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South China Morning Post
2 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Tencent game studio eyes global growth with Honour of Kings spin-off after user milestone
Tencent Holdings , the world's largest video gaming company by revenue, is intensifying its international expansion as its flagship studio reports a record number of overseas players and prepares to launch a new title based on its flagship game, Honour of Kings Advertisement TiMi Studio Group – developer of Honour of Kings, Call of Duty: Mobile, and Delta Force – has reached 100 million monthly active users outside mainland China, a milestone that took the 17-year-old studio by surprise, according to Huang Shuo, TiMi's global publishing director, in a recent interview with the South China Morning Post. This marks the first time TiMi has disclosed its overseas user numbers. As a key revenue driver for Tencent's extensive gaming operations, the studio is doubling down on global expansion with the coming multiplayer adventure action role-playing game (RPG), Honour of Kings: World. Video gaming is a key revenue source for China's most valuable tech conglomerate, which is aiming to boost overseas gaming sales as the domestic market begins to plateau. Tencent's latest financial results showed that its international game revenue surged 35 per cent in the second quarter from a year earlier, while domestic game revenue rose 17 per cent during the same period. TiMi Studio is one of Tencent's key revenue drivers. Photo: Handout In recent years, Beijing has softened its regulatory stance on video games. While China enforces strict licensing and limits game time for players under 18 to three hours per week, authorities increasingly view local games as symbols of the country's soft power, especially following the success of Black Myth: Wukong.
South China Morning Post
4 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Malaysian musician who can play 30 traditional instruments is captivating millions online
At just 19 years old, Belle Sisoski moves with the certainty of an artist twice her age. Advertisement While her peers navigate university life, temporary jobs – even the occasional existential crisis – this Malaysian performing artist has already mastered more than 30 traditional instruments, composed genre-defying electronic anthems and built a social media empire, all while spearheading a cultural revival of Southeast Asia's endangered musical heritage. In today's segmented music industry, where artists are packaged in neat little boxes, Sisoski defies categorisation. Classically trained pianist? Check. Digital native with millions of followers? Absolutely. Ethnomusicologist preserving near-extinct tribal instruments? Without question. Her live performances that see her seamlessly shifting between throat singing , electronic production and traditional instruments would already be career-defining for most artists. Belle Sisoski is known for her one-woman show that combines the ambience of ethnic instruments, cinematic music and electronic elements. Photo: Belle Sisoski Her distinctive aesthetic – shaved sides with a warrior's braid, slicked-back hair, well-known fashion accessories of Sarawak – mirrors her musical philosophy. Each performance and composition layers cinematic strings, pulsing electronic dance music (EDM) and indigenous instrumentation, all anchored by her remarkable five-octave range.
South China Morning Post
5 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
China's wartime message can sit alongside a love of today's Japan
This year, China marks the 80th anniversary of its victory in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression – part of the broader victory in the World Anti-Fascist War. Across the country, commemorative exhibitions, television documentaries and a wave of summer blockbuster films have been rolled out to mark the occasion. Advertisement These films , set in the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s, are not just historical dramas; they are cultural reminders. They show the destruction of war, the brutality of the Japanese military aggressors, the resilience of ordinary Chinese people and the enormous sacrifices that went into securing peace. In the cinema, I have seen teenagers sitting in silence long after the credits rolled, absorbing the enormity of what they had just watched. Yet outside the cinema, a different conversation is playing out. Critics – often overseas – accuse these commemorations of being a form of education to incite hatred against Japan, of keeping old grievances alive. Educating people to hate is a huge project. It is the deliberate, systematic cultivation of hostility towards another country or people, often through distorted information or selective memory, with the goal of making reconciliation impossible. But China's remembrance of the war is something else entirely. It is about truth, not distortion; reflection, not vengeance. It is about remembering what happened, not dictating what people must feel today. A boy looks at a poster of 'Dead to Rights', a film about the Nanking massacre, at a cinema in Beijing on August 4. Photo: Xinhua
