Tencent's next level up: Fewer big foreign franchise games, more in-house

DreamStar, a mobile game by Tencent, is seen on a mobile phone next to a logo of Tencent Games, in this illustration picture taken March 19, 2024.HONG KONG — In a sea change at China's Tencent, an easy-to-play game of cute characters tackling obstacle courses has taken precedence over developing a big-budget sophisticated foreign franchise for smartphones.

As a result, Assassin's Creed Jade — an action-adventure game set in ancient China that has been under development for mobile for at least four years — will likely be released in 2025 instead of this year, according to three sources familiar with the matter. They were not authorised to speak to media and declined to be identified.

Tencent had, for years, great success by developing for smartphones international hits like Activision Blizzard's shooter game Call of Duty and the battle royale game PUBG by South Korea's Krafton. "That would have been almost unthinkable just a few years ago. Tencent used to be far more generous," the person said.On Wednesday, Tencent reported a slight decline in fourth-quarter gaming sales and also flagged that overall gaming revenue this quarter would be soft compared with the same period last year when gaming sales surged as pandemic restrictions were lifted.

That month, Tencent also launched its "Spring Bamboo Shoots Project", aiming to incubate in-house games with novel gameplay and offering budgets of up to 300 million yuan per game. "Mobile games studios have learnt that IP is not the magic bullet for user acquisition it once was," says Serkan Toto, founder of game industry consultancy Kantan Games.

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