Imagine, a great tide of red water with five yellow stars sweeping across the surface, swallowing up everything under its wave. If you can picture that, then you are witnessing Tencent devouring its next victim which is Stunlock Studios.
To set the record straight, Stunlock Studios is the company behind Battlerite. The 2016 game is a top-down MOBA that sees two teams going at it to emerge the victor. The second version of Battlerite is the battle royale edition that released in 2018.
At launch, Battlerite peaked at 44,850 players and as of now has around 780 to 893 people still playing the game, according to Steam Charts. The same website reveals that Battlerite Royale at launch had a peak of 9,355 players, and now, it can only keep 169 to 191 players a day.
Now that you have a clear picture as to what Stunlock Studios has under its belt, website nordic9.com reveals that the team based in Skövde, Sweden has sold a part of the company to the Chinese giant Tencent.
The website reports that the deal between Stunlock Studios and Tencent went down for $4 million, which translates into 31% of the Swedish company’s shares.
With this move now out in the wild, Tencent is reported to be Stunlock Studios’ largest owner.
You know what that means, right? The above means that Tencent has done the tango with another company and thanks to PCGamer (archive.org), you get to see the growing list of companies Tencent is groping:
- Riot Games (League of Legends) – 100%
- Sharkmob – 100%
- Supercell – 84.3%
- Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile) – 80%
- Epic Games – 40%
- Fatshark – 36%
- Stunlock Studios – 31%
- 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%
Last but not least, Stunlock Studios is working on a new game. While we wait to see if Tencent is helping the team co-develop whatever this new project is like Call of Duty: Mobile, both Battlerite and Battlerite Royale are available on PC via Steam for free.
