Tencent has again allowed the broadcast of Honor of Kings in the Chinese equivalent of TikTok — it has been banned for five years
Chinese giants Tencent and ByteDance are building a relationship. Tencent no longer objects to streams of its Honor of Kings game on Douyin, a short video service owned by ByteDance.
Honor of Kings
Officially, Honor of Kings will be allowed to stream on Douyin from January 21.
Previously, Tencent and ByteDance regularly had conflicts, including over Honor of Kings. In particular, in 2016, Tencent filed a lawsuit against ByteDance, claiming that streams of the game in Xigua Video, another video service owned by the company, violate its copyrights. The trials lasted three years. In 2019, the court sided with Tencent and banned the broadcast of Honor of Kings on all ByteDance services without Tencent's permission.
The Sina Technology publication suggests that Tencent's decision to give the green light to Douyin is partly due to a drop in revenue from the company's gaming division. The same Honor of Kings began to attract fewer gamers and earn less compared to previous years (note, this did not prevent it from becoming the highest-grossing mobile game in the world by the end of 2023 with revenue of almost $1.5 billion, according to AppMagic).
In addition, Tencent and ByteDance have recently been competing less in the gaming segment. At the end of 2023, it became known about ByteDance's plans to restructure the gaming division and close its largest gaming "daughter", the publisher Nuverse, known for the card game Marvel Snap. Soon it was also reported that ByteDance was in talks with several companies to sell games. Tencent was named among the potential buyers, but ByteDance said in a media comment that it had not reached an agreement with it.
It is worth noting that Tencent and ByteDance entered into the first peaceful agreements regarding broadcasts in Douyin in April 2023. Then Tencent allowed content from the Tencent Video platform to be distributed in Douyin and other ByteDance services.
