It almost feels like it is only yesterday when Riot Games graced League of Legends fans with TFT: Teamfight Tactics for mobile. Another spin-off game into the rich world of Runeterra and Riot's direct answer to the rise of the auto battler genre.
While originally a separate game mode in the League of Legends client itself in 2019, a standalone version of TFT: Teamfight Tactics soon spawned for mobile devices in 2020. As it is for the mobile gaming market, it is par for the course for titles to be released in separate versions when it comes to launching in China versus the rest of the world, and TFT is no exception.
Naturally different versions mean that the revenue performance wildly differs and taking a peek into the earnings, the China version of TFT is leading ahead by a long shot. Based on the data provided by the mobile app analyst website AppMagic, TFT China has generated approximately $450 million USD more than the global version despite being limited to one country.
Although most games do succeed better in terms of generating revenue in China, it is worth noting many notable mobile titles were released in the country before the rest of the world, thus there were content gaps. Furthermore, TFT is a spin-off of League of Legends, a widely recognized game across many regions and once held the status of most played title with 27 million active players daily globally in 2014. Even 14 years after its launch, League of Legends still garnered a huge following especially when looking at the daily Twitch stream viewership as a metric.
As such, one would have believed that TFT: Teamfight Tactics would be performing just as well in the rest of the world.
Revenue and Downloads
When looking at the data, TFT China has amassed a total of $523 million USD since its release sometime in August 2021. Meanwhile, the global version has only generated a total of $66 million USD since October 2019.
There is also around 10 million difference in total downloads, with the China version garnering 36,168,621 downloads while TFT Global gathered a total of 26 million downloads.
Teamfight Tactics Global has also recently opened up its servers in the Asia-Pacific region on 22nd November 2023, inviting players from the Phillippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Macau. In the first week of the Asia-Pacific launch, Teamfight Tactics Global collected $1 million USD in revenue, approximately 770 thousand more than its earnings in the previous week, but still less than what the China version earned.
Why is China TFT More Successful?
Well, there could be many factors for it but nothing is concrete as we speculate the reasons that lie behind the game's success. In our opinion, one of the biggest contributing factors is that the two versions are different, not in terms of only language support and localization but various other features as well.
At its core, it is the same game, same mechanics and all. However, in China, the game is released under a completely new name with Tencent as its publisher instead of Riot Games. This new branding is titled "Battle of the Golden Spatula", a direct translation of its Chinese name "金铲铲之战".
With a publisher as huge as entertainment conglomerate Tencent, expectations are certainly high and the company has the resources to stand out. Yes, fundamentally the game is the same but "Battle of the Golden Spatula" features more than a fancy new name as it has many game modes unlocked early on while equipped with a more robust microtransaction catalog.Not only does the game have the usual Battle Passes, but also limited-time gacha on top of in-game shops.
Another thing to note is that the global version of TFT is designed to have cross-progression so players can keep their progress even if they are playing on a Windows PC. Since cross-progression exists, there may also be a large group of people spending money on the PC version rather than on their mobile devices.
Mobile Gaming Culture
One speculation that can be made is that the Battle of the Golden Spatula was a much better success because of how much mobile gaming has been ingrained in Asian culture. This is not only limited to China and Japan as even here in Southeast Asia, people are spending more time on the go and the best source of entertainment is something portable like mobile phones.
If we look back into the data with more details, South Korea made up the majority of downloads for the global version of TFT: Teamfight Tactics and contributed 60% in revenue out of every other country. In contrast, observations suggest the West tends to prefer home consoles and PC gaming with China and Japan making up the majority contribution in earnings for big titles such as Genshin Impact.
eSports Love
Lifestyle aside, both China and South Korea are also huge into the eSports scene, with League of Legends being their national favorite for many years. Just take a look at the teams participating in this year's League of Legends World Championship and you will notice the majority of the players are from either China or South Korea.
Considering the huge love and participation in League of Legends from the aforementioned countries, there are bound to be many potential new fans or players joining TFT at any moment, whether from word of mouth or eSports superstars or streamers such as Faker inspiring them. There are even reports of China often topping around 75 million monthly active players in League of Legends, dwarfing other regions in comparison.
The love for eSports and competition also set an example of how different the Chinese mobile gaming audience is from the West, preferring more complex mid-core games over casual titles, especially comparing the Top-Grossing chart between China and the USA.
Keep Growing, Pengu
Started out much like the origins of League of Legends is to the original Defense of the Ancient (DotA) mod in Warcraft III, TFT: Teamfight Tactics took direct inspiration from Dota Auto Chess, a Dota 2 mod that kickstarted the whole auto battler genre.
Despite joining the party later, the League of Legends brand does help shoot up the spin-off title, and now TFT: Teamfight Tactics Mobile has surpassed its direct competitors, Dota Underlords and Auto Chess: Origin, with the former only generating $497k USD in its lifetime.
When it comes to the question of why TFT China, or rather, Battle of the Golden Spatula is such a success and has generated huge contrasting revenue income as compared to the global version. The answer is never simple and all we could do is speculate.
Of course, the gacha microtransaction design may be a factor for Battle of the Golden Spatula's high earnings but it is also very likely that it is just how big the brand value of League of Legends is in China. In combination with Chinese gamers' love for complex mobile tiles to grind for and the huge population count of the country, it is easy to see how the game garnered so much attention. Another speculative factor may be Tencent's know-how in marketing the game.
All this is not to discredit TFT, however, since the game is still relatively successful in the rest of the world and the earnings are nothing to scoff at. Especially, considering that Riot Games is still hard at work providing updates to the game mode and its standalone mobile entry. With the game having just launched in Asia-Pacific, only time will tell if TFT Global can catch up to Battle of the Golden Spatula's success.
Feature written by Vincent L.
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