Haidilao Just Turned a Childhood Browser Game Into a Hotpot Party — and 500,000 Free Ice Creams

July 10 marked the start of a nationwide team-up that, on paper, sounds like a cultural Rorschach test: Haidilao (海底捞), China's infamously service-obsessed hotpot chain, partnered with
Rock Kingdom: World
(洛克王国：世界), the mobile revival of a beloved late-2000s browser game.

The tagline — roughly "Let's hotpot together, wave all your troubles bye-bye" — is a deliberate riff on Haidilao's own in-store birthday chant, the one where staff clap and sing while surrounding some mortified-but-delighted diner. This time, the song belongs to the game.

The collab runs through August 9 and covers the full Haidilao playbook: three tiers of dine-in combo meals, a delivery set, and a spread of merchandise that includes blind-box fridge magnets (five designs), tin badge blind bags, a shoulder-sitting plushie of Duck Jiji, and picnic blankets. In-game, players can redeem a CDK for an "All Troubles Bye-Bye" title, name card, and a dance emote called "Let's High Together," with the centerpiece being a Duck Jiji rainbow egg. Oh — and there are 500,000 limited-edition Duck Jiji custom ice creams, each served with a transparent photo card, free with a single order.

The timing is the real tell. The collab dropped exactly one week before
Rock Kingdom: World
's Season 3 launch on July 16. This is less a dine-and-collect promotion and more a pre-season rally dressed in hotpot broth. For players, it turns a solo login grind into a communal offline ritual — a reason to gather, eat, unbox together, and feel like the game world seeped into the real one.

Haidilao has been stacking these gaming partnerships all year. Before
Rock Kingdom
, there were collabs with
Identity V
(第五人格) and
Delta Force
(三角洲行动). The through-line is obvious: "hotpot + gaming = young consumers." But the
Rock Kingdom
play hits differently. Where tactical shooters and asymmetric horror games cast a certain audience,
Rock Kingdom
's player base grew up on the original 2008–2013 browser game. They're now in their twenties and early thirties — exactly the crowd with disposable income, nostalgia triggers, and a willingness to drag friends across town for a duck-shaped ice cream.

What looks like an IP merch drop is really a distribution play: the game gets a physical social venue to hype its new season, and Haidilao gets a reason for groups to book tables mid-summer — not for a birthday, but for a shared childhood.