Tencent’s WeGame Mobile will cease operation on September 8 due to “changes in business development strategy”

WeGame Mobile will shut down September 8 as Tencent continue to cut costs, and jobs, across the business.

Tencent is set to close the mobile version of its WeGame platform in September, after stopping accepting new users this past week. It’s just the latest in a long line of product closures and likely lay-offs at Tencent, which has been hit hard by new regulations in China.

WeGame, originally envisioned to be a competitor to Steam for the world’s largest gaming company, struggled to find an audience and “largely failed to live up to its ambitions” according to the South China Morning Post. The PC version of WeGame will continue as normal, with some of the mobile functionality transferring over.

As mentioned, it’s not the first incident of its type for Tencent. In the past year it has announced the closure of Penguin Esports, a Twitch competitor, been blocked from merging Douyu and Huya, two other streaming platforms, and shut down various other programs. We’re a long, long way from Tencent going out of business, but the regular cost-cutting and efficiency-increasing moves are disruptive and have resulted in “thousands” of jobs being lost.

On WeGame Mobile specifically, the SCMP cites experts and online commenters saying that most of the larger games on the platform had their own mobile apps or portals. Smaller games had no way to gain traction, thus making the app mostly pointless.

Officially the closure will happen on September 8 of this year. “Changes in business development strategy” was blamed for the closure in the official statement.

Written by GLHF.