Tencent is negotiating to dominate the world when it comes to live streaming of Douyu games?

According to Dow Jones, Tencent is negotiating to invest in Douyu, a domestic live game platform, which is the top domestic live game platform. Tencent's investment is to gain a dominant position in China's online game market and curb the slowdown in revenue growth from its largest business.

Douyu is a real live broadcast platform established in 2014. In just one year, by poaching anchors and operating fans, it has gained 10 million daily active users, and has been awarded Angel Investment by Cai Dongqing, Chairman of Aofei Animation, and Sequoia Capital's Series A investment.

At present, Douyu TV already has 380,000 anchors, and has just invested 100 million yuan to launch the "Star Anchor Development Plan". The good barrage atmosphere has become a major feature of Douyu.

Douyu is similar to the foreign live video site Twitch. The latter has already generated US$1 billion in Amazon's revenue last year and currently has 55 million monthly active users, making it the world's largest live video platform. Today, Twitch has set up a subscription service for live game channels. Viewers can directly pay to game video anchors, and the platform will be directly divided into two games.

European market research firm Newzoo estimates that there are already 113 million e-sports enthusiasts around the world, and revenue from this market is expected to exceed US$250 million this year. China is also one of the largest markets. According to the statistics of the "2014 China Game Industry Report", the number of end-game users in China in 2014 was approximately 158 million, and the number of end-game users covered by game videos was 105 million, of which 49.35 million were live games.

In the past two years, a large number of domestic video live broadcast platforms have arrived one after another. Huanju Times has announced that it will invest 700 million yuan in 2015 to develop its game live broadcast website "Tiger Ya Live". On September 5 this year, Wang Sicong also said on Weibo that he would serve as the CEO of Panda TV, a newly established game live broadcast platform. In addition, the total investment in Zhanqi TV, Dragon Ball Live and other platforms has also exceeded 100 million US dollars.

Before negotiating to invest in shares, there were also some unhappiness between Tencent and Douyu. Recently, a large number of Douyu anchors have been poached by Tencent's Dragon Ball live broadcast platform. Douyu TV has issued an official statement saying that it has sued 10 retired anchors to the court.

At the same time, in the current game field, the most popular "League of Legends" copyright is also in the hands of Tencent. In October last year, 32 million people watched the League of Legends championship game live online.

Tencent Games is also in urgent need of new growth drivers.

Tencent's financial report released last month showed that the growth rate of Tencent's online game revenue dropped to 17% in the second quarter, compared with 28% in the first quarter. It was the end game sector that experienced a significant decline. In the past year, Tencent has invested in many game companies. In December last year, Tencent also acquired a minority stake in Japanese game development company Aiming Inc. In April this year, he invested in Glu Mobile Inc, a US mobile games company. In May, Tencent invested another US$60 million in Pocket Gems, a US mobile game company.

Analysts at Dow Jones said that live game events are increasingly becoming an important marketing channel for game companies. Back-end service platforms for games such as Douyu can increase the loyalty of netizens and help extend the shelf life of popular games.

As of press time, Tencent had no comment on this matter.

Editor: yvonne