Tencent’s phenomenal mobile game Honour of Kings just posted the lowest number of monthly downloads in February—down 55% from the previous year—but industry analysts say it might actually be good news for the company.
“The latest statistics won’t have too much impact on Tencent’s gaming business,” Vincent Teng, founder of Chinese video game research firm Gamma Data, told KrASIA. “Most domestic games are working with Tencent. If the gamers flow into other games, it would just be like transferring something from your left hand to your right hand.”
Liao Xuhua, a gaming analyst at Beijing-based data consultancy Analysys, agreed that the shrinking downloads would have a limited impact on either the game or the company because “it’s unlikely to affect Tencent’s revenue.”
“Honour of Kings is the highest yielding game. As long as it can keep the current level of revenue, it still has a lot of potential,” Liao said in a phone interview with KrASIA. “The users released from the game will actually benefit other Tencent games as well as the whole industry,” he added.
Tencent’s Honour of Kings, released in 2015, is arguably one of the world’s most commercially successful mobile games in history. According to Nomura, a Japanese investment bank, Honour of Kings raked in about RMB 7 billion (just over $1 billion) in February.