Tencent Launching Steam Competitor Called WeGame

April 16, 2017 Erhan Altay Comments

Earlier today video games industry analyst Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners tweeted a series of screen captures of a new Tencent website with a countdown timer. The big reveal, expected on April 20th, will be Tencent's complete overhaul of its existing "Tencent Games Platform" service.

The current platform serves Chinese gamers and boasts over 200 million users. We've used it before to play games like Moonlight Blade which have not yet been released outside China. The new WeGame platform, however, has much greater ambitions.

Looks like Tencent will rebrand its 'Tencent Games Platform' to 'WeGame'.

It's basically Tencent's version of Steam. pic.twitter.com/Rx7ndSXJVM

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) April 16, 2017

WeGame will support Chinese and global users with a single storefront and has built in features to allow developers to interact with users. This model will put Tencent's WeGame is direct competition with the current PC gaming platform leader: Valve's Steam.

We'll have to wait until the big reveal on April 20th to see what exactly Tencent has in store, but the Chinese company has the reach to make WeGame an essential piece of software for PC gamers. As covered in our Chinese takeover of Western Game Studios Infographic, Tencent owns a stake in many well known studios including Riot Games, of League of Legends fame. If League of Legends were to move to the WeGame platform, it would immediately have an install base competitive with Steam's.

Readers who can't wait can try to decipher the Chinese website for the service at the official wegame.com site!