We have invested in more than 700 companies. 63 are now listed, and 122 are unicorns - Tencent President

For those who don't know, Tencent is the biggest games company in the world.

Check out these Revenues numbers for the first 3 quarters of 2018 https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-25-companies-game-revenues/

They brang in just over $15 billion in that time, which is nearly as much as Sony and Microsoft combined made in the same period.

Below is a list of some of the games and companies Tencent have some kind of ownership in, although there are probably many more:

100% stake in Riot Games, League of Legends.

84% stake in of Supercell, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, etc

48% stake in Epic, Fortnite

10% stake in Bluehole, PUBG and developed PUBG Mobile

Majority stake in MiniClip, 8 Ball Pool, Agar.io, Plague.Inc

5% stake in Activision-Blizzard, Call of Duty, WoW, Overwatch, etc, currently has a Call of Duty Mobile game in soft launch

80% stake in Grinding Gears Games, Path of Exile

12% stake in Snap

36% stake in Fatshark, Vermintide series.

5% stake in Ubisoft, Far Cry, Assassins Creed and all things Tom Clancy (Siege, Division, etc)

Partner with Take Two (GTA, Red Dead), to release NBA games in China.

Strategic partnership with Square Enix to make AAA titles

Team up with Intel for new cloud gaming service (Tencent Instant Play)

Reddit received a $150 million investment from tencent. Tencent has also invested in several of Discord’s financing rounds.

Published Smilegates' Crossfire in China, one of the worlds most profitable games, and formerly the game with the world's highest concurrent player count at 8 million. And has over 650 million players.

It's recently been reported that Tencent are looking to buy out the Company that Owns Nexon, Maple Story, Dungeon Fighter Online.

All this without even touching their own games, the biggest by far though is:

Honor of Kings (Arena of Valor) - The world's most played game that no one seems to talk about. A Mobile Moba which had over 200 million monthly active users (for comparison sake, Fortnite has 80 million monthly active users), and had a total revenue of nearly $2 billion for 2018. And thats not including the 3rd party app stores for android in China (no playstore since google is banned), and where the majority of the playerbase plays though since China is about 75/25% split in favor of android OS's over IOS.

I'm not going to talk about the apps, sites, etc they also own or have stakes in, but I will briefly mention that they also own Wechat which is one of the worlds largest social network platforms, and WeGame, China's biggest Steam alternative. Wechat is the biggest digital payments portal in the world, bigger than Paypal. As of April 2017, WeGame store had over 200 million PC users in China alone.

Getting their money mostly from micro transactions

At this rate, Tencent may end up monopolizing the PC game industry... I wonder how long till they buyout Steam?

@Jag85: that might be tricky as Valve isnt publicly trades company, but theres always a price for everything..

Very kind of them to save me the time of compiling my own list.

Cows thought Sony would acquire Take 2 lol. Tencent will probably the first bidder if it happens.

They also own most bike and car sharing services. They are a conglomerate.

Tencent is one of the biggest companies in the world, not just in game industry.

Better question is, how far would you go? Go as far as Disney's $4 billion for Star Wars franchise.

Tencent marches toward global domination. I don't recall their specific ranking, but they're one of the top 20 most valuable tech companies in the world.

I looked up Tencent last night too and had to triple check those crazy numbers.

They are criticised for having no new ideas though and using manipulative, pavlovian devices to hook in gamers (see World of Warcraft etc).

So they are a company who just happens to be a digital company which games just happen to be a part of created by Chinese investors with very deep wallets.

So they are interested only in the bottom line and should be seen as a threat to the creative aspect of gaming.

Tencent has shown plenty of support for the creative aspect of gaming. For example, the biggest new genre to emerge this generation, battle royale games, owe much of their success to Tencent. They were the first major publisher to invest in BR games, publishing PUBG and then funding the development of Fortnite. It was largely due to Tencent that battle royale games have become the dominant genre they are today.

@Jag85: battle royale games are the opposite of creative.

it's just the worst aspect of the DayZ mod simplified and commercialised.

