Inside Tencent’s Ambition to Make a Triple-A Console Game – Metaverse Marketing

Tencent, China’s largest social media and video game company, hasn’t been very successful in bringing its popular products into the Western mainstream. The giant’s international expansion has been largely achieved by investing in businesses outside of China, but now it’s boosting its presence on the ground overseas through its most lucrative business: video games.

Over the past two years, Tencent has significantly expanded the footprint of two of its most successful game studios, TiMi Studios and Lightspeed Studios, around the world, hiring local executives to manage these outposts at home. foreign.

To get some insight into how Tencent handles its international gaming branches and the expectations it has for them, we spoke to Steve Martin, Managing Director of Los Angeles-based company Lightspeed. In addition to its base in China, Lightspeed now has offices in the United States, Canada, Singapore, United Kingdom, France, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and the United Arab Emirates.

Intellectual property ambitions

Tencent is recognized more for its ability to turn established PC games into popular mobile games than an original developer. Lightspeed, for example, made a name for itself designing the mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

In May, PUBG Mobile had reported $8 billion in global lifetime spend on gamerswhich makes it the second highest grossing mobile game in the world behind TiMi’s Honor of Kings, which itself is considered a League of Legends version of Riot.

Tencent now wants players to remember it through its own intellectual property. Under the guidance of Martin, who was part of the Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 development team at Rockstar Games, the Lightspeed LA office is working on a AAA console game targeting hardcore gamers around the world.

Although Martin declined to share details of the game, he said it would “reflect cultures and sensibilities around the world.” The game should be finished in two to three years.

“What we’re working on is very ambitious,” the executive told Metaverse Marketing.

The success of PUBG Mobile is largely due to its large number of Chinese players. Lightspeed LA is clearly targeting a more international crowd.

The Chinese console market takes off after a 15-year ban that ended in 2015. But the industry, which generated $2 billion in revenue from China last yearremains humble compared to mobile and PC games, which generated $45.5 billion in revenue in 2021according to industry researcher Niko Partners.

Autonomy

Tencent is known for its hands-off management approach to its game portfolio companies, letting them operate on their own while providing support as they see fit.

It appears to be saving the playbook for its in-house overseas studios. While Lightspeed LA has access to technical and operational assistance from Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters, in terms of creativity, it’s all done in the LA office of 83 employees, which will eventually expand to a team of 200. said Martin.

After a decade at Rockstar, the gaming veteran joined Tencent because “there aren’t many big publishers that offer this level of creativity.”

Many Tencent executives, including CEO Pony Ma and Chairman Martin Lau, are known to be gamers themselves. “When we talk about games with management, it’s always about the games we love. I’ve had executives who don’t play at all,” Martin said.

Rather than having a single brain dictating most decisions in the studio, Martin oversees a collective of directors across all disciplines, from creative and animation to technical functions. For example, when the studio chooses a soundtrack, the main executives will discuss the options, but the decision is up to the audio director. This structure also removes the bottleneck of having 700 people asking questions of a single boss, Martin suggested.

“We want people to feel like they own the game.”