Chinese games giant Tencent is going all-in on competitive gaming with the construction of an entire town in China dedicated to eSports.
Mashable reports that the company has signed a framework agreement with the local government to construct its town in Wuhu, east China.
Tencent aims to create an eSports university, a cultural and creative park, animation industrial park, a creative neighbourhood, a technology entrepreneurship community and a cloud data centre.
The agreement will see it hosting a convention and mobile games competition in Wuhu later in 2017.
Tencent is also planning to build a theme park based on its MOBA Honor of Kings in Chengdu in the future. It is unknown how much money the company is planning to invest in the ventures.
Money to burn
Honor of Kings has been an enormous success for Tencent, having surpassed 50 million DAUs in January 2017. It is currently soft-launched in the West under the name Strike of Kings.
It certainly has plenty of money to invest in these large-scale ventures. It saw revenues of $21 billion for its FY16, generating $6.3 billion of revenue in Q4 FY16 alone.
Tencent has been spending its money on other mobile game developers too. It acquired a 9.9% stake in Chinese developer Seasun for $142 million in April 2017, and invested $90 million in Pocket Gems earlier in May 2017.