Facebook's Chinese rival Tencent now aims to go big on Metaverse

As Facebook doubles down on making Metaverse a reality with an initial $10 billion investment, Chinese tech behemoth Tencent has also revealed ideas for the first time to tap into the next big thing, stressing that Beijing will support the development of such new-age technologies as the country goes through sweeping internet and tech regulations.

According to Tencent's CEO Pony Ma, Metaverse is going to be an opportunity that really adds to the growth to the existing industries.

"For example, it will be an addition to the gaming industry. It will also be an addition to the social networking industry. And in some cases, when you have real-life applications like business applications, it actually also can be a growth engine for that industry too," Pa said during the company's earnings call late on Wednesday.

He said that we have a "lot of the technology and know-how building blocks for us to explore and develop for the Metaverse opportunity. For example, we have a lot of gaming experiences. We also have very strong social networking experience".


"In addition to that, in terms of technology building blocks, we have engine capability. We have AI capability. We have the capability to build a large server architecture that can serve a huge number of concurrent users. We are very experienced in managing digital content economies as well as real-life digital assets," Pa elaborated.

On regulation, Tencent said that for the China market, there will be another set of regulations for Metaverse.

"But we felt the government is not fundamentally averse to the development of Metaverse. Metaverse in itself will be tech-driven. The Chinese government will be in support of the development of such technologies as long as the user experience is actually provided under the regulatory framework," said James Mitchell, Tencent's chief strategy officer - IANS