#HTE

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world.

The spotlight this week is back on Tencent, which has made some interesting moves in gaming and content publishing. There will be no roundup next week as China observes the Lunar New Year, but the battle only intensifies for the country’s internet giants, particularly short-video rivals Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese version) and Kuaishou, which will be vying for user time over the big annual holiday. We will surely cover that when we return.

‘Honor of Kings’ creator hiring for U.S. studio

Tencent’s storied gaming studio TiMi is looking to accelerate international expansion by tripling its headcount in the U.S. in 2020, the studio told TechCrunch this week, though it refused to reveal the exact size of its North American office. Eleven-year-old TiMi currently has a team working out of Los Angeles on global business and plans to grow it into a full development studio that “helps us understand Western players and gives us a stronger global perspective,” said the studio’s international business director Vincent Gao.

Gao borrowed the Chinese expression “riding the wind and breaking the wave” to characterize TiMi’s global strategy. The wind, he said, “refers to the ever-growing desire for quality by mobile gamers.” Breaking the wave, on the other hand, entails TiMi applying new development tools to building high-budget, high-quality AAA mobile games.

The studio is credited for producing one of the world’s most-played mobile games, Honor of Kings, a mobile multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, and taking it overseas under the title Arena of Valor. Although Arena of Valor didn’t quite take off in Western markets, it has done well in Southeast Asia in part thanks to Tencent’s publishing partnership with the region’s internet giant Garena.

Honor of Kings and a few other Tencent games have leveraged the massive WeChat and QQ messengers to acquire users. That raises the question of whether Tencent can replicate its success in overseas markets where its social apps are largely absent. But TiMi contended that these platforms are not essential to a game’s success. “TiMi didn’t succeed in China because of WeChat and QQ. It’s not hard to find examples of games that didn’t succeed even with [support from] WeChat and QQ.”

Call of Duty: Mobile is developed by Tencent and published by Activision Blizzard (Image: Call of Duty: Mobile via Twitter) 

When it comes to making money, TiMi has from the outset been a strong proponent of game-as-a-service whereby it continues to pump out fresh content after the initial download. Gao believes the model will gain further traction in 2020 as it attracts old-school game developers, which were accustomed to pay-to-play, to follow suit.

All eyes are now on TiMi’s next big move, the mobile version of Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty. Tencent, given its experience in China’s mobile-first market, appears well-suited to make the mobile transition for the well-loved console shooter. Developed by Tencent and published by Blizzard, in which Tencent owns a minority stake, in September, Call of Duty: Mobile had a spectacular start, recording more worldwide downloads in a single quarter than any mobile game except Pokémon GO, which saw its peak in Q3 2016, according to app analytics company Sensor Tower.

The pedigreed studio has in recent times faced more internal competition from its siblings inside Tencent, particularly the Lightspeed Quantum studio, which is behind the successful mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). While Tencent actively fosters internal rivalry between departments, Gao stressed that TiMi has received abundant support from Tencent on the likes of publishing, business development and legal matters.

WeChat erects a paywall – with Apple tax

Ever since WeChat rolled out its content publishing function — a Facebook Page equivalent named the Official Account — back in 2012, articles posted through the social networking platform have been free to read. That’s finally changing.

This week, WeChat announced that it began allowing a selected group of authors to put their articles behind a paywall in a trial period. The launch is significant not only because it can inspire creators by helping them eke out additional revenues, but it’s also a reminder of WeChat’s occasionally fraught relationship with Apple.

WeChat launched its long-awaited paywall for articles published on its platform 

Let’s rewind to 2017 when WeChat, in a much-anticipated move, added a “tipping” feature to articles published on Official Account. The function was meant to boost user engagement and incentivize writers off the back of the popularity of online tipping in China. On live streaming platforms, for instance, users consume content for free but many voluntarily send hosts tips and virtual gifts worth from a few yuan to the hundreds.

WeChat said at the time that all transfers from tipping would go toward the authors, but Apple thought otherwise, claiming that such tips amounted to “in-app purchases” and thus entitled it to a 30% cut from every transaction, or what is widely known as the “Apple tax.”

WeChat disabled tipping following the clash over the terms but reintroduced the feature in 2018 after reaching consensus with Apple. The function has been up and running since then and neither WeChat nor Apple charged from the transfers, a spokesperson from WeChat confirmed with TechCrunch.

