

Then there is Riot Games’ League of Legends, a game that is now Tencent’s flagship PC game in China, and whose studio was also completely bought out by Tencent, with the firm finalizing its purchase of Riot Games in 2015. These include Peacekeeper Elite, which is the Chinese version of PUBG Mobile, and the wildly popular Honor of Kings, which is the dominant MOBA game in China.

Online games make up a major portion of its profits at 32%, and many of those products target mobile players in the domestic Chinese market. By revenue, it’s the world’s largest video game publisher, with approximately $6.7 billion in game revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020. When it comes to the games part of that, Tencent’s dominance is prodigious yet stealthy. What sets Tencent apart from these corporations is its size and ubiquity across industries, with investments that include social media, games, television, cinema, music, e-commerce, medical technology, and comics. Of course, Tencent is far from the only tech giant looking to build a macrocosm of virtual services and environments NetEase, Epic Games, and Facebook’s parent company Meta, among others, are all gunning to forge their own hyperconnected virtual worlds. what sets Tencent apart from these corporations is its size and ubiquity across industries. Tencent is far from the only tech giant looking to build a macrocosm of virtual services and environments. Codenamed “F1,” this studio will span across China, the United States, Canada, and Singapore, and it’s the company’s first team under a new “Future” label. The firm has begun laying the foundation of this project, with one of its first steps being founding a new studio under one of its gaming subsidiaries, TiMi Studio Group. To Tencent, that path can be chartered via a mix of video games and a gamified social media experience - or a real world experience that’s supplemented by both augmented reality and virtual reality.

During the tech behemoth’s third-quarter results earning call in 2021, its usually reticent CEO, Pony Ma Huateng, spoke about the company’s vision for the metaverse, saying that Tencent currently has the resources to develop its version of the idea. And as one of the largest tech conglomerates in the world, it also wants to build the metaverse - to construct a sprawling, digital universe that doubles up as a diverse gaming platform, made up of various IPs. And with a growing presence internationally, we recently decided to take a closer look at how it operates and what it owns.īeginning with Riot Games in 2011, Tencent has been steadily acquiring an extensive portfolio of international game studios. It’s also China’s - and the world’s - biggest game company. And with Tencent Music, it also owns the majority of China’s music services, with 841 million active users. It’s the behemoth that created QQ.com, one of the country’s largest web portals and the world’s fourth most visited website. It’s behind the nation’s most popular messaging app, WeChat, with over 1.2 billion monthly active users. While its size and acquisitions have made frequent headlines, its presence has remained understated relative to competitors like Amazon and Google, with the name occasionally peppered into conversations as an example of China’s burgeoning influence on technology and entertainment around the world.īut in China, Tencent is everywhere. In the West, tech giant Tencent is not yet a household name.
