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Industry News
2018/01

Tencent Brokers Deal With LEGO To Develop Online Games In China

The Danish company, LEGO Group, has suffered a rather unfortunate decline in sales growth, resulting in them having to partner up with Tencent Games for a slew of upcoming titles set to launch in China.

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Tencent and LEGO have partnered up, and that they’re looking to expand their reach further into mainland China.

According to Reuters, head of LEGO in China, Jacob Kragh, told them that they’re looking to Tencent to create bespoke content in mainland China…

“What we are looking for now with Tencent is just to find more creative ways… (of) reaching children, and creating bespoke content with Tencent, in this case, video games,”

The reports indicate that while LEGO has a small piece of brand recognition in China, they’re hoping that they can get pulled out of the slump by Tencent with some large-scale outings to help offset the downturn in business that LEGO suffered back in 2016.

Over in North America Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment handles publishing rights for LEGO games. The company has a multitude of licensed based LEGO games on the market, but apparently they want to go where the big money is and the big money is located in the largest gaming market in the world… China.

Tencent has been in the news recently (and frequently) for having struck a deal with PUBG Corporation to publish PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in mainland China as well. However, they first had to go on a clean-up spree by having a bunch of Chinese cheaters arrested in hopes of curbing the the poor reception the game has among gamers in order to make it more enticing to casuals. So Tencent has been keeping very busy as they continue to dominate the global sales charts as the largest video game publisher in the world.

Don’t expect to see Tencent’s new joint-venture titles made with LEGO to make an appearance Stateside, though. It appears the upcoming LEGO titles are designed specifically for Chinese kids.

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