In the first half of 2021, the main advertisers in the mobile gaming market were games made by developers from China. The analytical company SocialPeta analyzed, using the example of Genshin Impact and Lords Mobile, how betting on creatives helps Chinese projects with promotion in the West.
Genshin Impact General situation
Chinese mobile game developers are cramped in the domestic market. Due to the increased competition, they are increasingly looking towards the West – in 2020, almost a third of the revenue of local games came from abroad ($ 15.4 billion out of $52.4 billion).
Advertising has become one of the tools that helps companies gain a foothold in the foreign market. Chinese studios are much more active in advertising their games compared to Western developers. According to SocialPeta, in the first half of this year, the games of Chinese developers got 80% of the places in the world’s top 50 mobile advertisers by the number of published creatives. They also took all the first ten lines of the rating.
The number of Chinese games in the top 50 mobile advertisers by the number of published creatives
The developers of MMORPGs, card games and social casinos rely most on advertising.
These genres partially include two popular projects outside the Celestial Empire — Genshin Impact and Lords Mobile.
Genshin Impact
The game from the Chinese studio miHoYo cannot be called a full-fledged MMORPG, but it has elements of multiplayer. The cooperative mode opens after the user reaches rank 16.
The company has to pay attention to Genshin Impact advertising for two reasons: to attract the attention of Western gamers in principle and to maintain a large audience size.
As analysts explain, Genshin Impact focuses on the passage of the plot and the exploration of the open world. Unlike many other mobile studios, miHoYo cannot release updates often. Therefore, as soon as gamers complete all available quests, they begin to lose interest and stop playing. It is possible to attract new users with the help of advertising.
miHoYo’s advertising targets mainly players from the USA (11%), Canada (10.2%) and Australia (7.8%).
Distribution of Genshin Impact iOS ads by country
As for the frequency of the release, the first Genshin Impact advertisement began to appear regularly a few days before the launch of the public beta (it was scheduled for September 15, 2020).
But the peak in the number of creatives occurred on the day of the global release — September 28, 2020.
The following peaks were often associated with major updates to the game. For example, patch 1.2 was released at the end of December, patch 1.3 was released at the beginning of February, and patch 1.5 was released at the end of April. Shortly before these dates, you can see a sharp increase in advertising. At the moment, the April update turned out to be the most “advertised” after the release of the game itself. In the period from April 14 to April 28, miHoYo published over 1,200 creatives on iOS only.
The main advertising network used by miHoYo in April is Facebook. It accounted for 341 creatives. The second was Instagram with 328 advertising creatives.
The number of Genshin Impact creatives from August 2020 to July 2021 on the iOS platform
Such attention to the Western audience allowed Genshin Impact to enter the top 30 free-play mobile games on the American market (App Store) several times.
For example, in February, she rose from 60 to 13th place in the ranking.
Dynamics of Genshin Impact’s position in the rating of the American App StoreLords Mobile
The game was released by IGG in 2016. This is a 4X strategy. According to analysts, titles like Lords Mobile are traditionally popular in the West, and the IGG project was no exception. Due to the fact that there is a lot of PvP content in it, developers have to constantly attract new audiences through advertising.
IGG shows a significant part of the title’s advertising to gamers in the UK (5.22%), Canada (4.9%), Italy (4.9%) and the USA (4.6%).
Distribution of Lords Mobile iOS ads by country
As in the case of Genshin Impact, the authors of Lords Mobile began to actively advertise it around the world from the moment of release.
SocialPeta did not tell in detail how things were in the year of release, but noted that the volume of creatives for the project has remained at a high level for the last 12 months.
Peaks in the number of advertising creatives can be associated with the addition of fresh content to the game. For example, at the end of March, the developers announced the imminent start of the event, during which Saint Seiya heroes appeared in Lords Mobile. From that day until the end of April, the number of ads increased dramatically: from 400 to 600 videos per day on iOS.
The number of Lords Mobile creatives from September 2020 to August 2021 on the iOS platform
As of today, the total time for placing Lords Mobile ads on Android is almost 2000 days, and the number of creatives shown exceeds 100 thousand.
Instagram Facebook, Google Ads, Facebook, Messenger, Audience Network and Instagram are the most popular networks used by IGG.
Advertising Networks for Lords Mobile
SocialPeta noted that IGG’s approach to advertising helps Lords Mobile maintain a high level of revenue even five years after the release.