What Set AppGallery Apart from Other App Stores in 2020 When It Became a Secret Weapon for the Growth of Lords Mobile?
The top 30 Chinese mobile game makers managed to make 45% more revenue compared to December 2019
Benefiting from the rise of “stay-at-home economy”, the game industry has witnessed a rapid growth in the face of a tumultuous 2020, and game makers have reaped the rewards in terms of the overseas online entertainment market. According to data from SensorTower Store Intelligence in December 2020, the top 30 Chinese mobile game makers managed to make 45% more revenue compared to December 2019, while the spending of global mobile game players on App Store and Google Play only increased by 27.8% on a YoY basis, which indicates that Chinese vendors significantly outperformed their rivals in the global market.
According to media reports, I Got Games (IGG) broke a record in December 2020 that had stood for nearly two years due to the outstanding performance of its main game Lords Mobile. On January 16, 2021, Lords Mobile held an offline meetup in Guangzhou for players on the servers in China, which was named “The Night of Lords”. As a partner of Lords Mobile, AppGallery was invited to attend this event and had a great night with the key players of the game.
Huawei has a decade of experience in mobile app distribution, but its very own AppGallery was only launched outside China in April 2018. At the 2019 HUAWEI Developer Conference (HDC), Huawei officially announced that it would accelerate the development of its Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) ecosystem. In just over a year, AppGallery continued to grow and made its way into the world’s top 3 app markets. By the end of last year, AppGallery has been used in more than 170 countries and regions, with 530 MAUs worldwide and over 2.3 million developers worldwide registered on HUAWEI Developers.
Identifying pain points for an overseas cooperation solution with Lords Mobile
Despite it being the first time that AppGallery had participated in a meetup for players of Lords Mobile, there had been a long history of cooperation with Lords Mobile in global market operations.
As the world’s first 3A mobile game that combines real-time strategy choices and roleplay, Lords Mobile has been ranking among the top of the most profitable mobile games outside China since its launch five years ago. In 2019, it achieved an astonishing monthly revenue of more than CNY300 million. Ever since then, Lords Mobile has entered a stage of steady development and has started to seek long-term and diversified operations. By leveraging Huawei’s advantages in software and hardware as well as HMS capabilities, HMS experts at Huawei who specialize in helping developers launch and grow apps overseas have customized a global joint operation solution for Lords Mobile.
From June 12 to July 26, 2020, AppGallery and Lords Mobile unveiled an unprecedented joint operation. In addition to AppGallery bringing exposure to the Lords Mobile brand in key resource slots such as splash ads, banners, push notifications, and Gift Center on the global AppGallery site, HMS ecosystem resources such as traffic diversions via browser navigation, Vmall recommendations, and HUAWEI Ads, as well as UI materials were also opened to publicize and promote Lords Mobile from every possible angle.
AppGallery and Lords Mobile meanwhile carried out a series of brand promotion campaigns using Huawei’s global PR activities, social communication, and retail channel promotion resources. In 2020, the 618 live streaming recommendations of Lords Mobile by the Russian KOL Wylsacom attracted 130,000 viewers and 250,000 likes. Huawei’s retail channels all over the world also helped launch publicity campaigns for offline retail stores and the Month of Lords Mobile event. Brand-specific promotion cards were distributed and interaction was carried out with gamers through simple drawings of game characters in stores in key areas, achieving a huge amount of brand exposure and offline channel publicity.
Innovative promotion campaigns helped IGG make high profits again after four years.
As one of the world’s top host vendors, Huawei has leveraged its excellent hardware strength and brought many surprises to this top game in addition to providing traffic support. HUAWEI MatePad T8 and Lords Mobile launched a joint operation campaign in the Mexican market and launched more than 10,000 customized MatePads through Coppel and Mercado Libre, a leading retailer and the №1 e-commerce platform in Mexico respectively, which were warmly received by players.
Exposure of joint operation campaigns at Coppel, a leading retailer in Mexico
After just over a month of joint operations, Lords Mobile issued nearly ten thousands of vouchers and coupons and witnessed a growth in IAP revenue by 80% and 40% in downloads, both via Huawei’s channels. This has greatly enhanced its influence and brand preference among target players. The outstanding performance has not only helped IGG record revenue highs after four years, but also demonstrated AppGallery’s formidable operation capabilities. As an emerging global app market, AppGallery is fully capable of providing small and medium-sized developers with one-stop services to help them increase sales and achieve monetization. By implementing full-lifecycle user operations for various apps and customizing innovative operation solutions for top developers and partners, AppGallery paves the way for high downloads and revenues. In this way, AppGallery and game developers have formed an extremely close relationship whereby they have joined forces and grown together.
It is no accident that AppGallery and Lords Mobile have succeeded in working together. So far, top games such as the Rise of Kingdoms (Wan Guo Jue Xing) and AFK Arena (Jian Yu Yuan Zheng) have been cooperating closely with AppGallery and have achieved good market performances. This can be attributed to AppGallery’s strong networks of local organizations and media resources in 170 countries and regions as well as its independent platform capabilities that continue to prosper despite the presence of Google Play and App Store.
AppGallery is dedicated to developing tactical practices such as in-depth localization and long-term operations for each game app. It is also working with game developers to gain strategic insights into the global market and develop innovations, thus providing unlimited possibilities for more developers to gain a share of the global market.
