East meets west: How Level Infinite and TiMi Studio Group are taking Tencent global

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by Anna Munhin May 26, 2023 News
East meets west: How Level Infinite and TiMi Studio Group are taking Tencent global

In order to deliver high-quality games to a global audience, Level Infinite and TimiStudio Group were launched. Ryan Ward, commercial team director at TiMi Studio Group, best known for Honor of Kings, spoke at the GamesBeat Summit about how the company is collaborating with other companies to make big games.

The Level Infinite brand aims to ensure everyone under that umbrella has the resources, focus and understanding of the marketplace to bring the right users to the right content, and create a hit. Honor of Kings has 100 million downloads and has an audience of more than 50% women.

The goal is to provide an overarching brand and container for all of the studios. We engage with our studios, helping them realize their vision, applying the resources that we have, across all of the different disciplines in marketing.

The way to give value to players is with games-as-a-service and live service models. He explained that the model is at the heart of everything TiMi does and that it is a foundation from which to adapt to changing markets.

He said that they wanted to put quality first with awesome creative content that the market actually wants and cares about. A new mindset is required. We want to plan and adapt for the changing market in order to meet the needs of the West.

Mobile dominates both PC and console games revenue around the world. To stay competitive, games need to be available on every platform.

"We want to make sure that our studio partners have an opportunity to create content not being held hostage by one particular platform, but being able to work with a lot of different platforms." Ensuring that we are best-in-class when it comes to publishing on PC and continue to dominate on mobile is one of our mandates.

They look for diversity in their studios to make games for all markets.

It is a challenge to develop on multiple fronts but it is also a way to hedge their bets.

He said that they want to be in that cross-play era because it is all about accessibility. They use all of the platforms. You are on your phone at lunch. As your day goes on, you switch over to the 10-foot experience on your sofa and the big screen in your gaming PC. You want to capture as much leisure time as possible.

There is a link between the east and the west. The studio is working to create a process that is effective for western markets while respecting the heritage of the company. Ward said that it takes two buckets to conceive its winning strategy.

He said that the creative process is what starts everything at TiMI. They start from the narrative in order to develop an intellectual property with broad appeal and then imagine their core game loops.

He said that they were beginning from the key pieces. We are not even talking about business opportunities. We know we have to make great games to change hearts and minds and win the eyeballs, and then layer in the business strategy around what platforms we're going to go on, where we're going to publish, and even what our production strategy is. We are trying to learn from those experiences and are very proof of concept minded. Later on, we will be ramping up to mass production.

Level Infinite wants to be where gaming is, where the users are, and provide them with great content, so they are constantly evaluating content out of TiMi for marketability, user segment, and whether it feels right for the market

He said that they don't like to be predictable because they want to try new things. It takes a lot of collaboration from all the different teams to be innovative. We have a lot of successful games, so we look for what works. We want to mirror what's working, and double down on that, and eliminate what's not working, and apply those learnings to evaluate new content.

That includes how they will bring it to market, who their audience is, and how to target them effectively in order to gain a better understanding of what is working in the marketplace.

It doesn't matter where it is, if it's a great game, it can move to other regions and be successful. Helping the development studios to realize that greatness is what it is.

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