Former Sega EVP John Clark joins Tencent

John Clark, Sega Europe’s former executive vice president of publishing, has joined Chinese megacorp, Tencent, as vice president of partnerships for Europe.

First spotted on LinkedIn and then confirmed by GI.biz, the move sees Clark follow former Sega Europe COO and president Jurgen Post who left the Japanese developer/publisher to join Tencent back in 2017. 

Clark started at Sega in 2007 as UK managing director. In 2010 he was promoted to UK managing director and digital distribution director before being promoted again – this time to senior VP of commercial publishing – in 2014. Three years later, he became an executive VP.

As yet, there’s no confirmation from Sega on who will replace Clark.

Tencent recently acquired a 10 per cent share of Sumo Group, the parent company of Crackdown 3 and LittleBigPlanet 3 developer Sumo Digital. This means Tencent now not only owns League of Legends creator Riot Games but it also has stakes in a wide range of high profile game makers, including Activision Blizzard, Bluehole, Epic, Paradox Interactive, Sharkmob, Supercell, and Ubisoft, and partnerships with many others, including peripheral company Razer, Nintendo, and The Pokemon Company.

Tencent is reporting a boost in year-over-year revenue thanks to the performance of its mobile division, including PUBG mobile and Call of Duty: Mobile, the latter of which exceeded 100 million downloads within a month of launch. In Tencent’s quarterly earnings call, the company revealed its overall revenues were up 21 per cent YoY to RMB 97.2 billion ($13.9 billion) and profits up 23 per cent to RMB 25.1 billion ($3.6 billion), due largely to the two mobile shooters. Despite a 7 per cent YoY drop in PC software sales, the company was nonetheless boosted by a 25 per cent YoY uptick due in part to the success of its mobile business.

“We have made encouraging progress toward globalising our business, particularly for online games, where we created, published and operated some of the most popular mobile games outside China,” said Tencent President Martin Lau at the time. “In the most recent quarter, Call of Duty: Mobile, which we co-developed with Activision Blizzard, gained more than 4 million five-star reviews on Google Play and a 4.9 rating on iOS following its October launch, which has become one of the most successful mobile game launches in the past couple of years.”