Tencent, Sony Investing in Cloud-Gaming Initiative

Tencent Holdings Ltd., Sony Corp., and the innovative financing round with Ubitus K.K. are stepping up their gamble on cloud gaming.

Ubitus, a cloud gaming hardware, and services specialist said on Wednesday that it had finalized its round without revealing the amounts earned by Tencent, Sony Innovation Fund by IGV, and Square Enix Holdings Co., respectively. An estimate of less than $400 million is made by investors of around 45 million dollars, said a well-known individual and asked not to be named because the data were not public.

Tencent has stepped up its efforts to promote cloud gaming which enables consumers, without costly hardware like consoles or computers, to play high-end games. Cloud gaming providers offer games over the internet from servers to users’ TVs and tablets and other screens as Netflix broadcasts movies. Tencent told OOParts, a Japanese cloud gaming site, Monday that it was helping to use the technology.

Yet, even as wireless connections increase, cloud gaming is confronted by challenges, and most people are sticking to titles that use players’ own hardware. Google’s excitation triggered by Alphabet Inc. could not last until the latency of communications and price-fixing of its Stadia service is questioned. Stadia has lowered its expectations who Jade Raymond, a gaming industry veteran who recently left to work on a PlayStation game, opened up a workshop.

Matthew Kanterman, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, said “Long-term cloud gaming would alleviate the growing pressure for multiple console games, extend gaming to include new geographies and boost higher subscription revenues but remain a distance from being a key platform.

Despite skepticism, many video game device owners will see technological promise and expect that console-based market models can co-exist. Sony provides PlayStation Now and Microsoft Corp. has an xCloud Project, all of them offering subscribers streamed games.

About Tencent:

The Chinese company Tencent is based in Shenzhen and established in 1998 and is extremely successful and profitable in China.

The adorable penguin icon, as well as the McDonald’s Gold Arch logo, is common to Chinese children in the West, says Kerry Allen from the BBC’s Chinese media analyst.

Tencent has become more known as a family-friendly organization that connects families, friends, and colleagues in the digital era, “Tencent is seen as so much more than simply a Chinese business in China, she said.

“He/she has a business model that can only be envied by other Chinese businesses – it can literally reach everyone.” Except in the West many people never knew of this.

Tencent clearly makes a lot of money from gaming. Tencent is the world’s leading producer of computer games. It participates in two Battle Royal games: Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PubG).

It has a 40% stake in Fortnite Studio, Epic Games and has a license, even though the game wasn’t accepted for sale in China in its own struggle. The whole studio of League of Legends, Riot Games, is also owned. The list of 16 game companies outside China, in which 10cent publicly invests, including Ubisoft and Discord, is released in October 2019 by PC Gamer.