TiMi Studios, the Chinese tech giant Tencent-owned developer of popular mobile game hits Call of Duty: Mobile and the MOBA Honor of Kings, generated a staggering $10 billion in revenue in 2020, according to a Reuters report.
Reuters’ article says those earnings make TiMi the “world’s largest developer, which many industry watchers had suspected to be the case” according to its sources. While it has not been cleared out exactly what metric that is defining, it’s undoubtedly a huge number. For comparison, in 2020, Activision Blizzard (which publishes the Call of Duty franchise) earned revenues of $8.09 billion, nearly $2 billion less than TiMi’s reported $10 billion.
TIMI’S GAMES RACK UP SOME BIG NUMBERS
While TiMi might not be a household name worldwide, its games rack up some big numbers to show how good they are. In October 2019, when Call of Duty: Mobile released, it had the biggest mobile game launch ever, racking up over 100 million downloads worldwide in its first week of availability. And Honor of Kings, whose availability is only limited to China, had an astounding 100 million daily active users as of November 2020, according to Tencent.
It doesn’t seem like Tencent and TiMi will stop here. TiMi is recruiting for a new AAA game that “resembles the virtual community from the movie Ready Player One,” Reuters reports, which seems to suggest that, in the vein of Fortnite and Roblox, TiMi wants to make its own metaverse-like game. Tencent is also building a TiMi studio in Los Angeles and also one for Lightspeed and Quantum (which develops PUBG: Mobile), according to Reuters.
Tencent has long-standing investments in some US-based gaming companies including a majority stake in Riot Games in 2011 and then full ownership four years later. And, in 2012, Tencent purchased 40 percent of Epic Games that has grown in value significantly following the huge success of Epic’s Fortnite.
