Tencent launches its WeGame client outside China
The Chinese gaming giant is now selling games globally.
Last year Tencent, the Chinese conglomerate that owns Riot Games and has holdings in Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft, and a 40% share in Epic Games, announced it would be rebranding the Tencent Gaming Platform and launching it globally.
The Tencent Gaming Platform is their digital storefront and launcher which has 200 million users, but has only been available in China until now. With servers in Hong Kong, the newly launched platform, WeGame X, can be accessed by the rest of the world. (The language dropdown is on the top right of that page.)
Right now WeGame X is pretty bare. It's labelled "early access" and there are only 17 games on it, primarily indie games like Chinese Parents, My Time At Portia, and Forts. Larian Studios, Deep Silver, and Hello Games are all listed under "FAMOUS IP" on the front page.
The launcher includes features like user reviews, genre tags, and cloud saves and an offline mode for some games. There's no way to know for sure which languages a given game supports, however, and some games, like free-to-play rhythm game Nishan Shaman, have not been localized.
Here's their privacy policy, by the way.
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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.