A closer look at Tencent, the world’s biggest game company
In the West, tech giant Tencent is not yet a household name. 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.
But in China, Tencent is everywhere. It’s behind the nation’s most popular messaging app, WeChat, with over 1.2 billion monthly 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. And with Tencent Music, it also owns the majority of China’s music services, with 841 million active users.
It’s also China’s — and the world’s — biggest game company. And with a growing presence internationally, we recently decided to take a closer look at how it operates and what it owns.
Beginning with Riot Games in 2011, Tencent has been steadily acquiring an extensive portfolio of international game studios. 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. 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. 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.
The firm has begun laying the foundation of
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