Tencent pleased with 'strong growth' of mobile and PC games

Chinese internet giant Tencent has released its financials for the full-year ended December 31, 2017, and both revenues and profits are on the up. 

Full-year revenues rose by 56 percent year-over-year to $36.38 billion, while profits increased by 74 percent to $10.9 billion during the same period. 

That upswing was driven in part by the success of Tencent's smartphone and PC game portfolio, which includes the popular mobile MOBA Honor of Kings and the Chinese version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on PC and mobile.

Those performances helped smartphone revenue rise to $2.66 billion, a year-on-year increase of 59 percent. PC client game revenue also rose by 13 percent to $2.02 billion in that time. 

"We sustained another year of strong growth in both smartphone and PC games. On the mobile front, our in-house developed MOBA game, Honor of Kings, achieved mass adoption and became the most popular smart phone game in China," commented Tencent. 

"On PC, we strengthened core user engagement by organizing eSports tournaments and live streaming activities. Through attaining the PC publishing rights and mobile development rights for the popular survival shooter game Battlegrounds in China, we are well-positioned to develop this emerging category of games during 2018.

Looking ahead, Tencent intends to bolster its games business by upgrading exiting titles and adding new ones, pointing to the success of its recent release QQ Speed Mobile -- which has been pulling in over 20 million daily active users -- as evidence of its ability to create an original IP that's viable on both PC and mobile.