This mobile game is earning $100m every month in China

What does mobile gaming success look like? It looks like The Legend of Mir Mobile.

On Wednesday, Shanda Games vice-chair Zhu Xiaojing announced some pretty stunning data about Shanda’s highest-earning game, The Legend of Mir Mobile. The game, Zhu says, is earning between US$92 million and US$107 million each month through Tencent’s mobile game platform. On its best day, The Legend of Mir Mobile brought in more than US$7 million in just 24 hours.

Not bad for a game that’s 15 years old.

What is The Legend of Mir?

To understand why this game is making so much money, you have to understand what it is and where it comes from. The Legend of Mir Mobile is a mobile version of a PC game called The Legend of Mir 2. Mir 2 is a Korean massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by WeMade Entertainment and first published way back in 2001.

Mir 2 was localized and published all over the world, but it made an especially big splash in China, where it was published for the PC by Shanda Games. In 2002 and 2003 it reportedly racked up 250,000 simultaneous players in China – a modest accomplishment by modern standards, but an impressive one at a time when China’s internet penetration was barely five percent.

Mir Mobile may be based on a very old game, but it isn’t static.

The games themselves – both the original Mir 2 and Mir Mobile – are fairly by-the-books MMORPGs. Players choose a class (warrior, wizard, assassin, etc.) and then explore and adventure in a fantasy world that includes thousands of other players as well as computer-controlled entities. Players can approach the game however they’d like: some prefer to team up with other players to take down computer-controlled bosses, others battle with other human players.

How is such an old game doing so well on mobile?

This is what Mir actually looks like. Not exactly next-gen graphics.

There are a few reasons.

First, The Legend of Mir Mobile capitalizes on the nostalgia of China’s early PC gamers, the people who were playing this game on PC in internet cafes 15 years ago. Many of those gamers are now adults with white-collar jobs. They may or may not still be hardcore PC gamers, but virtually all of them own smartphones, and being able to play what many consider a classic game from their youth on a phone is too tempting to pass up. And of course, their enthusiasm has helped attract a whole new generation of players to the game as well. It’s this nostalgia factor that Shanda credits for the some of game’s success: it’s proof that the classics will never go out of style, Zhu told Sina Tech.

Shanda’s strategy for the future is pretty predictable: double down

Second, Mir Mobile may be based on a very old PC game, but it isn’t static. Shanda has been careful to keep Mir updated (both on mobile and PC) so that players always find the game’s classic gameplay but occasionally also come across new adventures. Shanda has even introduced new playable character classes to give players a whole new way to experience the game.

What’s next for Shanda?