Tencent

Tencent
他们的名字几乎概括了他们的游戏开发预算。(Their name pretty much sums up their game development budget.)
Type: Public Founded: November 11, 1998 Services: QQ WeChat WeGame Miniclip Huya Live/Nimo TV GameLoop Founder(s): Ma Huateng Zhang Zidong Xu Chenye Cheng Yidan Zeng Liqing Headquarters: Shenzhen, Guangdong, China Key people: Ma Huateng (chairman, CEO) Martin Lau (president) Divisions: Tencent Games Tencent Music Tencent Pictures Subsidiaries: See List of subsidiaries Website: https://www.tencent.com

"The problem with Tencent is the lack of innovation; all of their products are copies."

— Jack Ma

Tencent Holdings Ltd. (Chinese: 腾讯; pinyin: Téngxùn) is a Chinese multinational conglomerate holding company founded in 1998, whose subsidiaries specialize in various Internet-related services and products, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and technology in China and globally.

Tencent controls hundreds of subsidiaries and associates in numerous industries and areas, creating a broad portfolio of ownerships and investments across a diverse range of businesses including search engines, e-commerce, retail, video gaming, real estate, software, virtual reality, ride-sharing, banking, financial services, financial technology, consumer technology, computer technology, automobile, film production, movie ticketing, music production, space technology, natural resources, smartphones, big data, agriculture, medical services, cloud computing, social media, IT, advertising, streaming media, artificial intelligence, robotics, UAVs, food delivery, courier services, e-book, internet services, education and renewable energy.

As of 2020, Tencent is the publisher #3 out of 5 of the most played games of all time, with the top of the list, Crossfire, have reached the player count of 1 billion players in 2020.

Other than their main gaming division; Tencent Games, Tencent Holdings has invested in several non-Chinese game publishers and developers since around 2011, ranging from minority shares to full control of the company. Through these investments, Tencent has been considered the largest video game company in the world since March 2018 as well as the highest-earning game company in the world, generating over $32 billion of revenue in 2021 (almost double that of Sony, the 2nd highest-earning company). As of 2022, it is largest company in China and the 6th largest company in the world by market capitalization.

Why They Don't Deserve a Single Cent

NOTE: This page will focus on Tencent's involvement in the gaming industry.

