Tencent's Arena of Valor esports game draws a crowd at E3 2018.
Tencent's Arena of Valor esports game draws a crowd at E3 2018.
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Tencent drums up an audience for its mobile esports game in the West

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

For the first time, Tencent, the world’s largest game company, had a big presence at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show recently held in Los Angeles.

The Shenzhen, China-based company teamed up with ESL to create a booth where the stars of its Arena of Valor mobile game could compete in the playoffs of its global esports tournament. It was an experiment to see if mobile esports could work well at E3, where the noise level is huge in terms of competition for attention.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.