Tencent Holdings, the worlds most valuable video games publisher hit another major milestone last week, it’s its not one you’d want. After months of turbulent markets, bad news, and restructuring, Tencent finally succumbed to some serious damage over time and are no longer one of the world’s ten most valuable companies.
For those of you that haven’t heard of this Chinese behemoth, Tencent Holdings are an enormous technology company, based out of Shenzhen, China. They invest in a number of fields including AI, social media, payment systems, and video games. Their portfolio spans the length and breadth of gaming culture, from Call of Duty Online to Monster Hunter, Ring of Elysium, and League of Legends. It is hard to underestimate Tencent’s impact on video games and today’s news is troublesome.
This latest slip all played out at the end of last week and, like most of the internet community, it almost passed us by. Since the Chinese government began to restrict, and then curtail, the approval of new video games in Chinese territories, Tencent’s share value has wavered. While a number of other factors have forced the value down, this massive player has dropped around $250 billion of market value in the past nine months. If you wanted to visualize how much that is, that’s one Disney, all of Apple’s spare, cash pile, 625 times what Tencent paid to take control of Riot or approximately 257,839,643,652 packs of Wallmart exclusive Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Totino’s pizza rolls. That’s a whole heap of Ram Axe heavy weapons.
What is most worrying about this event, is that it signals more problems for one of the biggest players in the video game market. In economic markets, confidence is key to investors and we don’t quite know how this slip is going to impact confidence, and Tencent’s confidence in the video games.