If the behemoths’ settlement over tipping was a concession on Apple’s end, Tencent has budged on paywalls this time.

Unlike tipping, the new paywall feature entitles Apple to its standard 30% cut of in-app transactions. That means transfers for paid content will go through Apple’s in-app purchase (IAP) system rather than WeChat’s own payments tool, as is the case with tipping. It also appears that only users with a Chinese Apple account are able to pay for WeChat articles. TechCrunch’s attempt to purchase a post using a U.S. Apple account was rejected by WeChat on account of the transaction “incurring risks or not paying with RMB.”

The launch is certainly a boon to creators who enjoy a substantial following, although many of them have already explored third-party platforms for alternative commercial possibilities beyond the advertising and tipping options that WeChat enables. Zhishi Xingqiu, the “Knowledge Planet”, for instance, is widely used by WeChat creators to charge for value-added services such as providing readers with exclusive industry reports. Xiaoe-tong, or “Smart Little Goose”, is a popular tool for content stars to roll out paid lessons.

Not everyone is bullish on the new paywall. One potential drawback is it will drive down traffic and discourage advertisers. Others voice concerns that the paid feature is vulnerable to exploitation by clickbait creators. On that end, WeChat has restricted the application to the function only to accounts that are over three months old, have published at least three original articles and have seen no serious violations of WeChat rules.

#HTE

Last Saturday, Taiwanese voters re-elected President Tsai Ing-wen to her second term after an election that split the country among generational and ideological lines. A crucial issue were the differences in how Tsai, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and her main opponent, Han Kuo-yu of the Kuomintang (KMT), approach Taiwan’s fraught relationship with China.

Despite the highly polarizing run-up to the election, however, both the DPP and KMT have taken measures to foster entrepreneurship in Taiwan. Now that Tsai has won, many investors don’t expect a dramatic impact, but instead are keeping an eye on how policies put in motion by both parties will play out. They are also looking for political allies who understand the startup ecosystem in Taiwan, which is often overshadowed by large hardware OEMs and semiconductor companies.

Policy

Joseph Huang, an investment partner at Infinity Ventures, has worked with both the DPP and KMT as limited partners, and says “from our side, they are always asking for how to create more awareness of Taiwan startups, how do we help them with institutions, how do we help them more?”

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Neighborhood stores dot tens of thousands of cities, towns and villages in India. They have survived — and thrived, despite — retail giants’ billions of investment in the country. So now, Amazon is beginning to embrace them.

Amazon said on Saturday it has partnered with thousands of neighborhood stores — locally known as kirana stores — across India to use them as delivery points for goods.

The company said it’s a win-win scenario for all stakeholders. “It’s good for customers, and it helps the shop owners earn additional income,” tweeted Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos .

Bezos’ announcement today, as he concludes his fourth India trip, underscores just how vital neighborhood stores remain for shoppers in the country despite the world’s largest e-commerce giant’s major push into the country and an emergence of heavily backed ecosystem of shopping startups.

These mom-and-pop stores offer all kinds of items, pay low wages and little to no rent. Since they are ubiquitous (there are more than 10 million neighborhood stores in India, according to industry estimates), no retail giant can offer a faster delivery. And on top of that, their economics is often better than most. E-commerce is still at an early stage in India, accounting for just 3% of total retail sales, according to industry estimates.

Walmart -owned Flipkart has also arrived at the same conclusion. Last month, it invested $30 million in four-year-old Bangalore-based startup ShadowFax, which works with neighborhood stores in 300 cities to use their real estate to store inventory, and utilize their large network of freelancers for the delivery.

Any alliance with neighborhood stores would come in handy to Amazon India and Flipkart as a new contender readies its e-commerce play. India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani late last month started signing up customers for a soft launch of JioMart in suburban Mumbai.

JioMart is a joint venture between Ambani’s Reliance Jio, which reshaped the country’s telecom market with ultra-cheap mobile data, and his Reliance Retail, the nation’s largest retail chain with over 10,000 outlets in 6,500 Indian cities and towns.

The new venture is courting shopkeepers in many parts of India to use a handheld Jio terminal to help them better manage their inventory and order new stock from Reliance’s network of wholesalers. (Amazon, on its part, is slowly deepening its partnership with Future Retail, the second largest retailer in India.)

