The Brands at Licensing Expo Didn't Get There by Being Good at Licensing. Licensing Expo 上的那些品牌，不是靠会做授权走到这儿的。

They got there by deciding, over and over again across years, what they were and what they weren’t. Licensing is downstream of that. You can’t build a collaboration business on an IP that doesn’t know what it stands for. There’s nothing for a partner to attach to, nothing to protect, nothing to extend. The deal structure comes later. Brand clarity comes first.

I understood this faster than I expected at the expo, partly because I’d spent years on the consumer end of these deals. Every collaboration I’d followed as a fan was actually a signal about how clearly a brand understood itself. The ones that felt right were the ones where both sides knew exactly what they were bringing. The ones that felt off were the ones where the IP was being stretched into territory it had no business being in, where the collaboration existed because someone said yes, not because it made sense.

A conversation with Tzu-Ping (Michael) Lin from HoYoverse’s licensing department made this concrete. He walked me through how collaborations get planned at a studio like HoYoverse, what both sides are actually optimizing for, where the licensing team sits in that process, and what makes a partnership work versus what makes it fall apart. What struck me wasn’t any single tactic. It was how much of the decision-making traced back to a prior question: does this fit who we are? HoYoverse has spent years building IPs with enough internal coherence that the answer to that question is actually answerable. That’s not a given. A lot of studios can’t answer it cleanly.

Which is what made one detail on the expo floor so interesting by contrast. Palworld, currently in the middle of a patent infringement lawsuit with Nintendo and The Pokemon Company, had positioned its booth directly next to Nintendo’s. Whatever the intent, the move read as a deliberate use of proximity as leverage. The lawsuit, the controversy, the “Pokemon with guns” discourse, all of it converted into foot traffic and attention on the expo floor.

It worked, in the narrow sense. I noticed. Everyone noticed.

But there’s a difference between being talked about and being trusted. Palworld was mobilizing every available resource to build visibility, which is a rational thing to do when you’re a new IP trying to establish yourself. I don’t think it’s a wrong move, exactly. I just don’t find it particularly admirable, because visibility borrowed from someone else’s brand clarity isn’t the same as having your own.

The IPs that fill a trade floor like that year after year aren’t there because they were strategic about exposure. They’re there because they spent a long time being consistent about what they were. That consistency is what makes a licensing business possible. It’s also what makes it defensible.