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.
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 had estimated to be 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.