China's biggest online E-commerce company Alibaba has recently been making a strong push into the gaming industry, but the company is going to have its hands full competing with Chinese Internet giant Tencent.

Alibaba recently invested $120 million in Kabam, which is a game developing company for online and mobile games. And Alibaba announced yesterday that the company is behind KTplay, which is a new social gaming platform and is essentially another version to Apple's Game Center.

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Although Alibaba currently dominates sales services via web portals in China, the gaming industry is a completely different market. Alibaba has an abundance of financial resources, but it's going to take much more for the company to make its mark in the gaming industry to compete with the dominating Tencent.

The biggest source of revenue within the gaming industry in China comes through PC gaming, and Tencent has the luxury of having published the top three most popular PC games in China: "League of Legends," "Crossfire," and "Dungeon & Fighter." Tencent has other top games, but these three have stood ahead of the pack consistently for years.

Even if Alibaba decided to strictly stay within mobile gaming, Tencent dominates that aspect of the industry as well. Apple recently released a list of the top-grossing iOS apps in China where 13 of the top 20 were games developed by Tencent, Tech in Asia reports. 

Furthermore, Tencent has a clear lead over Alibaba within social networking as well. The company is able to market games through its services such as WeChat that consists of hundreds of millions of users making it much easier to promote and popularize its games.

So while Alibaba is making an effort to expand into gaming, don't expect the company to dominate the industry as it does with E-commerce quite yet. Alibaba will need to invest much more to obtain multiple talented game development studios and must have an interest in PC gaming if the company plans to compete with Tencent. 

TagsGame industry, PC gaming, mobile games, e-commerce