College dropout becomes billionaire with Chinese gaming platform

As China’s Internet use shifted from desktop to mobile, Huang realised there wasn’t a Steam-style community dedicated to smartphone gamers. TapTap was born in 2016 and has been free to use from the outset. — AFP

When China’s two big mobile powers clashed publicly on New Year’s Eve, the stock of a little-known gaming company surged the most ever, minting a new billionaire in 38-year-old maverick entrepreneur Huang Yimeng.

Shares in his indie game distributor XD Inc rose 24% on the first trading day of 2021 after Huawei Technologies Co temporarily removed all Tencent Holdings Ltd games from its app store in a dispute over their revenue split. Investors flocked to the ByteDance Ltd-backed creator of TapTap – a Steam-like download service for games that bypasses the dominant app stores – on the sign of schism between China’s big two.