Tencent, the Asian giant that owns League of Legends and Fortnite, added a Spanish study

While the gaming industry in the west is aware of the movements of companies such as Microsoft and Google, in the eastern pole business giants have a completely different impact. While analysts remain in expectation of the effects of the purchase of Activision Blizzard, colossal companies like Tencent continue to pursue an assertive investment strategy that has filled its portfolio with the titles of Fortnite, League of Legends, Player Unknown's Battlegrounds and the Epic Games platform. Now they added the Spanish Tequila Softworks (RiME) to their roster.

Tencent started its conglomerate 23 years ago, where it slowly began buying shares in communication technology companies. In China, its home country, the company is everywhere: from messaging apps such as WeChat (with more than 1.2 billion active users), Tencent Music (with 841 million accounts in use) and to more than 100 mobile games (the largest gaming market, with a total of 681.7 million accounts in use) millions of players reported in 2020).

Its international expansion was reported in 2011, when the giant slowly began to acquire video game shares in free-to-play gaming companies. One of the first iconic cases was the acquisition of Riot Games, a company that grew exponentially after its purchase.

Tencent's special division for video games is called Tencent Games, which in turn is another conglomerate of video game developers and distributors that move globally. The division that handles the international distribution of titles is called Level Infinite, which provides support for games such as Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodhunt, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide and Don't Starve: Newhome, among others.

More than 25% of its gaming revenue derives from international markets and it was reported that during the end of 2020 it earned almost $6.7 billion in total profit in the video game sector alone.

His perspective is not limited to territory and he recently acquired Inflection Games (Nighingale), Turtle Rock Studios (Back 4 Blood and Left 4 Dead) and Spanish Tequila Softworks (RiME). While one of the biggest concerns in the international market is the policies of restriction and censorship in video games, Raúl Rubio, CEO of the Madrid-based company, stressed that Tencent is becoming more flexible when it comes to regional policies. “There is a limit to what you can grow by yourself (...) Tencent respects our independence and creative freedom,” said the director.

According to industry analysis company Niko Partners, Tencent managed to consolidate during the first part of 2021 a contract on a video game IP every 2.5 days. According to their statistics, the only companies that represent a competition for the conglomerate are the Chinese companies of Lilith Games, NetEase Games and My Hole.

Which gaming companies did Tencent invest in?

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