For more than a decade, Tencent Holdings developer Leo Yao toiled in relative anonymity, churning out one shooting game after another. Then he scored one of the biggest Chinese hits of 2024 with Delta Force, a video game that continues to attract 30 million players daily.
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Now, Tencent’s top brass have tasked the 43-year-old with helping orchestrate a major shift at China’s most valuable company.
Executives see a change in tastes among domestic gamers – long deemed a smartphone-dominant audience – towards embracing personal computers and shooters. That has prompted a push to invest more in shooting titles, traditionally dominated by Western players, which research house Newzoo has estimated are worth roughly 9 per cent of the US$189 billion global games arena.
Armed with the experience of converting Call of Duty’s fast-paced PC action to a touch screen-friendly mobile hit, Yao and his team at Timi J3 Studio combined several genres and play styles with Delta Force, which proved instantly popular in China. Cracking the overseas market is now the top priority.
“The senior leaders will ask questions like, ‘Do you need a bigger budget for marketing?’”, as well as user acquisition abroad, Yao said matter-of-factly in a rare interview from his studio in Shenzhen. “In our foreign markets, we’re seeing gradual progress.”
Breaking through in the hotly competitive shooting genre is a daunting task, but confidence is high within Tencent. Yao’s J3 team is seen as a safe bet after Delta Force outperformed internal forecasts, and the upside of high expectations is that Yao has the “complete trust” of senior management, he said.
