Tencent Enjoys Big Q2, Bringing In Over $11 Billion

Tencent, the Chinese company that owns a little bit of practically everything in the gaming world, released its Q2 financial statement yesterday. Here's the first thing that jumped out at me: The company's net revenue for the quarter was $11.135 billion USD. By comparison, Activision/Blizzard -- not exactly a tiny outfit, and one that Tencent owns a little bit of -- had revenues of $1.641 billion USD for the quarter. That makes Tencent nearly seven times bigger than ActiBlizz alone.

Want another ridiculous number? Tencent's phone messaging and mobile payment app, Weixin (or WeChat), now has over a billion users.

Tencent's second quarter of 2018 was up 30% over Q2 2017, which Chairman and CEO Ma Huateng attributes to "deepened user engagement with increased daily active users and time spent across our social, games and media platforms." "Deepened user engagement" is, of course, a fancy way of saying, "we had more people and they gave us more money."

Meanwhile, the company touts its "internally developed" PUBG Mobile app "as highly suitable for expansion to gamers outside China," as it already has 14 million daily active users and brought in over $20 million. They're still in love with how mobile gaming in general, and Arena of Valor in particular, are doing, even if Riot Games might not be.

That's about the only mention I could find in the financial statement of any game that's highly relevant to Western gamers. Pore over it yourself, or take a glance at a similar, but more number-heavy, report summarizing the last six and last three months.