Chinese Company Tencent Buys Grinding Gear Games

Have you heard of Tencent?

It's a Chinese multinational investment-holding conglomerate and games publisher who has their fingers in a lot of pies. They own shares (majority or otherwise) in companies like Riot Games (the folks behind League of Legends), Epic Games (they’re the folks who do Fortnite), Ubisoft, Frontier Developments (who made Elite: Dangerous), and Activision Blizzard, among others. They also publish countless native and western games in mainland China. For example, they’re responsible for bringing Minecraft, Cities: Skyline, Clash of Clans, and even a Lego-based social network. So, the long and short of it is that they’re a really big deal even if you’ve never heard of them before.

And now they’re adding another studio under their umbrella: Grinding Gear Games, the folks responsible for the excellent and free-to-play Diablo Clone, Path of Exile, just announced that Tencent has purchased a majority share of their company.

Grinding Gear Games announced the purchase publicly on their website, and said that despite the purchase, they would continue to operate independently without any form of input from the Tencent team… more or less. They did say that they might try some new features in the Chinese version of the game, at Tencent’s insistence, and if it works well they might roll it out to the international audience, but otherwise… it’s apparently going to be hands off. It seems all that’s really changed as far as the west is concerned is that Tencent will be earning more money from the title and will retain the privilege of publishing the title in China.

Is this good news? Bad news? It’s neither, really. It could mean that all the extra resources make Path of Exile an even better game, but it could, in theory, lead to some bad business practices. So, for now, let’s just call it “news” and keep an eye out…