If you feel like you didn't have enough online stores to buy games from and clients to launch them from, you're in luck! Tencent has expanded its WeGame client outside of the Chinese market to now offer game sales and game play through it all over the world. This could be another major Steam competitor, as WeGame already enjoys an audience of some 200 million gamers within China itself and now has the chance to expand that to a far grander global audience.
Almost two decades after its original launch, Steam enjoys around 90 million monthly active gamers, with over 200 million accounts in total — if you count the ones that are no longer used. There have been a number of other stores launched over the years, including EA's Origin, Ubisoft's UPlay, Blizzard's Battle.net, and GoG Galaxy, among a few other, smaller options. In recent months, however, we've seen major players join the fray. Most notably Epic Games with its game store, which already boasts more than 100 million players thanks to Fortnite. Tencent's WeGame is as big if not bigger than both Steam and the Epic Game Store, presenting an intriguing additional option for gamers.
It doesn't matter too much which way gamers go though, at least for Tencent. It owns major holdings in Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft, as well as a 40 percent stake of Epic Games. It's taking over the gaming industry from all sides and now it's overtly expanding out of China, expect to see it gobble up even more of it in the months and years to come.
As for WeGame itself, it's not a hugely functional store right now. It only has 17 games on offer outside of China and most of them are small, niche indie titles, as per PCGamer. However, that will change in the future and it already enjoys features like reviews and genre tags, something that the Epic Game Store still lacks.