Tencent, China's largest online games developer, is "building an entire town dedicated to esports," according to Yi Shu Ng of MASHABLE. The town will be located in Wuhu, China, where Tencent "just signed a framework agreement with the local government." The planned esports town "will have an esports theme park, esports university, cultural and creative park, animation industrial park, a creative neighbourhood, a Tencent technology entrepreneurship community, and a Tencent cloud data center." Tencent will also bring QQJOY (a convention for QQ's mobile games) and QGC (a mobile gaming competition) to Wuhu. City officials added that Tencent has "also signed an agreement to hold this year's QGC finals in Wuhu." Wuhu is not the "only city Tencent is investing in." The company is also "planning to build a theme park in Chengdu" built around Chinese mobile fantasy role-playing game "Honor of Kings," which reached 50 million users in January this year. More than 47% of Tencent's '16 revenue came from games, with Tencent's gaming unit posting revenues of nearly 70.8B yuan last year, "dwarfing" that of rival NetEase, which posted revenues of 28B yuan. That revenue "stems from the sheer size of the video game market in China" -- nearly 500 million people in China play video games and about 145 million of them play more than an hour per day, according to a '14 estimate by market research firm Eedar. City and county officials are "increasingly seeking the esports dollar to stimulate the local economy and drive tourism." Taicang, China, announced a planned 1.37-square-mile esports town in April (MASHABLE, 5/16).
