Tencent is a famous video game online platform and it's coming to the Western market by rebranding itself into WeGame. The new platform will support both its current 200 million Chinese users and international players, as they are said to be taking on Valve's Steam. Should Valve be worried?
Tencent Coming To The West As WeGame
The news of the announcement broke on Twitter when Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad, who specializes in the video game industry of the Asian market, translated the slides from the Tencent splash page. According to the announcement, WeGame will "support both Chinese and global users through a single storefront." For those who don't know how significant that is, Tencent (200 million) already has more users than Steam (125 million) and it controls 13 percent of the entire video game market.
Although the possibility of a Steam killer has been said before with game platforms such as Origins and Uplay, Tencent and its new WeGame may have the highest potential to uproot Valve from the number one spot - or at least put a significant dent in its worldwide sales. The company certainly is in a strong position to do so since in terms of developing and publishing games, it owns Riot Games and Supercell, which are League of Legends and Clash of Clans respectively. Tencent also own stakes, both major and minor, from other companies like Glu Mobile (Kim Kardashian: Hollywood), Epic Games and Activision Blizzard.
Should Valve Be Worried?
Considering that Tencent is already bigger than Steam in terms of user number and a market value of $279 billion, where it was recently hailed as the tenth largest publicly traded company in the world; it certainly has the resources. Tencent had Steam in its sights since its plans of global expansion were announced last year. Due to its significance in the video game market, Tencent may be offering a more extensive library of games than Steam. Since Tencent has a target painted on Steam's back, everyone thinks Valve should be constantly looking over its shoulder.