1. Tencent is infamous for copying tons of products from other companies (including its subsidiaries) and branding them as their own, most notably several MOBA games created under the brand Tencent Games. Examples include Honor of Kings (known as one of the most popular and third highest-grossing video games of all time after Nexon's Dungeon & Fighter Online and Rockstar/Take-Two's Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online, despite being released only in the Chinese market in 2015) and its international version Arena of Valor, which directly copy several elements from then semi-independent Riot Games' League of Legends.
   • Tencent's CEO, Ma Huateng, has responded to fellow Chinese tech companies' criticism regarding this topic that "[To] copy is not evil." The sheer hypocrisy in this statement is that in 2018, Tencent and the now fully-owned Riot Games have filed a lawsuit against Shanghai Moonton (the developer of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang) for copyright infringement on League of Legends, which Tencent copied 3 years earlier.
   • Some of the features in their games were directly plagiarized from other companies, such as a UI in Code Syn that is crudely modified from Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's The Division 2's UI.
     • Speaking of copying, they also force their gaming divisions (such as Supercell and (formerly) Glu Mobile) to make numerous reskins of their specialized genres (city building strategy and rail shooters, respectively).
2. Tencent is known as the pioneer of the "Games as a service" model. They mainly focused on online-only games with a lot of mostly overpriced microtransactions, tacked on in several different formats. Some champion skins in their MOBA games cost up to $40.
   • Valorant, by Tencent's Riot Games, features a gun skin set named Elderflame with a base price tag of $100 (which is very expensive, even for F2P standards). However, Tencent has created a skin of a skin system by selling "visual upgrades" of the Elderflame skin which costs $192 to fully upgrade all weapons, and $292 in total unless you grind out the battle passes.
   • In Call of Duty: Mobile, Tencent rigged the in-game loot drops to not drop "grand prizes" (such as time-limited guns and character skins) until the player has opened the loot drops for a fixed amount of time (mostly 10 to 20 times).
   • In Pokémon Unite (a Pokémon-based MOBA game), Tencent added Energy tanks that can obtain coins, tickets, and Boost Emblems to buy cosmetics and use them as boosts to improve gameplay styles. While it is not a bad thing to do, emblems can only make players cheat, thus making it pay-to-win.
3. They often create knockoff games to capitalize on fads, like the aforementioned Code Syn, which is a knockoff of Cyberpunk 2077 with plastic-looking Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters and a generic open world.
4. They are infamous for taking over several companies (both big and small) for various purposes, such as;
   • Epic Games: "partially" taken over in 2012 after they signed a support agreement to aid Epic during their transition into "games as a services" business model. Epic later turned into one of Tencent's flagships, focused on milking money from the Unreal Engine license, Fortnite, and their game store.
   • Grinding Gear Games: bought out by Tencent in May 2018 to milk their online game Path of Exile.
   • Krafton: partially taken over a few months after suing Epic Games for "copying" PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds to eliminate Fortnite's main competitor and bring them to their side.
   • Marvelous: partially acquired in February 2020, mainly to use Marvelous' anime division to produce adaptations of Chinese manhua (comic books) and milk Marvelous's Story of Seasons games.
   • More recently, they acquired several mobile game companies just to butcher their games and turn them into P2W fests (or even make them worse if they already are), as well as to milk money out of both the games and the mobile industry.
5. They usually acquire several licenses from media franchises and games to create a cash-in game/add-on content with little to no originality and/or grasp of the source material, for example,
   • Several DC Comics characters were featured in Arena of Valor yet they have unoriginal skill sets based on mismatched skill sets from LoL champions.
   • They acquired a license from Marvel Comics to feature some of their characters in Fortnite, such as a mode where players could transform themselves into Thanos if they found the Infinity Gauntlet that spawned randomly on the map. The game also includes skins based on their characters, including Deadpool and Captain America.
   • They made a contract with The Pokémon Company to create Pokémon Unite, which is basically yet another LoL clone with some gimmicks added.
6. They are also infamous for meddling with their subsidiaries, for example;
   • They made Riot Games create some cash-in spin-off titles based on the League of Legends franchise, such as Legends of Runeterra (a Heartstone-like card game), League of Legends: Wild Rift (which is just a mobile port of LoL, which Tencent originally intended to make in 2015 but got rejected due to Riot back then stating that the MOBA genre is "not fit for mobile control", said "mobile port" would have turned into Honor of Kings and Arena of Valor later), and a League of Legends fighting game codenamed: Project L. They are also responsible for several overpriced weapon skins in Valorant, as well.
   • They forced Funcom to break their promise that Conan Exiles would be released as a full game without DLC by having them dissecting several in-game contents and sold it as DLCs, resulting in a horrible launch due to the rushed state of the game.
   • They meddled Epic Games into making a mobile port for Fortnite to create "competition" against a mobile port of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which is also owned by Tencent's other subsidiary (Krafton), meaning that they are competing against themselves!
     • Another example is Garena's Free Fire, which was initially developed and published as a mobile clone of PUBG for the Southeast Asian market. After Tencent partially acquired Krafton and completed a deal to develop and publish the mobile version of PUBG by themselves, Garena would have later rebranded the game as yet another competitor of PUBG and Fortnite.
7. Due to Tencent owning a large percentage of Epic Games and Krafton, the developers of Fortnite and PUBG respectively, Tencent has nearly monopolized the Battle Royale genre (with the only real competitor against both games being EA's Apex Legends). This led Tencent to implement a lot of microtransactions in both games without having to worry about competition, this is the main reason why most of the problems that PUBG has have been left untouched to this day.
8. Their online game stores (WeGame and the Epic Games Store) are riddled with many problems.
   • WeGame is a Chinese-only online game store that has a near monopoly on the Chinese gaming market. Due to strict censorship by the Communist Party of China (which has close ties with Tencent themselves), several foreign online stores were banned from China, including Steam (though Valve attempted to create a "localized" version of Steam with censorship applied, which caused outrage in the Chinese gaming community, before Valve announced that the international version of Steam will be available for all Chinese players via VPN and separated it from the Chinese version). As such, the only way to access these foreign stores in China is by using a virtual private network, or VPN.
   • The Epic Games Store is riddled with several problems and questionable policies, such as the infamous timed exclusive practices, review censorship, lack of basic features such as a shopping cart, and restrictive DRM, which is carried over from WeGame.
   • Due to various reasons as stated above, Tencent has generated over 46% of overall revenue in China, far ahead of their rival NetEase who have "only" 15% of the market share.
9. As mentioned above, they have strong ties with the Communist Party of China, which has supported Tencent's business in several ways, such as banning several online game stores (including Steam) in favor of Tencent's WeGame. In return, Tencent made a deal with the CCP to release several propaganda games, such as Clap for Xi Jinping: An Awesome Speech (a mobile game released for the occasion of the 19th National Party Congress) and inserting patriotic agenda into their games, such as the counter-terrorism theme of their Game for Peace program.
   • As of May 2020, Tencent has shut down PUBG Mobile in China and replaced it with a reskin called Peacekeeper Elite, with a nationalistic story about Chinese "peacekeeping forces" fighting terrorist factions.
10. Several of their titles and platforms (like Valorant and the Epic Games Store) contain suspicious DRM software, which led to rumors that Tencent is using that to send info to the Chinese government (similar to ByteDance's TikTok). It doesn't help that Tencent has been accused of bribing computer software agencies to whitelist their software.
    • Following a series of Chinese gaming regulations changes in 2018 in an attempt to "combat gaming addiction in children", Tencent has implemented facial recognition technology to prevent children from logging into the game after 10 PM.

Redeeming Qualities

1. While they mainly copied other games, most of the games made under Tencent Games are of decent-to-good quality products from other companies (including its subsidiaries).
2. Despite the censorship, Tencent's gaming platform WeGame has helped several Chinese indie developers thrive, some of them would eventually make it out of China and release several great titles, such as Mirror, Muse Dash, and Chinese Parents.
3. Although they usually meddle with their subsidiaries for profit, they allow their subsidiary developers to have independent operations and creative freedom as long as it's not against themselves or the CCP.

Trivia

• According to Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney. Ma Huateng's favorite game is Unreal Tournament II, which is the game that inspired him to invest in the game industry in 2002 and subsequently making Tencent the largest video game company in the world via several acquisitions, including a partial takeover deal with Epic Games in 2013. Sweeney also stated that Ma is also his personal friend.
• After a late 2020 controversy which resulted in the VTuber agency Hololive raising a ban on doing any business with Chinese companies and the orange dragon Kiryu Coco leaving (or graduating in VTuber language) from the company in 2021, Tencent managed to find a loophole around the ban and indirectly promote their game using Hololive VTubers, by having them play Tencent games published by the non-Chinese publishers. A notable example is Pokémon Unite (published by The Pokémon Company, a Japanese company) and Fortnite (published by Epic Games, an American company).
  • This practice was later copied by a fellow Chinese publisher Shanghai YoStar, who published Blue Archive in collaboration with a South Korean company Nexon.

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