Tencent is acquiring a majority stake in Klei Entertainment

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/126355-studio-announcement/

by doppp • 5 years ago

124 83 5 years ago

forums.kleientertainment.com

justicezyx3• 5 years ago

Tecent has been actually allowing independency for most of previously acquired studios. Seems a good deal for the team.

Also it's well known that the Chinese creative market is a bit brain-fucked, in the sense the cut-throat competition drives a lot of studios focusing on trial-and-true designs, results into significant duplication of ideas and implementations. They kind of require talents from a different environment to produce something that is novel to Chinese market.

eunos3• 5 years ago

I think it's just Tencent that are too money oriented, instead of Chinese gamedev environment as a whole that fucked up.

To be fair, a lot of famous Chinese game are gacha/microtransaction since China is mobile first environment. Console gaming only gained traction recently.

justicezyx3• 5 years ago

Happy to see your sources.

I was born and raised in mainland until leaving for US at 24 in 2008.

Never saw much original games from Chinese studios. A lot of games are purely sexuality saturated cheap games, on both web and mobile. Pay to win is very popular.

sudosysgen2• 5 years ago

This is anecdotal but the gacha in Genshin Impact is quite reasonable and you can get really excellent characters and builds without paying a penny if you do it smart. You get enough free premium currency to get a 100% chance of getting at least one top-tier character (on average you'll get two or three) (and obviously many excellent but not top-tier ones besides) as long as you spend it carefully, and every month or two there's a free really good character too.

It's definitely much more PC-oriented than mobile oriented, though.

For a mainly single player game the monetization is not bad.

That said it still isn't optimal, and the issue of power-creep is not even taken into account yet

em5003• 5 years ago

Console sales were banned in China from 2000-2015, which is why the industry grew into a PC-first environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_China

Barrin92• 5 years ago

I think this take is correct. Path of Exile players also made a lot of noise in 2018 but the game developers seem to be able t do their thing. Fortnite and League are still obviously hugely successful as well.

fermentation• 5 years ago

An interesting development since the Path of Exile acquisition is a Chinese client that has a bunch of features players everywhere else in the world have been asking for since the game's inception (notably macro support to prevent RSI).

wyldfire• 5 years ago

Also it's well known that the Chinese creative market is a bit brain-fucked ... lot of studios focusing on trial-and-true designs

IMO Don't Starve is a really enjoyable, very original game. Not sure about Klei's other titles, but maybe having an acquisition that's outside of the routine Chinese game studio is what they're after? Especially if the native teams are as homogeneous as you say.

scruple• 5 years ago

My wife and I play DST together every other weekend on both Friday and Saturday nights. We've been playing it for years now.

Oxygen Not Included is also really good. As is Mark of the Ninja. Highly recommended.

I haven't gotten to Invisible, Inc. yet but I've heard great things.

dijit• 5 years ago

This is true, I work for Sharkmob. There’s significantly less interference here (a wholly owned company) than there was at Ubisoft (a 5% owned company - whom I also used to work for)

SimianSci2• 5 years ago

Interesting observations about the Chinese economy right now.

The lax IP protections have allowed for incredible innovation in hardware and software. Everybody copies each other shamelessly, driving relentless competition.

But when it comes to creative properties its practically bankrupt. A lot of market movers are just copying each other and lack the capability to make anything transformative. Their gaming market seems flooded with hundreds of mobile companies with near identical products. It doesn't surprise me that Chinese investment firms are chomping at the bit to acquire more creative properties from other countries.

They really dont have to do much other than localize the acquired properties and release them to a market starved for good games. Its a smart investment, in my eyes.

catmanjan• 5 years ago

Is this conjecture or do you have proof?

SimianSci2• 5 years ago

Admittedly, conjecture based on observation

FooBarWidget5• 5 years ago

It's a double-edged sword. There are Chinese businessmen who chose not to do business in China, restricting themselves to foreign markets, because they are worried about IP theft in China.

But the situation is slowly improving. IP protection laws, as well as general rule of law, are slowly improving. Whereas 10 years ago IP protection wasn't much of a priority for the central government, it is now a prioritity.

vlozko• 5 years ago

I’m a long time fan of Don’t Starve Together and this news is just disappointing. What frustrates me most, though, is that China is able to operate here in the US independently whereas it’s much more likely it won’t be reciprocated.

FooBarWidget5• 5 years ago

Tesla in China is 100% foreign owned. More and more totally-foreign-owned companies in China are appearing.

MangoCoffee• 5 years ago

its 'cause the trade war that force China to allowed this. if there is no trade war. do you think China will allowed what have been working for them for the past 40+ years?

actuator3• 5 years ago

Tesla might have been allowed because it works well for the auxiliary industries in PRC which in turn helps their own EV companies.

Also, a cynical take. If Tesla has something worth copying, it might be easier as well.

skylabmelody• 5 years ago

Chinese app stores take a 50% cut on every sales and transactions. To publish in China you need to get a deal with a local publisher/company which takes another 70% cut of the remaining 50% (before taxes). Plus the long and heavy administrative paperwork to get a game approved by the authorities. Meanwhile chinese game companies can sell their games on western and asian markets without any restriction whatsoever. There is no reciprocity with China on the game market.

pototo6663• 5 years ago

Plus the long and heavy administrative paperwork to get a game approved by the authorities.

True. I am a game developer in China. I can't afford those paperwork, both in terms of money and energy. I intend to publish my game in Western countries.

There is no reciprocity with China on the game market.

