Young people from Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia hug each other wearing their national flags outside Axiata Arena Stadium in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, November 15, 2019. Soon, they would compete with each other with their game skills in the stadium. The game’s heroes, like them, would wear their national flags and compete for the title in a 5-5 match.
“Two out of two! Three out of three! Maniac!” The blue team quickly took over their base after dropping Gusion, the red team’s carrier hero. Within eight minutes, the EVOS team from Indonesia beat its opponent, RRQ, to win its first Mobile Legends Professional League (MPL) with a thrilling score of 4:3.
Be Patient, Be Unique: A Mobile Game’s Path to Industry Legend
It was 2019, and it was the first worldwide esports tournament organized by Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. The highest number of viewers reached as high as 760,000, while the tournament, which opened live on YouTube, was presented to players in 14 languages.
The moment EVOS won the MPL championship made a profound impression on Zikzira’s mind, having played the game for five years and reaching the highest “Mystic Victory” league. He is also a well-known live broadcaster of games in Brazil with 225,000 fans on YouTube.
“Before Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, there was no proper mobile MOBA in Brazil,” Zikzira told Pandaily. MOBA stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. In the classic game; all players are divided into two teams, each player can choose a hero with a set of specific skills, and players can capture the enemy’s base in multiplayer collaboration. Based on these traditional MOBA elements, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang also makes it highly interactive and fast, with an emphasis on 10-player real-time strategy and average 10-minute matches.
Mobile Legends: Bang Bang was first released in Brazil in July 2016. Two months later, it was released worldwide and quickly found surprising success, especially in Southeast Asia. In 2019, he was voted “Most Admired Game of the Year” in Indonesia. In the same year, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang progressed to one of the esports events at the Southeast Asian Games. This rapid success of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang in Southeast Asia points to the “mobile MOBA shortage” that Zikzara experienced in Brazil before this game entered the local market.
As of July 2021, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has reached 1 billion downloads and fixed the number of monthly active players to more than 100 million. Currently, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is among the top ten best-selling games on the App Store in more than 120 countries. Similarly, it entered the top earnings table in more than 60 countries on Google Play and secured its place in the top 10. As its name suggests, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has become a legend in the mobile gaming industry five years after its launch.
“Priority in Player” tradition
In the 5 years since its release, the Mobile Legends Team has brought numerous updates and optimizations to the game based on its ongoing in-depth research into player needs. Many players and even developers have difficulty remembering the original appearance of the game. Roger Yu, producer of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, said: “One day a colleague took out a screenshot of the game when we first released it and the changes were so much that we were all stunned. We’ve made a lot of improvements over the years,” he said.
In the first three months after its debut, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang went through more than a dozen changes. There were only about 30 people on the team at the time, and such frequent changes were based on a constant review of everyone and player needs looking for player feedback online. Today, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s core team consists of more than 1,000 employees and includes a dedicated team responsible for communicating with players and gathering feedback. Moonton, the company behind Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, has also opened branches in Indonesia and Singapore that collect feedback and transmit that feedback to its R&D team in Shanghai.
Sometimes hundreds of player feedback is collected in a week’s time, but not all of them could be resolved quickly. “In the beginning, some of our developers would actually reject certain feedback; Because as artists, they had their own opinions and wanted the players to accept the design. They would argue, ‘This is the way it’s supposed to be.’
“But it was pretty arrogant,” Roger continued, adding that they then became more open with the players. “For the features mentioned as ‘designed this way’, we will now tell our players when to solve them or explain why we designed them in the first place or why we can’t solve them now.”
Roger noted that Moonton’s tradition of “priority player” has been preserved to this day. For example, the top priority at the weekly product meeting is always a discussion on last week’s player feedback. Initially, Roger had set a 48-hour time limit for the team to respond to each feedback, but now Moonton is aiming for a response time of 4 hours.
Localization makes a difference
Although the development process went relatively smoothly, the company faced numerous challenges as it tried to expand into the foreign market. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang first announced its name in Southeast Asia and opened up to the world with its experience from there. But looking back on 2016, regions like Southeast Asia were undiscovered land for game developers. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, one of the first promoters in this region, did a pretty good job.
As early as 2014, Newzoopredicted the huge potential in the Southeast Asian gaming market. At first, the Southeast Asian population was 626 million, equivalent to about 8.6% of the world’s population, and the majority were tech-savvy young people. At the time, Southeast Asia had high-speed urbanization (average annual growth of 1.4% compared to 0.5% in China). All these factors pointed to a promising market for mobile games.
