“Tencent is currently in the process of becoming Techland’s majority shareholder,” Techland founder Pawel Marchewka said in a message. “Teaming up with Tencent will allow us to move full speed ahead with the execution of the vision for our games. We have chosen an ally who has already partnered with some of the world’s finest video game companies and helped them reach new heights while respecting their ways of doing things.”
Can someone explain the economics of Tencent to me? Rather than, say, publish studios’ games like many American companies would, it seems they almost exclusively just buy chunks of these studios instead. They long ago invested in Epic when they were transitioning to live service games, they acquired Riot (and eventually Hytale in turn), they’ve got some share buy-back deal with Ubisoft, they just picked up Sumo Digital recently, there’s this now, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. It’s never “oh Tencent will be publishing Dying Light 3.”
Tencent, the owner of WeChat, is likely the most powerful software company in the world. It’s essentially an extension of the Chinese government.
edit: Discussing its economics might be a bit contentious, to say the least. Suffice it to say that I will never run anything they own on my primary OS (LoL, Valorant, etc.). A government-controlled company installing software that demands kernel-level access is a huge red flag for me.
Everyone just rolled over when they wanted to rootkit everyone’s desktops for an anti-cheat and I still find it insane. I refuse to install their games and constantly get shit from my friends who play them.
I went out and bought an external disk (tiny and used, so it was dirt cheap) purely for Windows and rootkit shit like Valorant or Lockdown Browser.
No way in hell I’m letting any of that touch my primary disk.
A chat and gaming company is more powerful than Microsoft and Apple? Gotta get a grip…