国民IP如何持续长青？王者荣耀的答案藏在“共创生态”里

This article shares the core strategies that have kept *Honor of Kings*, China’s long-standing national mobile game, thriving after over a decade of operation. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Against the backdrop of ever-shortening lifecycle for most mobile games, *Honor of Kings* has maintained robust high-level growth. This success does not stem from short-term promotions or user acquisition, but rather from building a co-creation ecosystem that encourages player participation. It turns user-generated community culture into its own content assets through themed events: for example, it established the "5v5 Friends Festival" as a recurring social ritual for players, and launched the "Summer Gamer Festival" to embrace the popular player-created "gamer (nongyou) meme". This strategy has forged strong emotional bonds between the game and its users.

2. Today, *Honor of Kings* has evolved far beyond a single game product into a diverse, symbiotic national IP ecosystem. It not only delivers reverse value to partnered entertainment IPs, but also collaborates with offline urban commercial districts to drive in-person consumption. It continues to roll out new experiences, including an AI pet "Lingbao" and a new auto-battler mode *Kingdom of Chess*, while also taking on roles in promoting traditional Chinese culture and exporting Chinese original content to global markets.

This article offers replicable actionable insights for brands on IP operation, marketing promotion and cross-industry collaboration. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. For brand marketing, brands should move away from the conventional strategy of relying solely on short-term price promotions and instead adopt a user co-creation approach. By actively embracing user-generated community culture and emotions, brands can turn users’ moments of collective empathy into owned long-term content assets, build long-term emotional connections with consumers, and effectively solve the persistent challenge of user retention.

2. For cross-industry collaboration, brands should upgrade from the traditional model of merely tapping external IP traffic for customer acquisition to a deep content co-creation model. By anchoring shared core values between both partners and co-building new scenarios and experiences, brands can deliver young audience traffic to partners while expanding their own IP boundaries, resulting in a win-win outcome.

3. For new growth opportunities, brands can follow *Honor of Kings*’ example to integrate online and offline channels, leverage digital IP to empower the real economy, drive foot traffic to physical businesses through offline scenario co-creation, and open up new growth spaces for the brand itself.

This article provides growth insights and opportunity alerts for sellers operating in a saturated market. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. On growth strategy: In today’s oversaturated, intensely competitive market, relying on continuous user acquisition and short-term promotions to hit performance targets only generates temporary buzz and fails to deliver long-term user retention. Instead, sellers that deepen user ecosystem engagement, embrace user-generated culture and emotions, and build emotional connections can achieve stable, long-term growth. *Honor of Kings*’ continued robust growth after reaching 139 million daily active users serves as a standout example.

2. On opportunity alerts: When growth plateaus for a single product, sellers can unlock new growth through IP capability spillover. They should upgrade cross-industry collaboration from simple co-branding licensing to deep content co-creation, while expanding into offline physical scenarios by partnering with commercial districts and cultural tourism projects to convert online traffic to offline and unlock new growth curves.

3. On risk alerts: Sellers should guard against homogeneous competition, build competitive barriers through ecosystem development, and avoid the wasteful internal friction of price wars.

This article offers insights for factories on product design, digital transformation, and unlocking new business opportunities. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. On product design and manufacturing: Factories should prioritize user-generated demand and cultural preferences, rather than limiting themselves to pre-set in-house designs. By integrating user co-creation into product development and embracing user creativity and cultural identity, factories can lower content creation costs while delivering products that better match user needs. *Honor of Kings*’ experience of developing exclusive gameplay based on the player-created "nongyou" meme is a highly valuable reference.

2. On business opportunities: Today, established leading Chinese digital IPs already have the capacity to reverse-empower the real economy. Factories can develop in-depth scenario co-creation partnerships with these IPs, leverage the IPs’ influence to reach young consumer groups, boost product sales, and expand new sales channels.

3. Insights for digital transformation: Factories should move beyond the single production-sales business model, prioritize user ecosystem development, boost user loyalty through emotional connection, extend product lifecycle, and escape homogeneous industry competition.

This article helps service providers capture industry trends, identify core client pain points, and optimize their solutions. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. On industry trends: Today, operation of entertainment IPs and all types of brands has shifted from single-product operation and user acquisition models to ecosystem-based operation. The role of IP has also transformed from a pure traffic consumer to a value creator, and deep integration between digital IP and the real economy is the major trend going forward.

2. On core client pain points: Most clients currently face stagnant growth in saturated markets. Traditional operation models, which rely only on short-term traffic stimulation, cannot deliver long-term user retention, while most cross-industry collaborations remain at the superficial level of licensing and fail to generate deep value, leaving clients easily trapped in homogeneous competition.

3. On solution direction: Service providers can develop user co-creation ecosystem operation services for clients, help clients identify and embrace user community culture to build long-term owned content assets, connect clients with offline physical scenarios, and help clients achieve reverse empowerment through IP to escape intense competition and achieve long-term sustainable growth.

This article offers insights for platform operators on ecosystem building, operation management and risk mitigation. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. On core demand for platform user operation: Users are no longer satisfied with just accessing basic product functions; they increasingly demand emotional connection and group identity. Platform operators should proactively identify user-generated community culture, convert this culture into the platform’s own content assets, effectively improve user retention and loyalty, and build emotional bonds between users and the platform.

2. On direction for platform ecosystem building: Platforms should build an open, symbiotic ecosystem. Rather than only serving end consumers, they should open up their capabilities to connect with external IPs, offline physical businesses, cultural institutions and other stakeholders. Multi-stakeholder scenario co-creation creates mutual value, expanding the platform’s business boundaries while enhancing its social value.

3. On risk mitigation: In saturated markets, platforms should avoid falling into homogeneous traffic competition and price wars. They should build unique competitive barriers through ecosystem development, continue expanding into new scenarios and user groups, and maintain long-term stable growth.

This article provides a new case study and research direction for scholars studying the development of China’s domestic digital IP industry. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. On new industry trends: China’s independent developed digital IPs have now completed a stage of evolution, transforming from single content products into open, multi-stakeholder symbiotic ecosystems, and shifting their role from traffic consumers to value creators. They have achieved reverse empowerment of digital IP for the real economy and cultural industry, and blazed a new path to escape homogeneous competition in saturated markets.

2. On a new business model: This article summarizes the co-creation ecosystem business model, whose core logic is to continuously convert users’ collective empathy moments and community culture into long-term IP assets. Through cross-scenario deep content co-creation, it achieves mutual value for players, partners and the IP itself, effectively extending the IP lifecycle and continuously expanding commercial and value boundaries.

3. On industry implications: It provides a replicable benchmark for building long-standing national IPs in China, proving that enduring IPs are not built by chasing trends or buying traffic, but by consistently integrating into users’ daily life scenarios and building lasting emotional connections. It also offers new insights for integrating digital culture with physical industries, revitalizing traditional culture for younger generations, and exporting Chinese original content globally.