Unlike the history of games in developed countries such as the United States and Japan, where games played on computers and consoles have long dominated, there was no fully developed video game market in Southeast Asia. Local economic conditions limited people’s purchase of high-quality devices for gaming purposes. But on the other hand, the prevalence of smartphones in Southeast Asia has been rising rapidly in recent years. A 2020 report by Indian marketing company InMobi describes Southeast Asia as the “leading mobile market”, with games being one of the top three consumption trends on mobile devices in the region.
Despite the huge potential in 2016, Southeast Asia was frayed with challenges for game developers. Unstable Internet connectivity, a complex set of devices needed to adapt the game, the impact of app package size on conversion rate, and an underdeveloped payment system were obstacles mobile legends: Bang Bang had to overcome.
Eving Weng, director of the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang publishing team, said the principle is to ensure mobile legends: Bang Bang “runs smoothly on the lowest devices.” To address the problem of inadequate Internet infrastructure and high mobile communication tariffs, developers have reduced the package size of the game so that players can download it with minimal traffic data. At the same time, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has partnered with local mobile operators to issue game packages to solve the problem of network tariffs.
In addition, the cultural diversity and consumption habits of 11 countries in Southeast Asia have demonstrated a greater need for game localization. At this point, mobile legends: Bang Bang’s solution is to deeply understand the culture of different countries and players’ perception of the game and collaborate with popular cultural idea leaders (indonesian-language links) to create heroes that appeal to local players.
In fact, the problem of localization is not limited to Southeast Asia; There are also developing regions such as Latin America and the Middle East, and each country has its own characteristics to consider. For example, localizing Mobile Legends: Bang Bang for players in the Middle East is much more than linguistic translation. Because Arabic is written from right to left, developers have reversed the entire user interface to meet the reading habits of Arabic-speaking players. Ostensibly simple, this mission took Roger and his team almost half a year.
Brazilian broadcaster Zikzira, an experienced Mobile Legends: Bang Bang player, praises Mobile Legends: Bang Bang for its localization efforts. “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’ll give Mobile Legends: Bang Bang 10 for its localization in Brazil,” Zikzira said, citing hero Pharsa’s new costume, which includes his dance, which is common at the Brazilian Carnival.
“I think the most important thing in a game for Brazilian players is playability and frame rate. What distinguishes Mobile Legends from other games is that it performs smoothly even on cheap phones.” This is because moonton has installed 800 servers in Latin America that solve 98% of network problems.
As a type of game that focuses on competitiveness, MOBAs are not as focused on plot as console games by nature. Thanks to the attentive localizations of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, players can see heroes from different cultural circles on the same battlefield, such as Zhao Zilong from China and Gatotkaca from Indonesia. For those accustomed to the plot-based worldview of console games, mobile legends: Bang Bang’s more than 100 co-stars may seem like a mess. But this fully reflects the diversity that is one of the main values of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang.
In an interview with Pandaily, producer Roger Yu noted that it’s unrealistic to create a story that encompasses everyone to bring them together, while heroes from different cultures stand together, so by choosing to follow a more universal set of values, such as Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, “avoiding hateful or violent things,” all Mobile Legends: Bang Bang players remain culturally diverse. “We adopt a broad and inclusive worldview that welcomes all cultural elements.”
NEXT
Project NEXT
This highly comprehensive gaming continent celebrated its fifth anniversary in September. As part of the celebration, which runs until mid-November, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has launched a huge series of updates called Project NEXT. Players can expect to see richer visuals as well as a wider selection of heroes and costumes, such as Johnson “Optimus Prime” and X.Borg “Bumblebee”.
Producer Roger Yu also said moonton will collaborate with more popular brands such as Transformers and Star Wars in the future. “These brands have spent a lot of time gaining collaborative values, which is very close to our philosophy.”” In the meantime, Moonton’s next branding initiative continues the tradition of “priority player”, trying to gain more diverse brand partners such as film, animation, technology and fashion to meet the interests of players from different social circles.
“Game as a service” is a popular business model in the gaming industry. It brings constant updates to the game, allowing games to be cashed in after their first release and keeping players connected. Thanks to the patience and diligent work shown in the localization of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Moonton has made the game a “live game” that continues to evolve.
Nevertheless, as Roger Yu noted in the interview, “Game as a service” is also a philosophy. It’s about a game’s respect for its players. “The game is a fundamentally creative work based on the understanding of the players, not the dreams of our designers. In other words, players are the most fundamental element that contributes to our creative process.” In this respect, the satisfaction and respect that Mobile Legends: Bang Bang brings to its players as a game is probably more important than its commercial success.
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