Chinese mobile games giant Tencent released its latest party game DreamStar just last week and has been leveraging ByteDance’s advertising platforms to promote it, hoping to challenge the latest hit from fellow Chinese conglomerate NetEase, Eggy Party.
Tencent and ByteDance have previously held a rivalry of their own and barred each other from their respective platforms, but now ByteDance’s many popular platforms like Douyin are being used to Tencent’s advantage, which Reuters suggests is “a sign of warming relations” between the two.
Teamwork makes the DreamStar work
Tencent’s DreamStar is currently projected to make up to $842 million in its first year, while Eggy Party is estimated to have generated $1.1 billion for NetEase in 2023. The latter’s figure was achieved in no small part through promotions on ByteDance’s platforms, which have helped Eggy Party reach an impressive 100 million active users.
The two casual multiplayer games share a number of similarities from genre to artstyle, hence the rising comparisons being made between their promotional strategies. And in the past month, Tencent has placed approximately 38% of its DreamStar ads on ByteDance’s Pangolin ad service.
This is especially noteworthy when considering Tencent has its own ad network and a whole Tencent Advertising arm, yet is still choosing to tap into ByteDance’s audience.
The warming between the two has been observable publicly this year, from Tencent placing its ads on ByteDance platforms to finally permitting streamers to play its games on them. China’s top livestreamer Zhang Daxian, famous for playing Tencent games like Honor of Kings, even started streaming on a ByteDance platform this month and gave a preview of DreamStar there.
So, it appears that where ByteDance is pulling back from gaming, Tencent is growing increasingly comfortable with leveraging the fellow tech giant’s services. Whether this will push DreamStar to the same heights or beyond NetEase’s Eggy Party remains to be seen.