“Jio and Reliance Retail will launch a unique new commerce platform to empower and enrich our 12 lakh (1.2 million) small retailers and shopkeepers in Gujarat,” Ambani said last year.

Today’s announcement marks what could easily be one of the most remarkable weeks for Amazon in India, a market it entered six and a half years ago. Earlier this week, India’s anti-trust watchdog announced a probe into alleged predatory practices by Amazon India and Flipkart.

It was followed by Bezos’ arrival in India. At an event in New Delhi, he announced the company was investing a fresh $1 billion to its India operations and said it would work to help millions of small merchants come online for the first time. (This is on top of $5.5 billion the company has previously committed to its India business.)

Not far from the event venue, dozens of merchants assembled to protest the alleged anticompetitive practices of Amazon and Flipkart. On top of that, India’s trade minister Piyush Goyal chimed in on Amazon’s new investment to India, and said the investment was not a big favor to the nation. A day later, he backtracked on his comment.

On Friday, Amazon said it would create a million jobs in India by 2025, and ran a letter signed by Bezos on Amazon India website and app. Bezos had also sought to meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — a request that was not met.

#HTE

In many countries, an aging population coupled with a low birth rate is increasing the demand for qualified caregivers. In Asia, the need is especially urgent because rapid demographic shifts and changing social structures means family members who traditionally cared for relatives are unable to because they need to work or live far away. Homage wants to help with a platform that not only matches pre-screened professionals and clients, but also enables caregiving organizations to scale up more quickly.

The startup announced this week that it has raised Series B funding, led by EV Growth, with new investors Alternate Ventures and KDV Capital. Returning investor HealthXCapital also participated. The amount of funding was undisclosed, but sources tell TechCrunch it was $10 million.

Launched in 2016 by Gillian Tee, Lily Phang and Tong Duong, Homage currently operates in Singapore and Malaysia, with plans to expand into five more countries over the next two years. Before Homage, Tee, its CEO, worked in the United States, where she was co-founded Rocketrip, a business travel startup backed by Y Combinator. Tee tells TechCrunch she realized the need for a caregiving platform while looking for carers.

“We saw that in ASEAN and the Asia Pacific region, there is really a need to build long-term care infrastructure,” she says.

This includes increasing the pool of basic caregivers to reduce costs and also making it easier for families to be matched with professionals. Homage’s platform currently includes about 2,000 caregivers and focuses on elderly care, but also provides services needed by a wide age range, including rehabilitation care, physiotherapy, speech therapy and occupational therapy.

The platform was also created to give caregiving organizations a tech platform that allows them to expand more quickly and cost efficiently, in turn reducing care expenses for families. Homage interviews caregivers before they are added to the platform and partners with health organizations to provide continuing education and training. On the enterprise side, it helps providers with administrative tasks like compliance and bookings.

Tee says Homage’s screening process goes beyond interviews and background checks.

“From solving my own caregiving problems, I believe that a platform is needed, a highly-curated one, so that every single individual has to be fully competency assessed,” she says.

For caregivers, this means building a profile, and in addition to the information they provide, Homage also works with nurses to evaluate how they are able to perform important tasks like manual transfer techniques. That information is then used by its matching engine.

“The human mind can take in so many details at once, so we have an algorithm for manual transfer techniques, like bent pivot transfers or two-handed transfers, down to that granularity,” Tee says. “It is captured into the system and that translates into mobility, and gives categories of mobility, so it helps us shortlist much better than humans can.” Then final assessments and matches are done by one of Homage’s operators.

Homage also provides compliance tools that collect information about licenses, background and health checks, AED and CPR training and other documentation. On the bookings side, Homage helps organizations manage fluctuations in demand, since many families only need carers a few days a week. Caregivers on the platform range from full-time nurses to part-time carers and it also helps organizations plans breaks to prevent burnout.

Tee says many caregiving organizations put together their own system for administrative tasks and Homage gives them an alternative that lets them set up operations or expand more quickly.

Homage’s funding will be used on expanding its base of caregivers, providing training and new services, including its medical delivery service.

In a press statement, EV Growth managing partner Willson Cuaca said “Increasing aging population and low TFR (total fertility rate) are inevitable. Urbanization and a fast-paced working environment make caregiving service one of the key services in our daily life. Gillian and the team have been consistently trying to make the on-demand caregiving service as accessible as possible, fast and reliable. We are proud to be part of the Homage journey to bring back caregiving with control, grace, and dignity.”

