Tencent claims its mobile gaming platform covers 80% of Chinese mobile gamers

You knew Tencent was big in the Chinese gaming industry, but did you know it was this big? At a conference in Beijing on Monday, Tencent shared some numbers for its mobile gaming platform that are damn impressive. The platform was only launched in May of 2013, but by the end of the year it had more than 570 million registered accounts, and at this point it now covers more than 80% of China’s mobile gaming masses, according to the company, with a total of more than one billion registered accounts.

Of course, this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given how many Tencent mobile games top the iOS and Android charts in China. A bigger factor, though, is that Tencent also dominates the social messaging market, operating China’s two most popular IM apps: QQ and WeChat. When gamers play a Tencent game, they can almost always log in with one of those two accounts, meaning that most of Tencent’s game platform users didn’t actually sign up for that service. They simply logged into a Tencent game using their existing Tencent QQ or WeChat account.

Even so, though, it’s an impressive accomplishment. In fact, it’s funny to think back now to a few years ago, when people were wondering whether Tencent—whose most popular services were PC-based IM client and PC-based games—was going to be able to handle the transition to mobile. Uh, yes. I’d say the company handled it fine.

Of course, for indie developers, this is just further evidence that if you want access to the market, you kind of need to work with Tencent. Its 60/40 or 70/30 split (depending on the type of partnership you strike) may not seem that appealing, but when the company can offer access to a billion* mobile gaming accounts, what choice do you really have?

*Of course, this doesn’t actually mean there are a billion active mobile gamers in China. Many of these are duplicates or dead accounts. But there are almost certainly still hundreds of millions of active mobile gamers playing Tencent’s platform games every day.

(via Netease Games)

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