[skinnymuch]

What’s the bullshit part of Tencent owning 40% of Epic Games? Fortnite possibly wouldn’t be what it is if not for Tencent’s early investment and support of Epic Games. That then further goes into Unreal Engine not being what is today either.

[tytrdev]

I was just getting at the illusion of choice. At the end of the day it's all owned by the same handful of small groups. Found out yesterday that Blizzard apparently owns King. Tencent owns a cut of Activision Blizzard, as well as a slice of basically every gaming company. https://dataromas.com/what-companies-does-tencent-own/

Note that I'm not even criticizing or otherwise knocking these business practices, I'm simply making some observations. My use of the term bullshit was particularly to describe the illusion of choice. Not that it's anything new. http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/c...

I think the world would be just fine without fortnite, but I will say unreal engine is pretty nice to have. Probably just a matter of time until Microsoft owns unreal engine as well.

Tangentially relevant due to Tencent involvement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ&ab_channel=Peopl... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY&ab_channel=Peopl...

[skinnymuch]

Tencent has been bogged down by CCP’s crack down. It’s valuation is likely higher than the market is putting it at, unless CCP continues their stuff even more. Money that Microsoft has doesn’t matter to a company that also pumps out billions in profit like Tencent. They have no reason to ever give up an inch of their 40% stake. Microsoft wouldn’t be able to own it or Unreal realistically. Tencent is a bigger gaming company than Microsoft.

Cool you’re seeing how much Tencent controls. However the linked site doesn’t give good data and info. Tencent has stakes in far more things and the stakes they have are known too. While the site lists only a fraction of them. Including not listing much, much bigger stakes they have. Or not listing the actual specific stakes they have in companies like Kakao which are known. Or not saying their Epic Games stake percentage.

I should get to posting content! My notes on Tencent are pretty detailed if I may put humbleness aside for a second lol. But I don’t publish anything. Seeing sites with such weak info, is motivating.

—

Yeah there isn’t much choice in any thing. I don’t care about games, but Take Two (Grand Theft Auto, etc) are the 3rd biggest independent gaming developers and publishers. They have a market cap or $28B and are buying Zynga for $13B. Zynga themselves have swallowed dozens of companies amounting to a couple billion. EA, the 2nd largest, bought Popcap who make Bejeweled and Zombie vs Plant. Pokémon Go developer is valued in the billions and Google, Nintendo, among others have sizable stakes in it.

For all the positives HN and other geeks give Steam and Valve. They still charge a 30% cut. Only finally changing it up a bit because of Fortnite’s profits letting Epic Games compete with their 12% cut. So as much as saying Fortnite going away is no problem. At least they are the ones fighting the three headed modern gaming walled gardens of iOS App Store, Play Store, and Steam. Sure, it’s more like the enemy of my enemy situation, but that’s better than them not being around.

Edit: thanks for the reply! Most people don’t reply after the first 24 hours. Just set up a bot to get reply notifications. Was happy to geek out on this topic for a bit. Even though the bigger issues of monopolies and how screwed us normal people are, are not pleasant.

If you wanna get wilder if you’re an SO user. Prosus, who owned 40%, maybe 32% these days, of Tencent, bought Stackoverflow :P. They have also invested in many tech companies.