Tencent wants to one-up Minecraft
China’s gaming giant is working on challengers to two enormous Western games: Minecraft and Hearthstone
Tencent is looking to knock Minecraft off the throne with a sandbox game of its own: Handcraft Planet.
For weeks, the company had a dedicated countdown web page in the lead-up to Monday’s unveiling of the new game in Beijing.
Tencent bills this new world-building game, in which players can build virtually anything with Lego-like blocks, as a “next-gen” sandbox game.
From what can be gathered from the teaser, the game resembles Minecraft in both gameplay and aesthetics. But how exactly this new game is a step-up from Minecraft remains unclear, though we should discover more once testing begins in the third quarter.
In China, Minecraft is published by China’s second largest gaming company NetEase, which says it has some 60 million registered users in the country.