TiMi Studios, one of the world’s most lucrative game companies and part of Tencent’s gigantic digital entertainment empire, announced Thursday that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Xbox.
The concise announcement I didn’t mention whether the link is for content development or Xbox console distribution in China, but said more details for the “deep partnership” will be revealed by the end of this year.
TiMi was founded within Tencent in 2008 and is behind popular mobile titles such as Honor of Kings and Call of Duty Mobile. According to a research firm, Honor of Kings generated nearly $ 2.5 billion in gaming spend in 2020 alone SensorTower. Overall, TiMi had sales of 10 billion US dollars last year report by Reuters, citing people with knowledge.
The partnership could help TiMi make a name for itself around the world by turning its mobile titles into console games for Microsoft’s Xbox. TiMi has tried to bolster its own brand and differentiate itself from other Tencent gaming clusters, such as internal rival LightSpeed & Quantum Studio, known for PUBG Mobile.
TiMi has an office in Los Angeles and announced in January 2020 that the number of employees in North America would be tripled. Building high-quality, high-budget AAA mobile games was the core of his global strategy. There are references in a Notice of employment Recently Released by a TiMi Associate: The unit is hiring developers for an upcoming AAA title being compared to Oasis, a massive multiplayer online game that is becoming a virtual society in the fiction and movie Ready Player One developed. Oasis is played through a virtual reality headset.
The latest Xbox X and Series S models will be introduced in China imminent, although the launch doesn’t seem tied to the Tencent deal. Sony’s Playstation 5 hit shelves in China in late April. Nintendo Switch sells in China through a partnership with Tencent that was sealed in 2019.
Chinese console gamers often resort to gray overseas spending markets because the list of Chinese titles approved by local authorities is tiny compared to those available overseas. However, these gray markets, both online and offline, are prone to persistent shortages. Most recently, product lists of several top sellers of imported console games disappeared from the Taobao marketplace in Alibaba in March.