Choose your own adventure is now a marketing strategy

What happened New One Studio pitched its latest release with a single question: How many episodes could you survive as a female emperor? The line anchored the trailer the Shanghai studio put out on May 22 and the game’s official campaign site, and it carried into social feeds, where young Chinese players turned palace survival into a talking point of their own. How ‘Road to Empress’ became China’s breakout interactive game “Road to Empress” (女王的游戏:盛世天下) combines live-action filmmaking with interactive storytelling. Real actors carry narrative instead of animation or conventional game graphics, and players make decisions at key moments that shaped where the story went. New One Studio developed the title; Tencent Games handled distribution, taking it to Steam, WeGame, mobile and WeChat mini programs at once. Players take the role of a fictional heroine modeled on Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in Chinese history. The second chapter alone ran to roughly 1,000 minutes of live-action footage across 32 episodes, with more than 100 branching storylines and 100 endings, per the studio’s own figures. Five million copies and global chart wins Live-action production and branching choice turned “Road to Empress” into a breakout hit. The studio split the story into two chapters — “Meiniang” and “The Empress,” sold internationally as “Road to Empress I and II” — which tracked the heroine from her first years in the imperial court to the height of political power. Chapter one arrived on September 9, 2025 and sold more than 1 million copies in 12 days. It closed the year at 1.8 million, per estimates from DataEye Research Institute, second on China's domestic game sales chart for 2025. The second chapter went out globally on June 9, 2026 and moved faster than the first, passing 1 million copies in five days and 2 million within 12. By June 30, series sales had topped 5 million, which New One Studio said was a global record for live-action interactive film and television. Overseas demand drove much of that. The sequel took the top spot on App Store paid charts in six markets including South Korea and Singapore, and sat high on the charts in 10 more. On Steam it reached No. 3 on the global top-sellers chart and led the China chart outright, with peak concurrent players at 28,665 against 17,170 for chapter one. The Jing Take Polished production and the enduring appeal of palace intrigue explain part of the game’s success. What lifted it from hit to social phenomenon was its choice-feedback-replay loop. At each critical moment, players made a decision on the heroine’s behalf and shaped her fate directly. A minor choice could change what came next, or end a storyline outright. Dissatisfied players reloaded and chose again. Few real-life decisions can be undone; the game lets players fail and rewrite the ending, and that sense that choices matter ranked among its most immediate draws. That mechanism also changed how the content traveled. One story became many personal versions, depending on what a player chose. Some posted their own palace survival routes; others argued over whether a decisive moment had been played right, or replayed to find branches and endings they had missed. The deeper the participation, the more material there was to argue over and pass on. Ownership cuts both ways. Chapter one held a 95% positive rating on Steam across about 1,700 reviews; chapter two sat at 76% across roughly 480. Much of the criticism centered on a storyline that players said forced the heroine to give up the throne, overriding the ambition the series had spent two chapters building. Others objected to altered historical names. Handing players authorship raises what they expect to control, and an ending that takes it back reads as a breach rather than a plot turn. SK-II's interactive film and cultural storytelling in marketing Few brands need to commission a 32-episode live-action drama. The transferable part is the logic of participation underneath it. Brand films usually run a single narrative path: the brand speaks, the consumer watches. Interactive storytelling adds a step and lets the audience arrive at its own reading through action. SK-II tried this in 2023 with “My Destiny, My Choice,” an interactive film built by Forsman & Bodenfors around “good for marriage,” (好嫁风) — a term that pressures women to make themselves smaller, less ambitious and less successful to stay marriageable. Viewers navigated 12 story paths and more than an hour of playable content, with actress Zhang Zifeng cast as the friend alongside them. Choosing your own life stopped being a proposition the brand asserted and became a question it put in the user’s hands. Duolingo went further, running game mechanics as the product rather than as a wrapper around it. Experience points, streaks, leaderboards and instant rewards broke the slow work of language learning into small tasks with visible progress and immediate feedback. The company closed 2025 with more than 50 million daily active users. In February 2025 that logic moved into the marketing. Duolingo announced on February 11 that its green owl mascot, Duo, was dead, and users opened the app to find the logo with crosses over its eyes. Online mourning and memes followed, along with condolences from other brands. Six days later the company pointed users to a site where the terms were set out: complete lessons, collectively earn 50 billion experience points, and the owl came back. Users cleared the target in a week, finishing at 50,921,342,438 points. The United States contributed the most at 6.18 billion, followed by Germany, Brazil and China. Duo returned on February 24 and then claimed to have staged the whole thing. A campaign that started as a social-media stunt became a global participation drive, and the act of using the product turned into the plot. None of this requires building a game. The question worth asking is what an audience should do, not what it should watch. Give an action real consequences and people come back, and pass on a version of the story that belongs to whoever is telling it. Attention keeps getting more expensive. Road to Empress suggests what the added cost buys and what it demands in return: an audience that will keep showing up, and will hold a brand to the authorship it was promised. The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.

Choose your own adventure is now a marketing strategy

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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Choose your own adventure is now a marketing strategy

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag