Tencent Games Strategy 2019 China Games Market Intelligence: Tencent Games Strategy 2019 Tencent Games Strategy 2019 Tencent is a Chinese technology conglomerate founded in 1998. It is one of the top 10 public corporations globally, by market cap, and is one of the world’s largest venture capital and investment firms. Tencent’s success is at least partially attributable to WeChat and QQ, which are two of the largest social messaging platforms globally (despite being used primarily in China). It is also the largest gaming company in the world by revenue, having generated games revenue of $19 billion in 2018. China’s games market was rocked by a temporary game license approval freeze between April 2018 and December 2018, which led to Tencent reporting its first profit decline ever. Despite this, the company has been able to weather the storm and maintain its leadership position. This report describes the bold strategy for games that Tencent has disclosed. Tencent’s earnings and outlook for Q2 2019 Tencent reported Q1 2019 revenue of $12.69 billion, up 16% YoY, primarily driven by an increase in Payment, Cloud and Advertising revenue. Operating Profit was $5.46 billion, up 20% YoY with operating margin increasing to 43% from 42% last year. Total gaming revenue declined slightly to $5.2 billion, down 2.2% YoY. The decline was due to lower revenue from both Tencent’s mobile game and PC game segments. Mobile game revenue declined 2.3% YoY, primarily due to fewer titles being launched during the Quarter when compared to the same period last year. There were 8 new mobile games launched in Q1 2018 compared to just 1 in Q1 2019 (when licensing was just getting back underway). Perfect World Mobile, which received a license at the beginning of the year, was the only new game to launch during the Quarter, generating revenues of over $100 million in its first month. Perfect World Mobile is an RPG game for smartphones that has been adapted from the PC game of the same name. The title is developed by Perfect World Entertainment themselves and published by Tencent. Existing (legacy) titles continued to perform well with Honor of Kings (known as Arena of Valor in the West) remaining the #1 grossing mobile game in China during Q1 2019. Tencent saw an increase in DAU across its mobile game portfolio and paying users increased Quarter on Quarter, thanks to Chinese New Year promotions and the introduction of season passes and subscriptions across PUBG Mobile, Honor of Kings, CrossFire Mobile and QQ Speed Mobile. Season passes in F2P games were popularized by Fortnite’s battle pass last year and Tencent is currently experimenting with this monetisation method in its hit legacy games. 2 China Games Market Intelligence: Tencent Games Strategy 2019 PC Online game revenue declined 2.1% YoY, due to the lack of new title launches. League of Legends remains Tencent’s hit PC game with user engagement and spend increasing over 2018. We credit high user demand to the success of League of Legends esports with Chinese team Invictus Gaming winning the League of Legends World Championships. Dungeon & Fighter has also been a top performer with paying users increasing Quarter on Quarter after the Chinese New Year update. Tencent’s overseas games and earnings from investments also played a part as PUBG Mobile reached 100 million monthly active users outside China and has now generated lifetime revenue of nearly $400 million overseas. Tencent owns a majority stake in Supercell, who have published another hit in Brawl Stars. The company owns minority stakes in Epic Games and Garena who have found success with Fortnite and Free Free, respectively. Q2 2019 Outlook is Positive We expect games revenue to see a notable increase year over year as the company plans to release Peacekeeper Elite, Game of Thrones: Winter is Coming, JX Online 3 Mobile, Once Upon a Time, Fairy Tale Mobile, Ace Force Warrior and The Rhythm of The Clouds and Dreams. We expect Peacekeeper Elite, which is Tencent’s new battle royale title, to be the standout game during the Quarter as players from the recently closed down PUBG Mobile migrate over and spend in the game. The large portfolio of games set to launch during the Quarter is also a positive sign for the industry that Chinese game companies are returning to a healthy release schedule. Peacekeeper Elite will be Tencent’s key title for 2019 Peacekeeper Elite launched on May 8, 2019 as Tencent’s new self-developed battle royale game by Tencent’s Lightspeed & Quantum Studio, published by Tencent Games. The title launched with zero marketing or announcement prior to launch yet is already