Tencent says it has all the tech to build metaverse
Holdings, the world’s biggest gaming company, has broken its silence on the red-hot concept of the metaverse, saying it has an abundance of technologies to develop what has been called the next iteration of the internet.
Martin Lau, president of the Shenzhen-based firm, said on Wednesday it could potentially approach the metaverse through a range of businesses, citing video game development and social networking as major strengths.
He also said Beijing did not seem “fundamentally averse” to the metaverse, but it would come up with a set of regulations different from the rest of the world.
“We have a lot of tech and capability building blocks that will allow us to approach the metaverse opportunity through [multiple pathways],” Lau said.
Until now, Tencent executives have not publicly discussed the metaverse in detail, opting to promote the company’s own concepts of “all-real internet” and “hyper digital reality”.
Mainland regulators are getting wary; the bull run of socalled metaverse concept stocks listed in Shenzhen and Shanghai have prompted queries from authorities.
Interest surged after Facebook renamed itself Meta last month, and Western tech giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, Roblox and Epic Games have made the metaverse a core part of their strategy, in contrast to the relative silence from Chinese Big Tech.
Lau acknowledged that the metaverse was “very exciting, but a little bit vague”.
“We felt anything that really makes the virtual world more real and making the real world richer with virtual experiences [is something] that can actually become part of the metaverse,” he said.
Lau said there were multiple pathways for Tencent, citing its leadership in gaming and social networking as examples, which draw on the firm’s capabilities in game engines and artificial intelligence, while its large server architecture can accommodate a huge number of concurrent users.
Tencent was experienced in “managing digital content econoTencent mies as well as real-life digital assets”, which would help its move to the metaverse, he added.
In an exclusive report last month, the Post revealed that Tencent planned to sharpen its focus on metaverse-like developments by assembling an international team for a studio under its flagship game development firm, TiMi Studio Group.
Beijing’s crackdown on tech and market speculation has seen companies shy away from the limelight. However, facing an avalanche of questions during an earnings call on Wednesday, Tencent was forced to respond.
“For the China market, there’ll be another set of regulations. But we felt it’s not fundamentally averse to the development of the metaverse. Metaverse in itself will be tech-driven,” Lau said.
“The Chinese government will be in support of the development of such technologies, as long as the user experience is actually provided under the regulatory framework.”
He believed the metaverse would take longer than expected to come to fruition and it would undergo a “number of iterations” along the way. “There will be a lot of challenges. There’s a lot of uncertainty,” he added.
Lau also responded to a question about the all-real internet, or “quanzhen internet”, a concept that co-founder Pony Ma Huateng first proposed in 2019.
“I think it’s partly using our technology to actually make the real-world experience enriched with virtual experience and also leveraging virtual technology to actually help real-life simulations. So a lot of the core logic is actually similar to what we answered on metaverse,” he said.
Matthew Kanterman, senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said Tencent had clearly had a strategy for the metaverse for a long time.
“Most of the concern so far has been around not letting companies overhype strategies that lack substance. In the case of Tencent, they tend to be quite reserved and let the quality of their products speak for themselves, and so I’m not too worried.”