China’s tech powerhouse Tencent has recently unveiled its planned involvement with the metaverse industry. The company declared that its cloud division would emphasize on providing “metaverse-in-a-box” services to its clients.
As a supplementary move to the media services package the firm revealed last year, the project seeks to make the virtual world building experience a lot smoother for Tencent customers.
As per reports, businesses in the gaming, media, entertainment, and retail industries will use the tools Tencent has released to create and develop these metaverse spaces with a variety of goals in mind. Clients in Asian nations where Tencent anticipates strong growth, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, are the target market for the upcoming services.
“With more businesses now keen to explore and adapt to an efficient, transparent digital future, we are ready to leverage our technical experience in the fields of games, audio, and video to provide technical support for Web3, and work with industry partners to create a more immersive experience and nurture a better Web3 ecosystem,” said Poshu Yeung, the senior vice president of Tencent Cloud International.
Tencent’s latest initiatives suggest a shift away from pursuing a metaverse hardware venture and towards software development, which is what the company is renowned for.
Although the business announced the formation of its extended reality unit in June 2022, which was said to produce native hardware for exploration of virtual worlds, current reports suggest that these plans have been shelved and that this division has been disbanded.
However, Tencent denied allegations that this division was being disbanded, but it did say that staffing changes were being made because of a change in strategy.
With Bytedance, the developer of the Pico brand of virtual reality (VR) headsets, other Chinese companies are also in the midst of making changes to their metaverse-related divisions and organisations.