After the company hired Kojima Productions founding member Kenichiro Imaizumi and Halo 4 lead designer Scott Warner, Tencent is moving things along with its U.S. branch — based in Palo Alto, California — to court gamers in the West by churning out blockbuster games. As of now, No More Heroes 3 publisher has started a business alliance with Tencent.
If you don’t know, Marvelous is a publisher and developer. The company has worked on a lot of games such as the Senran Kagura games, Skullgirls, God Eater 3, Fate/Extra, and Daemon X Machina.
Well, as per bloomberg.com, Tencent is buying a 20% stake in Marvelous, giving the smaller company according to the publication site “capital to develop its game franchises and bolstering the content Tencent itself can offer users.” Here’s word from the outlet regarding the deal between Tencent and Marvelous:
“China’s biggest game company, through affiliate Image Frame Investment, will spend about 7 billion yen ($65 million) to buy stock in the company, the Japanese games maker said in a statement. Marvelous will sell 8.62 million new shares for 576 yen apiece, while shareholders Amuse Capital and Nakayama Hayao will sell 2.83 million and 708,600 shares respectively at the same price.”
The website also makes mention of Marvelous planning to use the money in question to “build out its existing game franchises and launch new ones over the next three years.” Marvelous’ current pipeline of working titles include Story of Seasons and Deamon X Machina.
With all of that said, Asia’s second-biggest company by market value, Tencent, has over 800 studios relying on it. Here’s the current list of known companies that Tencent has a stake in as of 2020:
- Riot Games – 100%
- Sharkmob – 100%
- Supercell – 84.3%
- Grinding Gear Games – 80%
- Epic Games – 40%
- Fatshark – 36%
- Stunlock Studios – 31%
- Funcom – 29%
- Marvelous – 20%
- Kakao – 13.5%
- Bluehole – 11.5%
- Sumo Group and Sumo Digital – 10%
- Frontier Developments – 9%
- Ubisoft – 5%
- Activision Blizzard – 5%
- Paradox Interactive – 5%
- Yager – ?%
As seen above, Tencent has a hand in a lot of well-known companies. Nevertheless, other popular services such as Reddit and Discord have received funding from Tencent too:
- Reddit – received $150 million investment from Tencent early in 2019 (2020 payment unknown)
- Discord – received $158 million in funding in 2018 from Tencent (2019 and 2020 payments unknown)
I’m sure this is just the beginning of Tencent’s agenda.
