Chinese social networking and entertainment giant Tencent surpassed Facebook during trading on Tuesday to become the world's fifth-most valuable public company, as investor anticipation of a new Tencent mobile game pushed stocks to new heights.

Shares of Tencent, already the most valuable company in Asia, reached 435 HK dollars per share, which put its market value at around 530 billion US dollars by midday, outstripping Facebook, currently worth 519 billion US dollars. 

The record comes as Tencent soft-launches its latest mobile game "Glorious Mission" on Tuesday. It is expected to be a massive hit following the success of its multiplayer online battle arena game, “Arena of Valor”, also known as “Honor of Kings”, which has played a critical role in driving up Tencent's third quarter gaming revenues by nearly 50 percent. 

Released more than a year ago, “Arena of Valor” has been a sensation, raking in over 3 billion yuan (about 45 million US dollars) in just the first three months of this year, popular to the point of being criticized for keeping its players, a large portion of which are adolescents, hooked.

"Glorious Mission" is likely to duplicate this success, as both are mobile adaptations of existing gamer favorites. While “Arena of Valor” basically remade the crowd-pleasing PC title "League of Legends" for mobile devices, the game beta launching today will be a mobile adaptation of a multiplayer shooting survival game, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), already an international PC and console knockout. 

Players in China have been primed to embrace Tencent’s latest release, already taking pleasure in “Wilderness Mission”, a Netease imitation of PUBG. Though China's game publishing regulators have frowned upon PUBG's “battle royale” genre – in which combatants must kill off each other and be the last man standing to be victorious, “Wilderness Mission” has so far avoided being slain by slightly altering the backdrop, adding party slogans in the forsaken warehouses and abandoned railways where the game is set.

Analysts said the new market value puts Tencent in the same camp as US tech giants Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.

The Shenzhen-based tech company has for the first time joined the US behemoths as one of the world's five largest companies by value, beating domestic rival Alibaba, which has gained and lost the title of Asia's largest company many times, to be the first Chinese firm in the league and exceed the 500 billion mark.