@jackamomo: Tencent GAD developers platform support creative game devs especially indies.

I don't quite understand the post or the message behind this guy's thing either... overall just confused.

@raining51: Beware Tencent.

I disagree. Battle Royale games were a creative spin on the 1st/3rd person shooters. The problem is that when something becomes successful, other big companies are quick to copy.

You know what's funny? I had an idea about PubG using Fortnite. It was on a gaming site a few years ago, during the time period where everyone was complaining about the yearly COD sequels. I said that COD should take on qualities of the Hunger Games, which were huge movies at the time. 20-30 players in a huge arena with the Cornecopia in the center. The center will have the most loot, but the catch is that because it has the most loot, people will stagnate there. The outer edges will have less loot (guns, food, drinks, med kits, healing balm, armor/vests, etc), but less people to deal with. To prevent people from stagnating on the edge of the map, which causes a game to go on forever, I stated they do like the hunger games. Have natural disasters, fire, poison storm, etc., to deter people from lingering too long and pushing them towards the center.

You know what people said? That Activision would be stupid to do my idea. It might not be popular and it would waste money. Just do the same Call of Duty to be safe. Then the next sales chart, they'll complain about Call of Duty being popular with no innovation. Fast forward years later, Fortnite and PubG are huge games. Yet according the the people on my old site, the idea wouldn't take off.

@luxuryheart: yeah well, I invented the wasd keyboard layout for fps games so top that.

Geez, 48% in epic? Good luck stopping the store with that back up.

They also have the best spyware program with the epic launcher. Don’t glorify data thieves.

Yeah, it's easy to say that battle royale games are unoriginal now, but there's no denying that PUBG was groundbreaking when it came out two years ago. When Tencent took a risk on PUBG, I'm sure even they never predicted it would become such a phenomenon. And then they repeated that phenomenal success with Fortnite. Of course, other publishers jumping on the battle-royale bandwagon are uncreative imitators. Just like how Doom led to a wave of Doom clones, PUBG led to a wave of PUBG clones. But Tencent is the publisher that kickstarted the battle royale boom, and they still dominate the genre.

The idea for battle royale games has actually been floating around for a long time, long before Arma or Hunger Games, but dating back to the days of Battle Royale (BR), the Japanese movie that started it all. Back then, I thought it would be a cool idea for a video game. And it wasn't just me, but other BR fans thought the same. There was also a manga and anime series, Btooom, that featured a fictional battle royale game within it, somewhat similar to PUBG. Yet there were no video game adaptations of the concept (except for some visual novels), despite BR being so obviously well-suited for a video game adaptation. It took a long time for some BR fans to finally start making mods based on the movie, and eventually those mods gave rise to the battle royale genre.

....i for one welcome our new Tencent gaming overlords and wish them nothing short of complete dominance of all gaming around the world.... micro-transactions are great and i will endeavour to spend more on them to ensure a healthy gaming ecosystem.

....*GULP*.....Note to self: back up games and get off the internet :P.

"For those who don't know, Tencent is the biggest games company in the world."

Weird, I couldn't name you one thing they've done or they are known for.

@Jag85: Gaben is happy with steam money. The Valve who made great games is gone. Thanks to the success of Steam it's just a company on autopilot with no passion for games left. We might see CDPR, GOG partnership with Tencent.

Give it a read.

UE4 is also not coming slow. Whenever I see its logo in game trailer the first thing comes in my mind that it's gonna be Epic store exclusive.

Source 2 for devs is still nowhere in sight. I've been hearing about it for six years now. What will they show at GDC 2019 ? steam update lol

like a modern day valve

Yet another reason I am boycotting the Epic Store...it's not Epic, it's Tencent-Epic.

Valve is still privately owned, thank god. GoG is not as CD Projekt is publicly traded :(

If there's ever going to be one of those megacorps like from those cyberpunk shows that takes over the world, it's probably going to be Tencent.

Valve might not make games like they used to, but they are doing more for gamers and customers than any other company out there. To say they're on autopilot does them a great injustice.

