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Tencent-Console

At CES Asia last week, Cyberspace giant Tencent appear a new console gaming system, dubbed the TGP (Tencent Games Platform) Box. Tencent isn't a well-known company in the w, simply it's a behemoth in the Asia-Pacific marketplace. The company'south market cap hit $200 billion for the commencement time just over a year ago and it earned roughly $16 billion in revenue in 2022. That'due south all the same significantly smaller than Sony or Microsoft, merely it'south more than than big enough to throw some serious greenbacks at the panel business organisation.

TGP owns Riot Games, which produces League of Legends, and LoL has already been confirmed every bit a supported title for the new platform. The company hasn't announced many other details, merely we know that the organisation runs Windows 10 and is compatible with Intel'south sixth-generation Core i3, i5, and i7 processors. There's no word of any supplemental GPU, implying that the platform will rely on Intel's integrated graphics for performance. That's less dodgy than it used to be — Intel's GPU operation has been improving steadily for years — just Intel's Crystal Well chips with 64-128MB of EDRAM are the only fries that can be said to compete confronting AMD or Nvidia's low-end discrete GPUs.

According to AllChinaTech, this iteration of the TGP Box is called the Blade and is the result of a partnership betwixt Haier, which built the hardware, Intel, which provided unspecified "sensing and smart abode technology," and Tencent, which provided both system evolution and game titles. A number of other titles accept been confirmed for the Blade, including FIFA Online 3, NBA 2K, Monster Hunter, and Need for Speed. The company volition announce additional titles later in the year.

Fighting for the Chinese console market

It hasn't even been a year since China officially lifted the ban on game console imports. Previously, consoles were simply allowed in-country if you lived inside an eleven-mile trade zone surrounding Shanghai and if the panel was assembled locally. Microsoft and Sony are now theoretically free to sell into People's republic of china, just in that location are difficulties selling into that marketplace. Content needs to be localized and Chinese gamers are much more likely to use either smartphones or PCs. Tencent's determination to standardize on a PC-similar device running Windows 10 makes sense in that context: It's the gaming platform users are actually more familiar with.

Given Communist china'south economic growth and millions of gamers, in that location'south adept reason for the established manufacturers to get after the marketplace — only Tencent's launch demonstrates that native manufacturers accept their own sights set on a slice of the metaphorical action. In that location'due south no word on whether or not Tencent volition launch its platform in the US, but hopefully we'll see some benchmarks and boosted data every bit the platform moves towards launch.