In light of the most recent events regarding Blizzard Entertainment and their decision to take a pro-China stance and censor their community, I wanted to investigate how much influence does China have on digital entertainment companies.
Tencent is the world’s largest games publisher, it is both an internet and entertainment giant in China, similarly to Google. However gamers are likely more familiar with Tencent’s involvement to a growing number of game developers and publishers.
In context to CSCC46 the following illustration depicts a weighted undirected graph showing the amount of investment and ownership Tencent has over major entertainment/gaming companies. The nodes in this case would be the company entities themselves such as Tencent, and the edges will signify that Tencent has had relations with the other company, while the weight of the node will represent the % in which Tencent has invested and is involved with the company’s hierarchy. Additionally some triadic closures between companies can be formed to symbolize the genre that the companie accomadates with their products, as they could be considered rival companies.
(For better understanding, I will also add the name of the game that is most commonly associated with the company)
By analyzing the relational ties and how much influence Tencent has over existing and up and coming developers and publishers, we can start to see and speculate how economically terrible it may become for the entertainment district is monopolized by Tencent’s political stance
References:
Messner, Steven. “Every Game Company That Tencent Has Invested In.” Pcgamer, PC Gamer, 4 Oct. 2019, www.pcgamer.com/every-game-company-that-tencent-has-invested-in/.
As a person who is very into video games myself, Tencent’s purchasing of multiple companies is getting pretty scary. In some ways, you can tell that Tencent does have some influence over the development of the game.
Hopefully Tencent does not grow too much bigger, a monopoly on the video game industry from Tencent would be very scary!
I agree that Tencent is being one of the largest companies that influenced a lot on the Internet, especially on games. Tencent just like some big tech companies for instance, Google, Ubisoft, and Facebook.
I think it would be more interesting to see how the triadic closure between those companies affect each other, for example, whether they are alliances or not. I do not think the entertainment district will soon be monopolized by Tencent’s political stance from just the graph above. I suggest we need more data and information which included other companies to draw conclusion.