Valve has nothing to do with microtransactions outside of letting developers and publishers market them on Steam. Would you prefer they don't give you the option and tell you what you can buy? No thanks.

Steam/valve is a multi billion dollar company themselves so it wont be cheap, they average about 4 billion a year in sales now i believe in 2018 it was 4.3,considering that Valve is dead and doesnt really make games anymore thats very impressive by Steam selling other peoples games and CS GO/Dota 2 skins

Gabes not going to sell his cash cow for nothing

Right? The hell did they do with source 2? lmao ive been waiting as well and then they have the nerve to give us artifact with nothing else since dota 2, a micro transaction riddled card game that you still have to buy in for 30$. Assholes, its sad they used to be one of my favorite developers nowadays I kind of hate them

@mrbojangles25: cs go is the best example, they just sell skins, some in the 200-500$ range, as far as I'm concerned they are about as innovative now in gaming as EA

@mrbojangles25: now im just reading the community forums for csgo on steam, its honestly hillarious.

so i have a job. and alot of money to buy plenty of knifes. but it doesent matter 200 300 500$ for a SKIN is just waste of money Practically they are NOThing worth.

and now? are u the Saver of the Money or should everybody have the same opinion like u? i guess not... So i go and buy some Skins now... and u should :gtfo:

yes go buy skins and look like a homeless IRL

^ lmao

If you want to judge people and companies by the worst thing they've done and only that, that's a pretty cynical outlook on life.

The skins are not great, I admit, but you don't have to buy them. They are purely cosmetic, so imo it's a non-issue because their presence or absence doesn't take or add anything to the game.

Ahhhhh I see what's going on. You're one of the scorned former lovers of Valve. They stopped doing things the way you want them to do things, so now they are terrible. Can't see the forest for the trees. See this a lot.

Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned....

@mrbojangles25: I call it as I see it, if EA was selling a single 200$ dollar skin people would hold thier feet to the fire.

Valve does it and people act like micro transactions are cool, the loyalty is rediculous

valve is dead, its just steam now, the developers they do have they just keep around to make and sell skins off CS go Tf2 and dota 2.

Technically besides artifact (which is a micro transaction fueled game) the only thing valve is making are micro transactions

@Jag85: there's no denying that PUBG was groundbreaking when it came out two years ago

Dean Hall created the DayZ mod in 2013.

How many people were playing that game at it's peak and just playing it as an arena shooter even though it was completely open world? I invented the idea to have distance based voice comms as it was silly how you could talk overt the whole server.

Millions played this mod. Hardly a gamble for PubG creators or Tencent.

Pubg came out in 2017 and they even copied the stupid motorcycle helmet and the DayZ logo for the cover art.

Not DayZ mod? Hmmm.

Shame Bohemia can't code otherwise they'd been standing as a colossus of gaming right now.

Its funny people seem to forget that DayZ was a mod to ArmA and not an independent work, and ArmA is pretty much "pubg" so calling the battle royal games creative is like calling a dogs... on the street a creative work by a dog.

But Tencent is a massive company, but they don´t make anything they just buy up companies that do and micro´s the shit out of the company to earn back the spending.

@Jacanuk: Tencent have a very well funded R&D division for new game software but I would wager their remit is 'make the most profitable game possible.'

Arma 2 is a terrible buggy game for army nerds that just happens to have a good sized map engine. Also the best lighting engine ever created.

Yes, Tencent has an excellent machine for how to micro-transaction everything

And sure ArmA was a buggy game and is a buggy game but it does not change the facts that DayZ was a mod for that and that Pubg took ArmA and expanded on it.

the first iteration of Brendan Greene's (playerunknown) BR mode was literally a Dayz mod

All things being equal Dean 'Rocket' Hall should be the wealthiest man in gaming.

Bohemia should get credit for the way you control your dude though with all the various stances and the tank style controls are very innovative.

@jeezers: At this rate Unreal engine 5 will release before Source 2. Valve is definitely a very prominent, perhaps even the worst offender of gambling microtransactions.

