Sometimes unrecognized in our regions, Tencent has become over the years a giant in the gaming world. Little is known about it, but the company is present in the lives of millions of players every day! Owner of Riot Games (League of Legends, Valorant, …) and Supercell (Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, …), Tencent also owns shares in many companies including Epic Games (40% of the capital ), Activision Blizzard (5%) or Ubisoft (5%).
Not content with being a stakeholder in the video game industry, the Chinese giant opened its own development studio in 2003, including the very juicy Honor of Kings ($ 1.5 billion raised in 2019)!
The undisputed and undisputed leader in many areas, Tencent has been working behind the scenes for many months to attack the streaming market. According to Bloomberg , it is neither more nor less than the merger of the two most important platforms of the country that the company wishes to conclude. And what could be easier when you also own shares in these two companies …
Huya Inc. Live and DouYu International Holdings, with respectively 37% and 38% of their capital owned by Tencent, represent more than 300 million monthly users between them! If this agreement were to be signed, this new actor would then have double Twitch users (estimated last year at 140 million monthly users) and would be valued at 10 billion dollars! As a reminder, Twitch was bought in 2014 for less than a billion dollars by Amazon.
If the success of such a partnership can only break all records for use in China, one can nevertheless ask the question of a possible expansion on a global scale. The United States, through the voice of Donald Trump, currently doing a witch hunt against Chinese companies and their products, Tencent would deprive itself of a large market share in the event of a ban on its future platform across the Atlantic.
On our Old Continent, many players have already tried to compete with the leader Twitch, without real success so far … Whether it is the rout of Mixer or the many metamorphoses of YouTube Gaming, no one has yet succeeded in doing doubt the American giant. European players seem to be attached to their first love and not yet ready to switch creameries.
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