eight episodes of documentaries, quality derivative contents, and thus accomplish business focusing on skateboarding, music, graffiti and some other value of products[7]. This team is the hero in marketing trends and cultures have been published, bringing a full games. Its creative design marketing can run through the range of content experience for game users.