Rocket League is racing to a new country.
Tencent, the biggest video game company in the world, is bringing the hit soccer-with-cars game to China. While Rocket League is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC as a paid game in the U.S., it will be free-to-play for PC only in China. Rocket League already has more than 30 million players, and this expansion to the lucrative Chinese PC gaming market (which was worth $13.8 billion in 2016, according to Newzoo) will help it continue to grow.
Tencent is the gaming powerhouse in China. It owns League of Legends developer Riot Games and has stakes in Activision Blizzard, Supercell, and Epic Games. Tencent is the 10th-largest publicly traded company in the world. We learned earlier this week that its rebranding its Tencent Games Platform to WeGame.
As a free-to-play game, the Chinese version will include in-app purchases. Tencent and developer Psyonix did not specify what those would be, but cosmetic items for players’ cars seem likely. In the non-Chinese versions of the game, you can unlock most of those by leveling up your account, although some are available for purchase as downloadable content. The companies plan to announce further changes to the Chinese version when it is further along in development.