True. Besides, china also has cheap labour in gaming industry, where employees are expected to work many hours.

b0rsuk• 5 years ago

There is no reciprocity with China on the game market.

There is no single word for reciprocity in Chinese. You can make do with phrases like "mutual benefit".

hertzrat• 5 years ago

Is steam available in China? If not, what platforms do people use? Do you really only get about 15% of the sale price before taxes? I’m making a game of my own and am just curious for the future

ekianjo• 5 years ago

Why does the WTO allow this kind of things to happen btw?

vectorcrumb• 5 years ago

Because the WTO has as much control over China as the UN has over the USA.

_cs2017_2• 5 years ago

I’m a long time fan of Don’t Starve Together and this news is just disappointing

What makes it disappointing? Do you mean Tencent will mess up the quality of the game, etc?

blackbrokkoli• 5 years ago

Not too unlikely.

After they bought League of Legends, they "updated" several dozen paid skins, some worth significant money apparently without communicating to Riot Games (the company directly in control of LoL, or rather the one who once was) or the player base. The quality of the update was mediocre to laughable.

Reversion/Fixing took month and there was never any apology IIRC.

Also, putting money into an indie game dev vs. putting money into a CRP-controled conglomerate which is silently buying more and more media may or may not be a morally different endeavor for someone.

haunter• 5 years ago

Full ownership of Riot Games

Full ownership of Norwegian publisher Funcom.

Full ownership of Swedish developer Sharkmob

80% ownership in the New Zealand company Grinding Gear Games

Approximately 84% ownership in Finnish mobile game developer Supercell

40% ownership of American developers Epic Games

20% ownership of Japanese publisher and developer Marvelous which owns G-Mode and the majority of Data East's intellectual properties

17.66% ownership of South Korean mobile developer Netmarble.

Approximately 15% ownership of American mobile game developer Glu Mobile

13.54% ownership of South Korean company Kakao, the parent company of South Korean publisher Kakao Games.

9% ownership in UK developer Frontier Developments

5% ownership of American holding company Activision Blizzard, the parent company of Activision, Blizzard and King

5% ownership of Swedish publisher Paradox Interactive

5% ownership in France's Ubisoft

1.5% ownership of South Korean company Bluehole

Majority ownership in Switzerland-based mobile game developer Miniclip

Capital Investment in Japanese developer PlatinumGames

Capital Investment in Reddit

Minority share in German developer Yager Development

Minority ownership of French mobile game developer Voodoo

Major share in Sweden's 10 Chambers Collective

Majority ownership of Canadian Klei Entertainment.

dirtyid2• 5 years ago

Somewhat tangent ownership factoid.

~30% of Tencent is owned by South African multinational Naspers.

actuator3• 5 years ago

Huh, that's a lot. With what happened with Jack Ma, I am not sure how comfortable outside companies are with holding that much stake in a company in PRC.

News reports seemed to indicate even Tencent was under scanner along with Alibaba.

reducesuffering2• 5 years ago

After all those, you forgot significant ownership in TikTok and Spotify? Two of the hugest apps; Currently #1 and #16 on iOS App Store.

edit: Tencent actually ended up selling their ByteDance/TikTok stake.

traek• 5 years ago

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, not Tencent.

skinnymuch• 5 years ago

They didn’t include a lot of things like JD, Pinduoduo and dozens more investments. It seemed focused on gaming investments.

SoftBank is the main backer of ByteDance as a big company. Not Tencent. ByteDance has a chance of being a proper third tech giant with Baidu having peaked long ago.

snoshy3• 5 years ago

A genuinely impressive list. They clearly know the valuable and successful properties to throw money at. I wonder why other USA tech players passed on those kinds of investments, because they certainly had the chance, and would ostensibly have been preferable given equivalent terms.

There's clearly a bigger play here that other large players in entertainment aren't valuing the same way. What is it?

Negitivefrags• 5 years ago

As a founder of one of the companies on that list, I can at least say why we went with Tencent.

All the western tech companies all had shitty alterior motives for wanting to buy us.

Amazon wants to use you to get more prime subscribers. Microsoft wants you to develop games as exclusives for their platforms. Etc etc.

You talk to other companies western tech buys and its stories about how they come in and meddle.

Only Tencent wants to buy you so that you can keep doing the thing you are doing without screwing around with your company. They have a very good reputation for this and it’s deserved.

gabaix• 5 years ago

They may look for unregulated markets. They focus on highly addictive games, and the games are restricted for the kids in China.

em5003• 5 years ago

The upside of this (and their very succesful WeChat payment platform) is that Tencent is far less dependent on advertising revenue and all the ad-related ills than Facebook.

hellyuipo2• 5 years ago

This is not economy, this is war.

They don't need to add restrictions (or benefits) on company they bought, they just need to keep as many market as they can (thanks to no restrictive market law)

When the time come, they will be able to destroy our economy, or drive it.

This list just show tencent investment, but if you get all China companies that invest in game companies, it much most scariest

ivraatiems• 5 years ago

"When the time comes" for what?

kemonocode• 5 years ago

Interesting.

Can't say I'm particularly excited about Tencent snatching up yet another game studio, and they (Klei) were expecting backlash for sure which is why they prefaced with how they're maintaining autonomy when it comes to creative decisions and to be fair, Tencent has been fairly respectful in that regard with other studios... but one does not make an acquisition just to have it bleed money so I expect the level of screw-tightening to vary according to any future games' successes.

If they're successful in spite, and not because of their new overlords, I have little reason to believe things would change much- why kill the golden goose, after all? But if things don't go as wanted...

Tencent is acquiring a majority stake in Klei Entertainment

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