abellwillring

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,331
Austin, TX
Who is Tencent and why are they so aggressive about gaming?
The ~8th (sometimes a bit higher) biggest company in the world. They have a huge gaming portfolio -- it's a very profitable market if you know how to play it well.

I guess buying a bigger stake in Netmarble would also make a lot of sense if they own a portion already. Netmarble not having an ADR or being traded on the US markets at all probably limits their growth to some capacity so it wouldn't be too expensive to acquire them.
 

TheWorthyEdge

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,062
Genuinely curious, but what's so bad about Tencent? What is their extent of influence on games out right now and how have they made things worse?
 

Cow Mengde

Member
Oct 26, 2017
13,292
Gross. I wouldn't play anything by them. Hopefully they buy a shitty company like Activision or EA.
 
Oct 27, 2017
3,797
The Zynga seems to be the most sensible to me given many of Tencent's other investments and a 6B loan (Zynga having a market cap of approximately double that) considering Zynga's presence in the mobile gaming space, but maybe it's something like WBIE.
 

Greenpaint

Member
Oct 30, 2017
3,015
Genuinely curious, but what's so bad about Tencent? What is their extent of influence on games out right now and how have they made things worse?

Tencent seems to have been very hands off with the acquisitions. I don't remember Tencent influencing the companies they bought in any public and major way.

However China uses censorship heavy handedly domestically and is very sensitive to any criticism internationally too. So there are fears that China will use the acquired companies to extend this censorship internationally.

But so far it seems to me that Tencent and China invest in foreign companies because they want to extract capital. Just like any company ever. So I don't personally think we'll have problems from Tencent buying gaming companies (from political perspective).

A much more likely scenario would be bad management enforcing bad business decisions on companies it owns, but that's the danger of any megacorp owning large chunks of any industry.