Back in February 2019, this column wrote about the Tencent-sponsored metaverse:
“Tencent was either a major shareholder in or investor in four of the top five deals [of 2018] that saw record $5.7bn invested in startups, according to Digi-Capital’s first quarter (Q1) report by Tim Merel.
“Tencent was behind investments in Epic Games ($1.25bn raised), Douyu ($630m raised), Shanda Games ($474m) and Huya ($462m raised). France’s Voodoo raised $200m from Goldman Sachs to round out the top five in 2018, Digi-Capital said.”
This week, Tencent completed the set by taking an undisclosed-size stake in France-based mobile games company Voodoo at a reported $1.4bn valuation, according to the Financial Times.
The FT also noted in Europe this year Tencent was completing its purchase of Norway-based game developer Funcom, valued at $160m, and had previously backed Germany-based Yager Development, while PC Gamer has a handy list of most of the games deals by Tencent outside of China here.
But not everything is going into Tencent’s stable. Playdots, a mobile games developer spun out of startup studio Betaworks with $10m led by Tencent and venture capital firm Greycroft, has just this week been acquired by publisher Take-Two Interactive for $192m in cash and stock, while US-listed Zynga is stepping up its own acquisitions with Rollic and Peak Games.
Beyond being a $150bn industry itself, games are a fascinating example of how advanced technology can morph into different areas.
Google’s acquisition of DeepMind helped it use the machine learning tools to save its energy costs, while Nvidia’s gamer chips were also picked up by early artificial intelligence researchers for their processing power.
The expansion of augmented or virtual reality might see most applications longer-term in education and training apps but games kicked off the excitement in the technology.
And from billions to trillions in revenues is the goal of the most ambitious entrepreneurs, often supported by Tencent.
Jacob Navok and Matthew Ball in their excellent series on Epic Games explored the metaverse – the joining of digital and physical worlds – and why it is taking on the walled gardens of Apple.
The FT review of Epic’s latest round, including $250m from Sony, also picks up Unity’s potential IPO.
But behind the scenes lies Tencent, minority investor in Epic, Roblox and others and we are delighted you can hear Jeffrey Li, managing partner at Tencent Investment, at the next GCV Digital Forum on 29 September.
