Tencent Gets Respite From Chinese Crackdown

Tencent Holdings Ltd. pulled off a pair of successes for its League of Legends franchise over the weekend, with a raucous e-sports tournament that drew more viewers than ever before and the strong debut for a new video series on Netflix, reports Bloomberg.

“Arcane,” an anime series based on the League fantasy universe, premiered to an overwhelmingly positive response, garnering 130 million views in China within a few hours and becoming the most searched show on Tencent’s streaming site. Globally, the show -- co-created by the Tencent-owned game maker Riot Games Inc. -- is streamed on Netflix Inc.’s service as well as Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch.

Riot’s promotional push around “Arcane” included a live premiere event in Los Angeles and advertisements posted at bus stops around the city. Epic Games Inc., also partly owned by Tencent, even debuted a League hero in its hit Fortnite game.

Earlier in the weekend, the League of Legends World Championship hit a record of more than 4 million concurrent viewers tuning in, according to Esports Charts. That was without including audiences in China, which provided the winning team for this year’s event and where a replay of the match has been watched more than 11 million times on Tencent-backed Bilibili Inc. The streaming service said cumulative views of the finals night grew 20% from the previous year without disclosing the exact number.

Chinese e-sports stocks surged after the event, with the tournament’s topic of the home team winning viewed more than 3 billion times on the microblogging site Weibo Corp. Dalian Zeus Entertainment and Hangzhou Electric Soul both rose by the 10% daily limit.

The successes come after Beijing has imposed a broad crackdown on the country’s games industry, hurting the stocks of Tencent and other companies. In August, authorities said children could play video games just three hours a week in most cases.