set to become one of Tencent’s most successful games ever. The game is essentially a carbon copy of PUBG Mobile with a few slight changes, and conveniently launched the moment that PUBG mobile was shuttered. Tencent closed PUBG Mobile in China on May 7, 2019 as the game, which had been on the market since January 2018, had still not received a license that allowed Tencent to monetise the game in China. Meanwhile, Peacekeeper Elite did receive a license to monetise in April 2019 and Tencent decided that it’d be easier to close down PUBG Mobile and migrate all 150 million monthly active users to the new game where they could be monetised, rather than continue to operate PUBG Mobile with no way to monetise it. 3 China Games Market Intelligence: Tencent Games Strategy 2019 Whilst an official reason was never given as to why PUBG Mobile was not awarded a license to monetise, we note that an unofficial ban on Korean game IP and rules surrounding battle royale games in China may have been contributing factors, because the original PC version of PUBG is a battle royale game developed in Korea. A statement from China’s Audio-Video and Digital Publishing association in October 2017 noted that battle royale games should strive to remove as much violence as possible, incorporate Chinese values and take into account the health of minors (who were spending many hours on such games). As the game can be monetised, Peacekeeper Elite already has a store that sells skins, weapons and other items. We expect Tencent to add additional monetisation options such as a battle pass and more loot box options in the future. It’s clear to us that Tencent took a number of steps to self- develop a battle royale game based on “domestic IP”, that did not utilise a Korean IP and explicitly followed content regulations, such as removing blood splatter, in order to obtain a license. Great news for Tencent, as they can now monetise a mobile battle royale game in China, yet not the best of news for PUBG Corp who may not see any of the profit from Peacekeeper Elite’s operation in China. The game hit #1 on the iOS game revenue chart in China on day 1 (May 8th) and we note that the game has remained at the top of the charts since launch, alternating between the #1 and #2 positions. We estimate that the game could generate gross revenues of over $150 million in its first month and has the potential to gross nearly $1 billion by the end of the year, making the title one of Tencent’s most successful games. Coupled with PUBG Mobile overseas, we believe that the battle royale genre will be a key driver of growth for Tencent this year. We note that Tencent has been able to launch battle royale games such as PUBG Mobile overseas and Peacekeeper Elite in China whilst also adding battle royale modes to existing games such as Honor of Kings and Call of Duty Online which has helped boost engagement and spend in the games. However, Tencent is still looking to obtain licenses for Fortnite, H1Z1 Battle Royale, Ring of Elyssium and Call of Duty Mobile Battle Royale to monetise these games in China. If Tencent is able to receive licenses for these games, the company will be able to grow and enhance its presence in the popular battle royale genre. A growing pipeline of diversified titles will drive revenue growth in 2019 Tencent has taken a number of steps to grow and diversify its game portfolio to ensure that it can have a presence across all gaming genres and create games for underserved segments of the market. The company is carrying out this initiative by self-developing new games, licensing third 4 China Games Market Intelligence: Tencent Games Strategy 2019 party games and by investing in and acQuiring developers who can augment Tencent’s existing game pipeline. This will give Tencent a greater presence across all gaming genres and segments, allowing them to Quickly respond to new trends and reduce any negative impact from new regulations. This is one of the ways that Tencent was able to weather the storm last year during a temporary game license approval freeze when China’s gaming regulator stopped approving new licenses for games whilst it restructured and reformed between April 2018 and December 2018. Despite being unable to obtain new licenses for games, Tencent was still able to release more than 30 games during this period as they already had a large number of games far along in development that had been awarded a license prior to April 2018. This helped Tencent grow its gaming revenue 8.9% YoY, which was down compared to 41.5% growth in the prior year, but it’s worth noting the situation could have been much worse.