Tencent Looks to the West for Third-Party Game Developers
Chinese Internet behemoth Tencent is looking to give developers a taste of its more than 700 million monthly active users.
The Shenzhen-based company has been busy securing deals with large American companies like Zynga and other unannounced partners to bring their most popular gaming titles to Tencent’s platform. Since opening its platform earlier this year, Tencent is paying its two top casual game developers about 10 million renminbi ($1.6 million) per month each after the revenue split, the platform’s general manager Peter Zheng tells us. About eighty thousand developers have registered so far with 40,000 pending applications
The open platform strategy reflects a big shift for the chat and social networking giant, which has long chosen to create its own titles instead of deferring those opportunities to third-party developers as American companies have done. The hope is that, like with Facebook’s platform, third party developers will be able to unleash the next wave of revenue growth for Tencent, which is the fourth-largest publicly traded Internet company in the world behind Amazon and Google based on market capitalization.
Tencent’s platform, however, is distinct from Western ones in a number of ways.
December 26th, 2011 at 3:02 pm
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