That’s the headline on my latest story, out last Tuesday with my colleague Raffaele Huang. It begins:
Tencent Holdings Ltd. is in talks to sell Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.’s popular virtual-reality headset in China, home to the world’s biggest pool of internet users.
Tencent, China’s biggest videogame company, has proposed to Meta that it become the exclusive seller of Meta’s Quest 2 headsets in China, people familiar with the discussion said. Tencent has also sought to publish Chinese versions of existing videogames for the device, they said.
The discussions, which began in recent months, are still at an early stage and a deal might not be reached, some of the people said.
Among issues that would need to be addressed are how user data would be handled, whether global macroeconomic conditions would be right for a partnership, and whether any deal between two of the biggest tech companies in the U.S. and China could draw scrutiny from Washington and Beijing, the people said. The two companies would also face China’s tight regulations on videogames.
Currently, the headset and its apps aren’t officially available in China. People there can buy devices from parallel importers on e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Taobao and JD.com Inc., and set up the headsets and download apps with a virtual private network to bypass China’s internet firewall.
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