中国游戏开发商沐瞳借电竞世界杯推进欧洲市场布局   2026-07-30

 

China's Moonton Technology, the developer of hit mobile game Mobile Legend: Bang Bang, is leveraging the Esports World Cup in Paris as a springboard to expand into the European market, setting an example for Chinese game developers to go global.

This year’s EWC, which runs from July 6 to Aug. 23, is the first one held outside the Middle East, after the first two were staged in Riyadh, as regional instability prompted organizers to relocate.

This year, the EWC will feature 25 competitions in 24 games, with a total prize pool of USD75 million. It is run by the Esports Foundation, a non-profit backed by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.

MLBB: From Southeast Asia to Europe

MLBB, the multiplayer online battle arena game developed by Shanghai-based Moonton, is one of the games on the EWC roster. Launched in 2016, it has been among the highest-grossing games in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia for years. Moonton puts MLBB global downloads above 1.5 billion, with 110 million monthly active users.

The latest MLBB competition at the EWC was the MLBB Women's International, where France's Team Vitality beat Natus Vincere's Philippines-based team 4-2 to clinch its fourth title. Chinese club Saeta lost in the quarter-finals.

Europe is not a market Moonton has bought its way into. "We haven't pushed hard on paid acquisition, but you see the game gradually getting picked up in communities -- people start talking about it, people start playing," Ray Ng, head of esports ecosystem operations at Moonton, told Yicai at the EWC.

Europe's mobile gaming user base is expanding by about 5 percent to 15 percent a year, but the composition of that growth is shifting, Ng noted. The fastest expansion is in Eastern Europe, where younger users have grown up playing games on phones rather than on consoles or computers, he explained.

The 2023 International Esports Federation world championship in Romania, which hosted the MLBB open qualifiers, drew more than 200 registered teams, far exceeding expectations, according to Ng.

Moonton's European approach is slow: community management and grassroots-level tournaments first, monetization later. "You pull those people together, run a lot of community-level events, and let the habit form," Ng explained. He expects it to take five to ten years for the mobile-native generation to become the mainstream European user base.

If Europe is a long game, Türkiye is the near-term move. The M8 World Championship, MLBB's flagship global event, will be staged in Istanbul in January next year, Ng said. It will be the first time in eight years that the M series finals will be held outside Southeast Asia.

Istanbul was chosen for two reasons, according to Ng. Türkiye has been building its esports infrastructure for several years, and its teams have become regular quarter-finalists at international events. Moreover, the country sits between Asia and Europe.

"We want to use Türkiye to gradually radiate influence into Europe," Ng noted.

This strategy replicates a playbook already proven in Southeast Asia. MLBB was designed for overseas distribution from the outset, and its Southeast Asian success rested on heavy localization work, according to Ng. "We drew on what had worked in Southeast Asia, and then replicated that model in Türkiye, or the Middle East."

Even though Southeast Asian countries are big contributors to games like MLBB in terms of user base, the US and European markets are still more important in terms of monetization.

Chinese games' overseas sales rose 10 percent to USD20.5 billion last year from 2024, according to a report from the Game Publishing Committee of the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association. The United States accounted for 32 percent of the total, Japan and South Korea for a total of 26 percent, and Germany, the United Kingdom, and France together for 9 percent.

 

来源：Yicai Global

 

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