Tencent, owner of Riot Games, is NOT funding PUBG

PUBG, Tencent, Riot Games, rumors
Updated:
18 Aug 2017

Despite rumors, there is no funding going on.

Recently there has been talk of Tencent, the majority shareholder of Riot Games (creator of League of Legends), supporting PUBG monetarily. This rumor has been confirmed false by the creators of PUBG, Bluehole Studio. The original story was started at an English publication of a Chinese news outlet called Yical News Group. Many different news sites created stories based on their claim, and later edited them with Bluehole’s explanation.

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Tencent’s company logo, for reference in case news like this is brought up again.

It makes sense that people would get excited for Tencent to fund PUBG. Tencent currently owns Riot Games, creators of one of the largest games of all time, League of Legends. PUBG recently broke a record previously held by League, however. PUBG’s total hours watched on Twitch over one week surpassed LoL’s hours for the same week, the first time this has happened in over 3 years. The hype around PUBG and the absolute size of both games could have led to people believing that Tencent would want shares in both.

Tencent currently holds shares in companies other than Riot as well. They have shares in Blizzard, Epic games and Supercell, who developed Clash of Clans. These companies are well known for hugely online based games, which PUBG definitely fits the bill for. Tencent is the biggest company in China, and it’s called the largest in the world commonly. They also run an IM app called Tencent QQ and the website QQ.com, which is mainly used as a site to spread news. However, the website is (not surprisingly) in Chinese. We can only wait and see what Tencent invests in next.

 

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