League of Legends players could soon be able to play the game directly from their mobile phone. Last week, Tencent, parent company of the game’s developer, Riot Games, announced a new mobile streaming app, allowing players to play PC games on their phones.
According to a translation from industry analyst Daniel Ahmad, the app is designed to work with Tencent’s WeGame platform. Once they’ve downloaded the app, players will eventually be able to stream games in their library to their phone. Sadly, however, their device will need to be connected to the same wifi network as the PC running the games, which means we’re still a little way away from being able to play on the move.
For now, the app only lets players stream League of Legends and its new mode, Teamfight Tactics. While it seems to me that getting the former to work at its best on a small screen might be a little difficult, Teamfight Tactics seems like the perfect fit, and Ahmad shared a video of the mode working surprisingly effectively.
WeGame launched in China, but earlier this year, Tencent released a new version of the client, WeGame X, internationally. That service only had a limited number of games, and it’s currently unclear whether the new streaming service will be available outside mainland China.
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Earlier this year, reports suggested that Tencent was working on a standalone mobile version of League of Legends.
WeGame is Tencent's PC game distribution platform for China (Think of Steam). It has over 300 million registered users and 70 million monthly active users in China alone.
Distributes both F2P and B2P games.
Here is a video of the app in action. pic.twitter.com/J18HIMh6oz
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) July 13, 2019
It’s possible that this is what those reports were referring to, but given the success of MOBAs on mobile, particularly in Asia, it would surprise me if this was all that Tencent had up its sleeve. For more information, however, we’ll probably have to wait until Worlds 2019 later this summer.