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The biggest games company in the world is to take on digital PC games giant Steam.
As spotted by PCGamesN, Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad has revealed that the Tencent Games Platform is being rebranded as WeGame. The service already has over 200m users alone in China, compared to Steam’s 125m global userbase.
"Tencent Games Platform entered the market later than Steam but has had a head-start with the games and services it provides on the platform," Ahmad said. "Chinese gamers have access to popular F2P games such as League of Legends and FIFA Online 3 through the platform. Tencent last year started to transform TGP in order to compete against Steam.
"The service now supports paid standalone game titles and well as VR and AR games. Tencent bought a few paid standalone games to the platform in 2016 and plan to release 100 new paid games, primarily from Western developers, on the platform in 2017. Don’t Starve launched on the platform this year and sold one million copies in China within a month.
Other games like Stardew Valley and Cities Skylines have also been popular on the platform in China. On April 20, Tencent will hold its UP conference where it will give more details of how it is continuing to transform the platform."
Tencent owns League of Legends developer Riot games and also has stakes in Activision Blizzard, Epic Games and Supercell.
It was revealed last month that the combined revenue of the world’s largest 25 video games companies hit $70.4bn in 2016, representing a year-on-year increase of 17 per cent – and Tencent accounted for ten per cent of this overall total.
Looks like Tencent will rebrand its 'Tencent Games Platform' to 'WeGame'.
It's basically Tencent's version of Steam. pic.twitter.com/Rx7ndSXJVM
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) April 16, 2017
