Inside Tencent’s ambition to create a Triple A console game
techcrunch.comTencent, the biggest social networking and video games company in China, hasn’t really managed to scale its popular products in the Western mainstream. The behemoth’s international expansion for the most part has been achieved by investing in companies outside China, but now it’s upping its on-the-ground presence abroad through its most lucrative business — video games.
In the past two years, Tencent has significantly expanded the footprint of two of its most successful gaming studios, TiMi Studios and Lightspeed Studios, around the world, hiring local executives to run these overseas outposts.
To get a glimpse of how Tencent is managing its international gaming branches and what expectations it holds for them, we spoke to Steve Martin, general manager at Lightspeed’s Los Angeles’s outfit. Besides its base in China, Lightspeed now has offices in the U.S., Canada, Singapore, the U.K., France, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and the UAE.
Tencent is credited more for its ability to turn established PC games into popular mobile plays than an original developer. Lightspeed, for example, made its name by devising the mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
By May, PUBG Mobile had grossed$8 billion in global lifetime player spending, making it the second top-grossing mobile game in the world trailing behind TiMi’s Honor of Kings, which itself is regarded as a take on Riot’s League of Legends.
Tencent now wants players to remember it by its own intellectual property. Under the helm of Martin, who was on the development team of Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 at Rockstar Games, Lightspeed L.A. office is working on a AAA console game targeting hardcore gamers around the world.
Steve Martin, general manager at
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