@jackamomo:

DayZ is a survival game, not a battle royale game. You're confusing two different genres. DayZ did not have a battle royale mode until PlayerUnknown (Brendan Greene) created a battle royale mod for it, inspired by the Japanese movie Battle Royale. And then PlayerUnknown's mod gave birth to the standalone battle royale game, PUBG.

PUBG wasn't the first battle royale game, but it was the first to have a mainstream impact. Just like how Doom was not the first FPS, but it was the first to have a mainstream impact. When PUBG first came out, no one thought it would come anywhere close to COD's sales. Yet when it came out, PUBG quickly outsold every COD game ever made by a huge margin. The success of both PUBG and Fortnite far exceeded Tencent's expectations.

If it was Activision, they would've dismissed battle royale games as just some niche mod thing, not something they could create blockbuster standalone games out of, so Activision played it safe and stuck to the same tried-and-tested COD formula. It was Tencent that saw the potential of battle royale games, and invested in that genre when no other major publisher had any interest in publishing battle royale games. Without Tencent, battle royale games would not be the phenomenon they are today.

Out of the top ten highest-grossing games of 2018, six of them are developed/published/owned/co-owned by Tencent:

Fortnite

Honor of Kings / Arena of Valor

Dungeon Fighter Online

League of Legends

CrossFire

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

@Jag85: yeah DayZ was a survival game.

But then the dick heads found out about it and ruined everything and they needed a playpen creating for them to butt heads against each other in.

The battle royale genre's success did not surprise me in the slightest seeing as millions of people were already playing dayz as a br game.

That is just a large scale deathmatch with sniper rifles.

I will admit WoW success surprised me. But seeing as Warcraft 3 and rts games are so prohibitively difficult for most people it makes sense and seems just elitist to withhold the brilliant WoW universe to the leet few who can actually play rts games.

"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." - a quote which has no relation to this conversation but I just heard and wanted to repeat.

I hate Tencent it's awful no direction just like a lot of ne wcompanies don't really care about games just wanna maximize profits and aren't even really great at that necessarily just laying waste to things left right

and all over the place.

@vaeh: the topic is Epic and their chinese overlords spyware. Don't care about google and facebook

@jackamomo:

BR isn't just a large-scale deathmatch, but BR is last-man-standing gameplay in a shrinking playfield. There was no battle royale mod like that for DayZ until the PlayerUnknown mod.

@oliversnyders:

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/china-how-big-tech-learning-love-party

Wang Xiaochuan, CEO of Sogou, a Tencent-backed search engine, explained this dynamic explicitly in a quote leaked in March of this year:

We’re entering an era in which we'll be fused together. It might be that there will be a request to establish a Party committee within your company, or that you should let state investors take a stake, you know, as a form of mixed ownership

It would be difficult to compete against state protected partly state owned enterprise .

------------

After repeated private enterprise MIA (missing in action), Australia's city building program in western Sydney is done by state owned enterprise. If it's good for China, time to go corporate socialism.

Chinese state actions in international trade is causing other countries to switch towards corporate socialism.

I see no reason for them to buyout steam or invest into gog. They are pretty much epic which is having there own store to compete against them. So they already have hand on this market.

@Jag85 said:

BR is death match with 1 life.

Everyone was playing Dayz as a br game even though that is just basically trolling as dayz is a survival game but people were not interested in working together, apart from as murder squads.

Social experiment: fail.

@jackamomo: Death match has been around for over two decades. That's not what BR is about. BR is about everyone killing each other until only one survives, while being forced to fight in a shrinking playfield. The first BR mod for DayZ was the PlayerUnknown mod.

It's like we're moving more and more to a dystopian society... I expect Robocop's OmniCorp next. Save us, Robocop!!

@Jag85: we could do this all day but ok then. I will admit I do not know the difference between a death match and a last man standing game. You win Jag.

@lundy86_4: Tencent is but a pawn in China's plan for world domination... PC is doomed!

But really, PC gaming will be fine, as long as the new Chinese overlords don't meddle too much... though there's a risk of censorship against anything perceived to be against Chinese interests.