With the developing economy and technology,there are more and more different platforms coming out for diversified video games. In 21 century, people are no longer need to limit themselves on computer only.Since smart phone was invented, game makers are always consider about how to bring video game on people’s mobile phone. Mobile phone is a better platform for people compare to computer.Firstly, it is more convenient for people to play games on mobile phone because mobile phones are very light for bringing out.People would carry their phone at anytime/any places,which means you can play games anywhere instead of seat in your room and only play games at home. Mobile games are easily accessible, provide quick entertainment and rarely ask for any special skills. You can play while waiting for your coffee or at the queue of your local supermarket. Even when using the bathroom. Secondly, the budget will be much lower if you choose to play games on mobile.People need to buy a good headphones/gaming mouse and keyboard if they want to play games on PC, however you only need a phone but nothing else if you want to play mobile games.

• 21% of Android and 25% of iOS apps downloaded are games.
• Games account for 43% of all smartphone use. .
• 62% of people install a game on their phone within a week of owning it.
• 78% of gamers are Android users.
• The number of active mobile gamers worldwide was 1 638.4 billion.
• This number has almost doubled in 2019, reaching 2 221.9 billion at the time of writing.
• 57.9% of the games played are puzzle games.

After we realize that how successful mobile games are, I will break it down to my point of this blog which is Honor of Kings.

Honor of Kings is no doubt the most popular and successful mobile game in China,before we talk about the game itself I want to show some data about how popular Honor of Kings is.

There are 50 million of people who play Honor of Kings every single day,and more than 200 million registered users.It was predicted by medium that the daily online player for Honor of Kings will break through 70 million.

Honor of Kings is a mobile terminal MOBA(multiplayer online battle arena) game, it is very similar to some PC MOBA games such as DOTA or league of legends.The way of playing Honor of Kings is very simple,destroy enemy’s towers and try to kill enemy so you can get more gold than your enemy, and destroy enemy’s nexus for win.

Honor of Kings also include over 10 of different game mode so people will not feel bored when they play it for a long time.

There are lots of reason for why Honor of Kings can be success in China, I will pick some of them and also explain it.

1.Easy to play

“Easy to get started” is almost determined the popularity of moba games.In Dota, the purchase of equipment is one of the most painful things for player because there are not only one store in the game, and different equipment have different formulation. In Honor of Kings, player can purchase their items at anywhere/anytime.There is only one store in Honor of Kings which is much more convenient and friendly for people who just start to play this game.The system will also list the best item to purchase for the champion, player will never be confused about what item should they purchase first.

2.The game characters in Honor of Kings are very familiar to Chinese people

Honor of Kings have designed their game characters based on traditional Chinese characters,especially the generals in “the Three Kingdoms” include: Liu Bei, Guan Yu,Zhang Fei, Cao Cao….

Honor of Kings is a game which is free to play, people don’t need to spend any money through the game.However,according to the data from app stores(ios) and google play(android),the general income of Honor of Kings are 1.93 billion dollars. People might be questionable about how does a free game made this much of money?To answer this question, we have to talk about the marketing strategy of this game which is the game characters.

There are 93 of different characters in the game and all of them are based on real people(traditional Chinese character). It resonates lots of Chinese people who are interested with Chinese history.Tencent(the company who owned this game) took lots of effort for game character design, the characters in games were selected from most famous and attractive characters in Chinese history.Tencent also hired some painter who are at the top level in China to recreate the image of characters.

When people just start to play Honor of Kings, there are only a few characters which are available for them to play.Player need to win game as many as possible to get gold, when they have enough gold they can use it to unlock new character.

However, this process will takes lot of time in Honor of Kings.Most of the champions in Honor of Kings need large amounts of golds to be unlocked(10000 golds).Win a game will only give players hundred of golds, which means player need at least one week to unlock a new champion.For most of players,they are not satisfied with few amounts of available champions and want to play more champion without spending so much time to get golds,which comes to the main marketing strategy of this game-selling character

In this game,each characters own different skins.If you want to make your character looks better and different to other players,you can purchase skin for your character to even makes your champion cooler.

Player spending in Honor of Kings averaged close to $5.3 million per day during 2018,and all of these money were earned through selling champions and skins.In recent years, Tencent is trying to expand their market out of Asia.Tencent also made a global version and named the game as Arena of valor(same game as Honor of Kings),for those people who want to play Honor of Kings but they are not in China(the lag would be very high if you play Honor of Kings in other countries),maybe Arena of valor is a better option for them.