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Xiaomi said today it is spinning off POCO, a sub-smartphone brand it created in 2018, as a standalone brand that will now run independently of the Chinese electronics giant and make its own market strategy.

The move comes months after two top POCO executives — Jai Mani, and Alvin Tse — left the Chinese giant. The company today insisted that POCO F1, the only smartphone to be launched under POCO brand, remains a “successful” smartphone unit.

Manu Kumar Jain, VP of Xiaomi, said Poco has grown into its own identity in a short span of time. “POCO F1 is an extremely popular phone across user groups, and remains a top contender in its category even in 2020. We feel the time is right to let POCO operate on its own now, which is why we’re excited to announce that POCO will spin off as an independent brand,” he said in a statement.

More to follow…

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Venture Highway, a VC firm in India founded by former Google executive Samir Sood, said on Thursday it has raised $78.6 million for its second fund as it looks to double down on investing in early-stage startups.

The firm, founded in 2015, has invested in more than two dozen startups to date, including social network ShareChat, which last year raised $100 million in a financing round led by Twitter; social commerce Meesho, which has since grown to be backed by Facebook and Prosus Ventures; and Lightspeed-backed OkCredit, which provides a bookkeeping app for small merchants.

Moving forward, Venture Highway aims to lead pre-seed and seed financing rounds and cut checks between $1 million to $1.5 million on each investment (up from its earlier investment range of $100,000 to $1 million), said Sood in an interview with TechCrunch.

Venture Highway counts Neeraj Arora, former business head of WhatsApp who played an instrumental role in selling the messaging app to Facebook, as a founding “anchor of LPs” and advisor. Arora and Sood worked together at Google more than a decade ago and helped the Silicon Valley giant explore merger and acquisition deals in Asia and other regions.

Samir Sood, the founder of Venture Highway

The VC firm said it has already made a number of investments through its second fund. Some of those deals include investments in OkCredit, mobile esports platform MPL, Gurgaon-based supply chain SaaS platform O4S, social commerce startup WMall, online rental platform CityFurnish, community platform MyScoot and online gasoline delivery platform MyPetrolPump.

As apparent from the aforementioned names, Venture Highway focuses on investing in startups that are using technology to address problems that have not been previously tackled.

Last year Venture Highway also participated in a funding round of Marsplay, a New Delhi-based startup that operates a social app where influencers showcase beauty and apparel content to sell to consumers.

“It’s very rare to have investors who keep their calm, get into an entrepreneurial mindset and help founders achieve their dreams. Throughout the journey, Venture Highway has been extremely helpful, emotionally available (super important to founders) and very resourceful,” said Misbah Ashraf, 26-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Marsplay, in an interview with TechCrunch.

There is no “theme” or category that Venture Highway is particularly interested in, said Sood. “As long as there is a tech layer; and the startup is doing something where we or our network of LPs, advisors and investors can add value, we are open to discussions,” he said.

This is the first time Venture Highway has raised money from LPs. The firm’s first fund was bankrolled by Sood and Arora.

Dozens of local and international VC funds are today active in India, where startups raised a record $14.5 billion last year. But a significant number of them focus on late-stage deals.

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India’s trade minister isn’t impressed with Amazon’s new $1 billion investment in the country.

A day after Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos announced that his company is pumping in an additional $1 billion into its India operations, making the total local investment to date to $6.5 billion, the nation’s trade minister Piyush Goyal said Amazon’s investment was not a big favor to the country.

“They may have put in a billion dollars, but then, if they make a loss of a billion dollars every year then they jolly well have to finance that billion dollars,” Goyal said in a conference on Thursday organized by think tank Observer Research Foundation. “So it’s not as if they are doing a great favor to India when they invest a billion dollars.”

The remark from the Indian minister comes days after the nation’s antitrust watchdog announced a probe into Amazon India and Walmart-owned Flipkart’s alleged predatory practices.

Bezos, who is in India this week, has sought to meet with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but his request has yet to be approved, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Goyal reiterated that foreign e-commerce players would have to abide by the local law if they want to continue to operate in the nation. He said the watchdog’s allegations were “an area of concern for every Indian.”

