Tencent is entering the Metaverse

Did you know they own Fortnite, and League of Legends?

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Decentra Daily
July 05, 2022

Welcome back to Decentra Daily, bringing you daily NFT and Web3 news and insights.

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

Today we're just going to talk about Tencent. For those of you who don't know, Tencent, it is an internet-based technology company from China.

It is one of the highest grossing multimedia companies in the world. In 2021 Tencent's revenue was $86.64 billion USD.

Tencent was the first Asian technology company to surpass the $500 billion USD valuation mark in 2018. They are big league.

Now, Tencent has turned its attention to the metaverse!

Tencent is primed to enter the Metaverse

Well, Tencent is in an incredibly good position to leverage their success into the metaverse.

You don't hear always hear about their success in mainstream media, but stealthily they have become the world's largest video game publisher. 

They had $6.7 billion in game revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone! in fact online games make up approximately 32% of Tencent's profits.

Once we rattle off a couple of the game studios that Tencent has ownership in you'll understand why, get ready to widen your eyelids! 👀

Riot Games - 100% ownership: Riot makes a 'little' game you may have heard of, League of Legends. It is the most popular PC game in the world, with an estimated $1.4 billion in revenue last year.

Epic Games - 40% ownership: When Tencent invested $330 million in Epic Games in 2012 it altered gaming as we know it, and created one of the biggest gaming cultural phenomenons.....in the free to play Fortnite game. Yes, Tencent owns 40% of the company that owns Fortnite.

Tencent also has ownership stakes in other gaming studios, including Ubisoft. So to say they are positioned well to take advantage of gaming and its metaverse implementation is an understatement.

Oh, btw. Tencent also has an ownership stake in Discord. The thing the NFT addicts use every.single.day.

What's next for Tencent's Metaverse ambitions?

Tencent is creating it's own metaverse division called the Extended Reality Unit. This division will focus on all metaverse related endeavours....both in software and hardware, hello Oculus competitor!

There will be more that 300 individuals in the unit, and while we don't expect Tencent to spend $10 billion on it metaverse endeavours, like Meta and Mark Zuckerberg planned to spend this year, we still expect them to turn heads.

At the end of last year (November), Tencent's CEO Pony Ma talked officially about the metaverse for the first time:

"Anything that makes the virtual world more real and the real world more rich with virtual experiences can become part of the metaverse."

Both Pony Ma, and James Mitchell (Chief Strategy Officer) discussed their visions for the metaverse, and envision different pathways for it to unfold:

  1. Gaming, through highly interactive gameplay

  2. Social networking that is gamified and supports programmable experiences

  3. Real world experiences enhanced by augmented reality and virtual reality

It will be interesting to see how Tencent navigates the censorship of video games, crypto, and NFTs working as a Chinese company. Money talks though!

Thanks for reading fam! See you tomorrow.

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