Smite MOBA gets funding from League of Legends owners Tencent

Tencent, the Chinese investment company that owns Riot Games - and therefore League of Legends - have agreed to publish new MOBA Smite outside of Europe and North America.

Smite is a new MOBA from Hi-Rez, the developers of Tribes Ascend.

“Smite is a totally new type of MOBA with some traditional mechanics, but also providing different modes of battle and gameplay,” said Tencent vice president Steven Ma in a statement. It's these differences that Tencent is banking on to make Smite stand out in a busy Chinese PC market.

A couple of statistics worth pulling from the noise of that video is that Tencent lays claim to 79.3% of the world's MOBA players, and that they estimate the MOBA market has grown in China by around 70% in the last year.

A closed Smite beta with Tencent will begin in October. Since beta testing began on Smite in June 2012 around two million players have signed up, so it's already doing rather well. This new partnership can only send that number upward.

Thanks, PCGamesN.