As we speak, Tencent hopes to appeal to U.S. goers in the games industry by partnering with Nintendo to reach more American citizens. While that is going on, Tencent now has a 10% stake in Sumo Group — the parent company over Sumo Digital.
With over 300 investments in Tencent’s portfolio, the Chinese mega-corporation is looking to make that book of companies even fatter. The recent stake or victim of Tencent is Sumo Group.
According to gamesindustry.biz, the Chinese mega-company has entered an agreement with Perwyn to acquire 15 million shares, which will give Tencent a 9.96% (rounding will get the company 10%) interest in the developer.
The website reveals after Perwyn sold its shares to Tencent, the former company’s interest will be reduced to 17.38%.
Here’s what head of Tencent Games, Steven Ma, had to say about this deal:
“We are glad to invest in Sumo Group, a leading independent co-development studio. We look forward to supporting Sumo’s growth and exploring collaborations with the Company to bring more interactive entertainment experiences to global audiences.”
Sumo Group CEO Carl Cavers, being the good slave he is, added:
“We are delighted that Tencent have chosen to acquire a shareholding in the company, and we look forward to working with Tencent to explore co-development opportunities.
When Perwyn invested in Sumo Digital in September 2016 we were a private company with annual revenue of around £24m and operated from three studios in two countries. We are now a public company and, following the recent announcement of our new studio in Warrington in the north west of England, now have ten studios in three countries and reported revenue of more than £38 million for the year ended 31 December 2018.
I would like to thank Perwyn, once again, for their original investment and for their ongoing support of the business.”
In other words, for Tencent, this is just another notch on the bedpost. Speaking of companies that Tencent has done the tango with and how much stake they have in top names sit below as per PCGamer (archive.org):
- Riot Games (League of Legends) – 100%
- Sharkmob – 100%
- Supercell – 84.3%
- Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile) – 80%
- Epic Games – 40%
- Fatshark – 36%
- Funcom – 29%
- Kakao – 13.5%
- Bluehole (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) – 11.5%
- Sumo Group and Sumo Digital (Crackdown 3) – 10%
- Frontier Developments – 9%
- Ubisoft – 5%
- Activision Blizzard – 5%
- Paradox Interactive – 5%
As you can see above, Tencent has a hand in a lot of well-known companies. And with Sumo Group and Sumo Digital now affiliated with the megacorp, the two are just another number to the growing pile.
Nevertheless, other popular services such as Discord and Reddit have funding from everyone’s favorite Chinese mega-corporation:
- Reddit – received $150 Million investment by Tencent earlier this year
- Discord – received $158 million in funding last year by Tencent
Lastly, Sumo Digital has worked on games such as OutRun 2 (2004), TOCA Race Driver 2 (2005), Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed (2012), Forza Horizon 2 (2014), and Crackdown 3 (2018) to name a few. But from here on out, the devs in question are excited to work with their Chinese overlords.
