Tencent to partner with more developers to fuel its mobile games expansion

Mainland internet giant Tencent Holdings is drawing new battle lines in the red-hot market for mobile games, with efforts to entice more start-up developers to join its platform rather than chip away at its domestic market share.

Shenzhen-based Tencent, the world's biggest games company by revenue, has sharpened its focus on partnerships amid the rapid growth of the mainland's mobile games market, which mobile internet analytics firm TalkingData has forecast to post US$3 billion in revenue this year and surpass that of the United States by next year.

"From a creativity perspective, we need to extend our partnerships with potentially promising studios to help build up our games pipeline," Wang Bo, vice-president at Tencent Games, told the South China Morning Post. "We are actively looking for the right candidates to work together with us."

Wang is primarily responsible at Tencent's games operation for international business development, licensing, investments, and mergers and acquisitions.

In the first quarter, Tencent bolstered its position as the mainland's leading mobile games provider with 180 million daily active users on its social platforms Mobile QQ and Weixin, known as WeChat outside the mainland. The company's mobile games revenue totalled 1.8 billion yuan (HK$2.26 billion) in the period, a threefold increase from the quarter to December.

"The Tencent Games business is more of a publishing model in which we work with different partners," Wang said. He pointed out that the company has 20 to 30 partners, including US firm Electronic Arts and Japan's Capcom, in its traditional online desktop computer games.

"We have about triple the number of partners in mobile games," he said, adding that demand for these games would only get bigger as more people on the mainland access the internet on their smartphone.