Tencent May Acquire Gaming Phone Maker Black Shark

China’s Tencent Group is in talks to acquire the gaming smartphone maker Black Shark in an apparent effort to enter the metaverse. 

According to multiple media reports Monday (Jan. 10), the social media giant wants to buy Black Shark and shift its focus from phones to virtual reality (VR) devices and content creation, with Tencent providing the VR software. 

Founded in 2017, Black Shark is backed by Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker. The company collaborated with Tencent last year on a gaming phone based around the Tencent game “Peacekeeper Elite.” 

Read more: Tencent: China Would Welcome Metaverse, With Caveats 

Last year, Tencent President Martin Lau said he believes the metaverse — the game-like immersive digital experience powered by virtual and augmented technology — has potential for gaming business opportunities. 

But Lau added that the Chinese version of the metaverse would likely look much different than the metaverse found in other countries. 

While Tencent has not commented on any of these reports, it’s worth noting that other companies have set about developing VR hardware prior to launching their metaverse ambitions. Facebook/Meta is probably the most well-known example here, purchasing Oculus in 2014. And last year, TikTok creator ByteDance purchased the VR headset maker Pico. 

Read more: Utility Will Make the Metaverse Work — and Pay — With or Without Goggles 

But as Seth Gerson, CEO of the interactive content firm Survios, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster recently, a fully realized metaverse won’t require users to don a set of goggles, but it could very well give ordinary glasses superpowers. 

“There’s been sort of this great convergence of what I would say are enabling technologies that now have made the cost of compute and heat dissipation incredible, and what that gives rise to is a different way to interact with the internet,” Gerson said. 

When asked about how useful the metaverse will be outside of the gaming environments where it began, Gerson said, “We’re building to enable presence, whether that be physics or locomotion, phoneme detection, all of that just enhances our state.”