People in costumes at a contest site of King of Glory in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province. (Photo by Wang Zhicheng/For China Daily)
Side-effects
Despite, or perhaps because of, its huge popularity, King of Glory has recently found itself in controversy at home.
Tencent saw its market value shrink by $14 billion as its shares slumped 4.13 percent in Hong Kong on July 4, after People's Daily accused the game of injecting "negative energy" into society.
A teenager was reported to have suffered a stroke after playing the game for 40 hours nonstop, while another was reported to have stolen money to buy expensive add-ons, according to the People's Daily commentary.
The company started to limit minors' playing time Tuesday, cap underage users' consumption and reinforce the real name system.
Overseas, Tencent will follow local regulations and a game classification system is usually in place, Gao told Xinhua. China has no such system yet.
Soft power
The popularity of MOBA games has given those who want to boost China's soft power food for thought.
King of Glory is at the forefront of China's booming mobile game industry, which pocketed 82 billion yuan ($12 billion) in 2016, up 59.2 percent year-on-year, according to the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association.
"Games are a universal language that everyone can accept and play," said Yu Guoming, executive dean of the School of Journalism and Communication, Beijing Normal University. He believes games are ideal products for cultural export as they contain "little ideology".
Fan Ying of the Institute for Cultural Industries at Peking University estimates game exports are growing at around 60 percent per year, leading the overall growth of Chinese cultural exports.
China tops the world in export of cultural products, but the percentage with intellectual property rights, such as films and games, is quite low, according to Zhang Xiaoming, a researcher at UNESCO.
But demand is rising as shown by the recent frenzy for Chinese web novels. The most popular genres are Wuxia (martial heroes), Xianxia (immortal heroes) and Xuanhuan (fantasy featuring adventures and wars), which are also mostly featured in online games like King of Glory.
The gap between demand and supply has long been filled by developed countries like the United States.
For instance, Kungfu Panda is made by the US, said Huang Bin, a researcher at the State Council Development Researcher Center. "Disneyland is home to all princesses from all countries."
For Huang, China has excellent culture, but lacks the ability to package, promote and make a profit from it.
King of Glory is providing a new paradigm. Apart from introducing Western characters, the team will fine-tune local characteristics and provide strong customer support to accelerate the game's globalization, said Gao.
"We have a team handling more than 50 languages and cooperation agreements with partners and distributors across the globe," he said. "We have spent a lot of time and money to improve our product and please our players."
