The world's largest developer? CoD: Mobile's TiMi made $10 billion in 2020

[midian182]

In brief: Which company do you think is the world's "largest" developer? Rockstar North? Electronic Arts? According to a new report, it's Tencent's TiMi Studios, the firm behind Call of Duty: Mobile and Honor of Kings. It earned an incredible $10 billion in revenue last year.

Chinese giant Tencent recently reported 156.1 billion yuan ($23.79 billion) in overall online game revenue for 2020, but it didn't break down the figure for its individual studios, which run independently from each other. According to Reuters, citing two sources "with direct knowledge of the matter," TiMi was responsible for 40% of that money.

TiMi might be an unfamiliar name to many people, but its games include the massive Call of Duty: Mobile, which managed 100 million downloads in its first week alone, and Honor of Kings. Only available in China, Honor of Kings boasted 100 million daily users in November 2020.

TiMi is using the vast revenue to expand beyond mobile games and into the console/PC market. Last week, a recruitment notice revealed that the company is creating a new AAA game resembling the virtual community from the movie Ready Player One. It is also building a studio in Los Angeles with "the goal of creating content with original intellectual property that has global appeal," writes the South China Morning Post.

Tencent also owns all or part of Riot (League of Legends), Lightspeed & Quantum (PUBG: Mobile), Epic Games (Fortnite), Supercell (Clash of Clans), and Activision Blizzard (Call of Duty), among several others. The company has seen its income boosted by the pandemic-induced surge in gaming, with its online games revenue rising 29% to 39.1 billion yuan ($5.95 billion) in the fourth quarter.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/89178-tencent-owned-timi-company-behind-call-duty-mobile.html

 

[Dimitriid]

If you want to know why there's no more Publisher concern about the simultaneous botched release of the new consoles AND both series of GPUs well, this is why: at this point AAA development is going to take a backseat to mobile because they can just recycle older games or create cheaper ones and make way more, like hand over fist way more money that way.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

I'm so glad I support any of those trash games. Yeah for me!

I think I spent less on PC games this past year than I did previous years and so far this year I've only spent $30 on one game. Right now I'm looking to spending just $30 this year. No games out there that interest me that I have to put my money towards. I guess we see what the future holds.

I have so many games in my backlog that I have no reason to waste my money on mobile games or other games I don't even play (used to play LoL, but last time I played was a good 3+ years ago, but I never put money into it). In all honesty, I have about 2 dozen unopened physical copy of games that I've had for 10 year or so...so many games I probably will never get to them all.