Source: Shanghai Securities News
ByteDance has a new move in the game business. A few days ago, ByteDance's Mu Pupil Technology completed the internal test of the game "Decisive Peak". Some insiders said that this game is regarded as the strongest competitor of Tencent's "Glory of kings", and ByteDance may hope to rely on it to win a place in the domestic e-sports market.
"Decisive Peak" is a MOBA mobile game (multiplayer online tactical competitive game), this round of national service internal testing from September 26 to October 9 ended. Although there was no prior publicity, as the famous domestic version of "Endless Showdown", the internal test still attracted a large number of players, and the game server quickly showed that "the number of registrations was full".
For a long time, "Endless Showdown" has been regarded as the biggest competitor of "Glory of kings", and Mu Hitomi Technology has also been regarded as a fierce enemy of Tencent Games. According to public information, Mu Hitomi Technology was founded in 2014, the company is committed to the development and distribution of global mobile games, and has a huge player base in Southeast Asia. At present, Mu Hitomi Technology has a number of game products such as "Endless Showdown" and "Magic Hero", and the main "Endless Showdown" is very popular in Southeast Asia, with more than 90 million monthly active users.
According to the data, as early as 2017, "Endless Showdown" was the first in the Southeast Asian game revenue list calculated by Sensor Tower. Today, the cumulative number of downloads of "Endless Showdown" has exceeded 1 billion. At the beginning of 2020, Sensor Tower revealed that the cumulative revenue of "Endless Showdown" has exceeded $500 million.
Medium to heavy games are considered by the industry to be the biggest bonanza in the gaming market, and MOBA games are undoubtedly the most valuable "gems" in this bonanza. For this 100-billion-level market, ByteDance has been coveted for a long time. Although with the advantage of traffic, ByteDance has sat on the throne of casual games in a short period of time, but in the field of medium and heavy games has been slow progress, so the company is constantly looking for breakthroughs.
In March this year, ByteDance acquired Mu Hitomi Technology on the platform of its game brand "Dawn lightyear", which caused a shock in the industry. According to media reports, the amount of the acquisition may be between $4 billion and $8 billion. Moreover, in the process of acquiring Mu Hitomi Technology, Tencent also has Tencent among the bidders. But an interesting episode is that in May 2017, Tencent demanded that Mu Hitomi Technology co-founder Xu Zhenhua create a company during his tenure and violate a non-compete agreement, and requested compensation of more than 23 million yuan. In 2020, Mu Hitomi Technology also sued Tencent in court for acts of unfair competition, asking Tencent to stop using "Endless Showdown" to divert traffic for its own products.
"Endless Showdown" turned into "Decisive Peak", and returned to the domestic game market, can it reshape the industry pattern? "Objectively speaking, "Endless Showdown" takes the lightweight MOBA route, and the size of the entire game is only a few hundred megabytes, so the production level is not small compared to "Glory of the King"." An industry insider believes that compared with the Southeast Asian game market, the domestic game market competition can be described as "purgatory", and domestic players who are accustomed to playing exquisite games may not pay for this lightweight MOBA.
On the other hand, since Mu Hitomi turned to ByteDance, Tencent's layout in the MOBA field can also be described as a leap forward. At present, Tencent's IP is unprecedentedly strong, and public information shows that in addition to "Glory of the King", "Pokémon Collection" and "League of Legends Mobile Game" have also become the main force of Tencent's overseas entry.
Reporter Luo Maolin Editor Qiu Jiang