Who is the biggest video game publisher in the world?
Nintendo, Sony or maybe EA? The answer is Tencent, a Chinese company based in Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley.
Tencent stretches across the global gaming industry like an octopus. The company owns Riot Games and at the same time has large stakes in game developers Epic Games and Supercell. It also has stakes in Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft.
The studio behind Call of Duty Mobile is also entirely owned by Tencent. The company also owns shares in Spotify, the car manufacturer Tesla, the largest global record company Universal Music, the digital bank N26 and Snapchat.
With WeChat and QQ, Tencent also owns the most popular messenger services in Asia. With WeChat Pay and WeBank, they dominate the asian cashless payment market. Tencent is the sixth largest company in the world and celebrates new revenue records year after year. Behind the company’s success is brilliant foresight, but also plagiarism and unquestioning cooperation with a government that uses every tool at its disposal to spy on its people and companies. In the late 90s, Tencent copied the legendary messenger service ICQ – starting in 2004, a series of successful browser games were released.
A short time later, Tencent brought itself into the global gaming market and copied games from abroad. The company put its focus on mobile games early on, as many chinese owned a smartphone, but not a computer or console. There was no competition from abroad. Basically, for foreign companies, the Chinese market is still not completely open. In China, there are lists for certain industries and sectors where foreign companies still can’t invest. Then there are certain industries where a chinese partner is mandatory. For a long time, Tencent was the only way for many international developers to offer their games on the gigantic chinese market after all. This is how Tencent grew rapidly.
At the same time, the Tencent app WeChat exploded. This was originally a clone of WhatsApp. Today, the app is not only used to spend time, chat or call a taxi – it is also used to send money, take out insurance and contracts, and to get information. You can do it all within the app.
WeChat now has over 1.2 billion users and dominates the daily lives of most chinese. In the wrong hands, of course, such an app and its data power would be an incredibly powerful tool – hmm… There is no democracy in the People’s republic of China. The communist party dictates the lives of the Chinese population in all areas. There are cells of the party in every larger company – also in Tencent. Tencent’s
WeChat and similar apps offer the chinese government new opportunities to censor unpopular opinions. Such services can be used to monitor the population and control information.
Amnesty international gave WeChat and QQ a privacy rating of 0/100 points. Among other things, the rating assessed how securely user data is encrypted and stored. Tencent was also the only company to leave open the question of whether it would deny governments a backdoor to the data. More than 100 million people use WeChat outside China. Citizen Lab, a research organization at the University of Toronto, has closely examined the app.
According to them, the chinese government also reads confidential app data abroad, and uses it for its domestic propaganda machine. But it’s not just WeChat and co. The communist party also seems to monitor and control its population through video games. In 2019, for example, the Chinese government arranged that Tencent and other game providers introduce new plain-name identification systems.
In some cases, even facial recognition was required to play games. Children are allowed to play for a maximum of 90 minutes per day. On holidays up to 3 hours and between 10 PM and 8 AM not at all. At the same time, games seem to only be permitted if they conform to the values of the Communist party. If not, they have a poor chance. In 2017, for example,
Tencent bought into the South Korean studio Bluehole – that’s the publisher of PUBG. The Chinese government has threatened Tencent to block PUBG in China because it is too violent and not socialist enough.
In 2019, Tencent took the game off the market and released “Game for Peace” in its place.
This is PUBG without blood and death and in the style of the Blue Warriors of the Air Force of the People’s Liberation Army of China. Even the game scores were taken from the original. However, the Communist Party also seems to have influence outside of China through Tencent. In 2019, there was a scandal surrounding the NBA – Tencent is an official partner of the league and streams the games for the Chinese market.
The state broadcaster CCTV televises them. The manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, publishes a Tweet – the Chinese government doesn’t like that at all. Start broadcaster CCTV and Tencent announce they will no longer broadcast NBA Preseason games of the Rockets. Tencent also wants to end all of its business relationships with the Rockets. According to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the Chinese government demands that Morey be fired immediately. The situation only calms down when an apology from Morey follows on Twitter a short time later. The players also apologize: “Yeah, we apologize you know you know We love China, we love you know playing there” – The NBA’s deal with Tencent probably just tasted too good – “Money is money” – China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s strongest economic power this decade – in fact, two completely different world visions are colliding. One with democratic, liberal values and one with centralist, authoritarian ones –
Do we have to fear that the Chinese government through Tencent and its holdings will soon gain more influence in our country as well? Principally, Tencent and other chinese giants like Alibaba want to make money first and foremost – and they want to do that abroad, too – “This is the english saying baba, money is money” – There would be no indication that china would become missionary in the rest of the world.
In the USA and in the EU, privacy and data would also be much better protected – Surveillance, control and propaganda by the chinese state here are not to be feared. The rise of China is nevertheless perhaps an opportunity to strengthen our own democratic values.
Tencent’s success is symbolic of China’s hugely successful economic policy. Foreign corporations were excluded – at the same time, everything was copied from themy. At least until they had the necessary money to buy the companies behind them or to become innovative themselves. Today, Tencent is gigantic and continues to grow. The Chinese government’s abuse of Tencent’s products is also emblematic of a whole new dystopian kind of techno-dictatorship. Now, with this government, this country will soon become the strongest economic power in the world – kind of creepy – technology and consumer trends will come from China more often in the future.
There will probably be more frequent ideologically driven power games. Nevertheless, good cooperation with china, not mere coexistence, is necessary. China is a leader in many research areas – We need their products and they need our markets. For global challenges, like climate change, we all need to pull together anyway – even the Chinese government is aware of this.
Cheers! As always, we hope you enjoyed this video. Let us know what you think about Tencent and its global holdings in the comments! Next week, we will upload a video on Nike and how they almost pay no taxes. So, be sure to click on that, and we’ll see you next week!
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