Last year was extremely profitable for one particular gaming company, Tencent. For the past few years, the enormous Chinese conglomerate has been buying up pieces of major video game developers and publishers from around the world. Currently Tencent has domain over a majority of the video game industry in China and in 2016, it was estimated that they had control of 13% of the global gaming industry.

Tencent’s expansion into the gaming industry has quickly began to pay off and they recently reported a 105% increase in their Q4 sales. Unsurprisingly, this increase in profits has motivated them to become even more involved in the world of video games.

Tencent’s name may not be well known in North America, but they have a lot of clout in China. Originally specializing in internet services, Tencent started Tenpay, which is similar to PayPal, and WeChat, the most popular social media app in China.

WeChat has become an integral part of Chinese daily life and is used by 900 million people every day. It’s is a messaging app, but also acts as a sort of portal for users to access minigames. On top of that, having a Wechat account is a requirement for playing certain online Chinese games including Honor of Kings, or Arena of Valor as it is known in the west. The game is published by Tencent and is played by at least 200 million people.

Tencent has a strong hold on almost every aspect of the Chinese video game market. They control major distribution sources for video games and own the publishing rights to several of the regions most popular games. Now the company is looking to expand even further into the video game market.

Even Nintendo has become involved with Tencent recently. The two companies are working together to bring Arena of Valor to the Nintendo Switch. This partnership could also be a precursor to Nintendo finally selling the Switch in China.

In March, Tencent helped Ubisoft fend off a long-running hostile takeover from Vivendi, a French conglomerate. Tencent purchased a minority stake in Ubisoft and made a deal with them to start publishing some of their games in China.

It isn’t just Ubisoft, though. Tencent owns percentages of studios around the world. Riot Games, Supercell, Pocket Gems, Garena, Netmarble Games, Glu Mobile, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, and Bluehole Inc. are all owned partially or wholly by the Chinese conglomerate.

Most of these developers and publishers have produced extremely profitable games. Riot is the force behind the wildly popular League of Legends and Epic Games is the developer of Fortnite. What’s really fascinating is that Tencent also owns the mobile publishing rights to PUBG, which is a huge competitor of Fortnite. In other words, Tencent is profiting off of the two most popular games in the battle royale genre. The major downside of this is that it potentially removes some of the competition between the two games and could make it more difficult for other games in this genre that are not connected to Tencent to become popular.

Tencent’s 2017 annual report mentioned that mobile usership was increasing while PC usership was in decline. The report expressed Tencent’s intentions to promote more PC games like Fortnite, PUBG and Subnautica, by hosting more esports tournaments. So expect to see Tencent having a larger influence on the esports community in the near future as well.

It was also mentioned in the report that the success of PUBG has motivated Tencent to create an original game IP for the PC. It is currently unknown if Tencent is already in the process of creating a new IP, but it is possible that they will be making one in the near future.

Whether or not Tencent actually starts creating new games of their own, it’s clear that the company will continue to be a major part of the gaming industry for the foreseeable future.