Steam will have to up its game very soon as it is about to get a strong competitor.
The Chinese owners of Riot Games, Tencent is all set to reposition its games’ platform to suit a much wider global consumer base. The platform which was earlier known as ‘Tencent Games Platform’ will be rebranded to ‘WeGame’.
The platform already has around 200 million active users while Steam has around 125 million. The news came to light over the weekend on Twitter thanks to Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad. According to him one of the translated piece from Tencent’s splashpage notifies that We Game will “support both Chinese and global users” through the same storefront.
Looks like Tencent will rebrand its ‘Tencent Games Platform’ to ‘WeGame’.
It’s basically Tencent’s version of Steam. pic.twitter.com/Rx7ndSXJVM
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) April 16, 2017
Tencent is quite a big player in the market. Apart from completely owning League of Legends creator, Riot Games and Clash Of Clans creators, Supercell, it has stakes in both Epic Games (Paragon) and Activision Blizzard (Call of Duty).
“Tencent Games Platform entered the market later than Steam but has had a head-start with the games and services it provides on the platform,” said Ahmad. “Chinese gamers have access to popular F2P games such as League of Legends and FIFA Online 3 through the platform. Tencent last year started to transform TGP in order to compete against Steam.”
It would be interesting to see how it all plays out as WeGame will be releasing soon.