Tencent’s efforts to translate the amazing success of its mobile title Honour of Kings in the west has ended up failing, and the company will now be abandoning it entirely.
The news comes from Reuters, where it is stated that the title in question, Arena of Valor, flopped in the main markets where it was being pushed, including Europe and North America. Arena of Valor is, for all intents and purposes, an English translation for the MOBA title Honour of Kings, which draws in nearly 55 million daily active users in China and was raking in an estimated $145 million a month, which makes it Tencent’s top grossing game.
According to two company sources close to the matter, Tencent has since scrapped the original plans for Arena of Valor. The sources go on to state that the Chinese mobile giant has disbanded the marketing team for Europe and North America’s regions, which just sees 100,000 and 150,000 users daily, respectively.
The failure of Arena of Valor can largely be attributed to Tencent’s US subsidiary, Riot Games, the developer behind hit MOBA League of Legends. As I reported previously, it was made known that Riot Games and Tencent had disagreements between the development of MOBA titles for mobile devices. Tencent has for years now been trying to convince Riot Games to bring League of Legends to mobile devices, a move which is now just materializing if the reports are to be believed. Without Riot Games’ support, Tencent moved on to develop Honour of Kings, which became a huge success in China, severely out-grossing other MOBAs in the market.
While this move caused some real strain to Tencent and Riot Games’ partnership, the real trouble began when Arena of Valor was developed. Honour of Kings was largely viewed by employees of Riot Games as a knock-off of League of Legends, and became rightfully incensed when Arena of Valor was launched in a market largely dominated by League of Legends.
Other reported reasons as to the failure of Arena of Valor include a huge misunderstanding of the markets in Europe and North America, where desktops are much more common for games compared to Asia. The idea to replace the hero designs from Honour of Kings into something much more generic with Arena of Valor also made it flop.
In any case, it will be interesting to see how the new partnership between Riot Games and Tencent works out, seeing that there is a League of Legends Mobile currently in development.
