Tencent is a bit of a subversive player in the Western video game market. Subversive in the sense that they run a fair bit of service that people might not even realise is under their control. Their biggest investment is none other than League of Legends, for example.
In a true corporate fashion, however, Tencent seem intent on getting their paws into other markets, as well as expanding their existing ones, with their latest experiment being a sort of a rival to Valve's Steam, no less.
Revenue-wise, Tencent are the world's largest and most prominent video-game related company, and are contextually extremely important when it comes to PC gaming in China. Essentially, their WeGame platform is to China what Steam is to the West. It was only a natural expansion of their influence, as well as a matter of time, before Tencent made an attempt at extending WeGame support to the international market.
WeGame was kickstarted last September as a Chinese-exclusive social and gaming service, where players can buy games, play them with friends, share content and more, all on a single, unified and well-supported game platform. It also offers the service of live-streaming, thus integrating a bit of Twitch functionality into its very design.
Tencent have since been developing a Hong Kong variant of WeGame, which will be translated into English language and made readily available for overseas users as well. By doing so, Tencent not only hope to attract some of the players from outside China, but also to get a chance at adapting and translating Chinese games for the international market.
As it stands, WeGame offers 220 games, some of which have originally been developed overseas, and then released in China via said platform. Tencent have offered purchase statistics for Don't Starve Together, Klei's survival title, which has been sold more than two million times on WeGame. This serves as an apt demonstration of the strength of numbers that Tencent and WeGame have at their disposal, and this alone might make for an interesting clash of titans when WeGame is finally released internationally.