“We allowed every entity to come to India in a marketplace model. A marketplace model is an agnostic model where buyers and sellers are free to trade. If they establish an agreement, then the transaction is between the buyer and seller. The marketplace cannot own the inventory, cannot have control over the inventory, cannot determine prices, and cannot have an algorithm that influences how products from different sellers are listed on the platform,” he added.

“We have several rules for marketplaces in India. As long as one follows them, they are free to operate in India,” he said. Some of the allegations that are being investigated in India surround the alleged violation of these very aforementioned guidelines.

Goyal’s comment may further escalate the tension between Amazon and the Indian government. Last year, U.S. senators criticized New Delhi after it restricted foreign companies from selling inventory from their own subsidiaries. The move forced Amazon and Flipkart to abruptly pull hundreds of thousands of goods from their marketplaces.

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India welcomed Jeff Bezos this week with an antitrust probe. On top of that, thousands of small merchants who typically compete with one another are gathering in the capital city New Delhi to hold a protest against the alleged predatory practices of the e-commerce giant. But Amazon founder and chief executive’s love for one of the company’s most important overseas markets remains untainted.

At a conference on Wednesday, Bezos and Amit Agarwal, the head of Amazon India, announced that the American giant, which has already invested over $5.5 billion in the country, is pumping an additional $1 billion to digitize small and medium sized businesses. Bezos said the company is also eyeing $10 billion in locally produced products — in line with New Delhi’s Make in India program — on Amazon platform by 2025.

Amazon opened its conference, titled Amazon SMBhav (Hindi for possible, and a play on the word SMB), with videos of poor merchants and craftsmen in India who have expanded their businesses after signing up on the e-commerce platform. An Amazon executive said the company has amassed over 500,000 sellers in India and thousands of merchants in the country who are selling on 12 Amazon marketplaces around the world.

But just 10 miles from the conference venue, thousands of merchants have a different Amazon story to tell.

Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), a trade group that represents more than 60 million merchants in the country, said it has started protests in 300 cities in India. A representative of the trade group said they are protesting alleged predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices employed by Amazon.

The announcement was aimed at two-day conference called Amazon Smbhav (Hindi for possible), that is aimed at exploring ways for the e-commerce giant to work with small and medium sized businesses and merchants. Not far from the venue, a large number of merchants are mobilizing as they kickstart yet another protest against Amazon.

On Monday, India’s Competition Commission opened an antitrust probe into Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart to find whether the two e-commerce giants have exclusive arrangements with smartphone vendors and give preferential treatment to some sellers.

At stake is 1.4 billion people in India, more than half a billion of whom have come online for the first time in the last decade. India’s e-commerce market is projected to grow to $150 billion in next three years, according to a report by Nasscom and PwC India.

A CAIT spokesperson told TechCrunch earlier this week that its member merchants were pleased with India’s antitrust watchdog’s moves. The new round of protests today are one of several the trade group has organized in recent years. Last month, thousands of protestors expressed similar concerns against both Amazon and Flipkart.

More to follow…

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Spotify is ending its year-long dispute with Warner Music. The world’s largest music streaming service said on Tuesday that it has inked a global licensing agreement with Warner Music Group’s Warner Chappell for music rights.

The announcement today marks the end of their litigation before the Bombay High Court, which prevented Spotify from offering tens of thousands of music titles in many regions, including India, where it launched its service early last year.

A Warner Chappell spokesperson said the new deal “appropriately values our songwriters’ music and expands our licensed partnership with Spotify to include India.” A Spotify spokesperson said the music streaming business was “pleased” with the outcome.

More to follow…

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Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. At the beginning of each year, a large crowd of developers, content creators and digitally savvy business owners gather in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou for the WeChat conference, the messaging giant’s premier annual gathering. The event is meant to give clues to WeChat’s future and the rare occasion where its secretive founder Allen Zhang emerges in public view. But this year, much to the audience’s disappointment, Zhang was absent.

