By The Time US Gaming Giants Figure Out Tencent’s Playbook It May Be Too Late

If you blinked you might have missed last Friday's news that Chinese Web giant Tencent is buying LA-based Riot Games. And that's just fine by Tencent. Tencent and its founder Pony Ma (seen in a sea of winking penguins to your left) are incredibly press-shy, as everything about the way the deal "leaked" demonstrates. It came late on a Friday before the Superbowl, it was positioned as Tencent buying an undisclosed "majority share" and not an acquisition - even the subsequent analysis was that it was just more proof of how hot the US gaming market is. Even Chinese companies were buying into it! In fact, this deal represents way more than that - and anyone in the game industry should be paying attention.