WeChat’s new era of money-making

The boss’s absence was not outright unexpected, an industry analyst told me, as WeChat shifts to focus more on monetization. With 1.1 billion active users, the app has been incredibly conservative with selling ads and pursuing other money-making strategies, an admirable decision from the user’s perspective, but arguably frustrating for Tencent’s stakeholders. Part of the restrain is due to Zhang’s user-first design philosophy and minimalistic product aesthetics. When reflecting on why WeChat doesn’t support splash ads — ads that are displayed full-page every time an app is launched — the boss had this to say (in Chinese) at last year’s WeChat conference:

“If WeChat is a person, it must have been your closest friend to deserve so much time you spent on it. So how could I have the heart to plaster an ad on your best friend’s face and ask you to watch the ad before speaking to him?”

The emphasis on user experience now seems overshadowed by Tencent’s need to carve out more revenue streams. The giant’s cash cow — its gaming business — has taken a hit in recent years, following a wave of new government policies on the online entertainment industry. Tencent’s imminent rival, ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, is getting a larger slice of the digital advertising pie in China.

One way to step up monetization within WeChat is to stimulate more business transactions. The app mapped out at the conference what it has done and what it plans to do on this front.

WeChat founder Allen Zhang addressing the audience of WeChat’s annual conference through a pre-recorded video in January 2020

Mini programs

The lite apps that skip app store downloads and run inside WeChat have surpassed 300 million daily active users. Practically every internet service in China — with the exception of a few that are at odds with Tencent, such as Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms — have built a WeChat mini program version of their full-fledged app. Without ever leaving WeChat, users can complete tasks, from playing casual games to booking movie tickets to getting food delivered.

Consumers and businesses are indeed increasingly embracing WeChat as a platform for transactions, of which the default payment method is WeChat Pay. Users spent more than 800 billion yuan ($115 billion) through mini apps in 2019, up 160% year-over-year, driven by the likes of e-commerce and other retail activities.

To further drive that spending momentum, WeChat announced it will make it easier for businesses to monetize through mini programs. For one, these apps will be better integrated into WeChat’s search results, giving businesses more exposure. The messenger will also broaden the variety of ads embedded in mini programs and provide logistics management tools to retail-focused developers.

These efforts signify WeChat’s shift from focusing on mass consumers to businesses, a strategy that goes in tandem with Tencent’s enterprise-driven roadmap for the next few years. It remains to be seen whether these changes will square with Zhang’s user-first philosophy.

Credit scoring

WeChat’s one-year-old “Payments Score” has picked up some 100 million users thus far. The program came about amid China’s push to encourage the development of credit scoring across society and industries to both regulate citizen behavior and drive financial inclusion, although Tencent’s private effort should not be conflated with Beijing’s national scheme. Like Alibaba’s Sesame Credit, WeChat Payments Score is better understood as a user loyalty program. Participation is optional and scores factor in variables such as user identity, payment behavior and default history.

Such a trust-building vehicle holds the potential to bring more transactions to WeChat, which previously lacked a full-fledged e-commerce infrastructure à la Alibaba’s Taobao. Users with a high score receive perks like deposit-free hotel booking, while application of the program is not limited to transactions but has also been adapted for rewarding “good” behavior. For instance, those with high points can redeem recyclable trash bags for free.

Tencent’s gaming empire

Tencent snatched up another gaming studio to add to its portfolio after earmarking an undisclosed investment in PlatinumGames, the Japanese developer of the well-received action title Bayonetta said in a blog post.

Over the past decade the Chinese gaming behemoth has extended its footprint to a raft of influential gaming studios worldwide, taking stakes in the likes of League of Legends maker Riot Games (full control), Clash of Clans’ Supercell (84%), Fornite developer Epic Games (40%), PlayerUnkonwn’s Battlegrounds’ Bluehold (rumored 10%) and World of Warcraft’s Activation Blizzard. It’s also Nintendo Switch’s publishing partner in China.

PlatinumGames noted that it will continue to operate independently under its existing corporate structure, a setup that’s in line with Tencent’s non-interference investment principle and a major appeal to companies desiring both the giant’s resources and a degree of autonomy. The corpus of cash will help strengthen PlatinumGames’ current business, expand from game developing into self-publishing and add a “wider global perspective.”

Tencent’s hands-off approach has led industry experts to call it an “investment vehicle” relying on external intellectual property, but in recent times the company’s in-house development teams have been striving for more visibility. Its Shenzhen-based TiMi studio, for example, is notable for producing the mobile blockbuster Honor of Kings; its Lightspeed and Quantum studio, similarly, rose to fame for developing the popular mobile version of PUBG.