“Tencent is currently in the process of becoming Techland’s majority shareholder,” Techland founder Pawel Marchewka said in a message. “Teaming up with Tencent will allow us to move full speed ahead with the execution of the vision for our games. We have chosen an ally who has already partnered with some of the world’s finest video game companies and helped them reach new heights while respecting their ways of doing things.”
I doubt the US will get involved. Tech land is too small of a company for the US to have much leverage. I mean technically they have no direct say in the merger itself. The FTC could prevent their products from being sold in the US, how much would that really hurt them? And the treasury department already blocked the Pentagon and state department from issuing sanctions against Tencent recently. It’s unlikely that will change. Too many billionaires here use China for various nefarious things including, but not even close to limited to, slave wage labor. And the US has no sway with the Chinese government over things like this.
It’s different with the UK and Microsoft/Activision. The UK is a huge market that they would have to give up if the UK put sanctions on them and both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are huge companies, so the merger creates a much bigger impact on the overall marketplace. Significantly reducing competition and significantly increasing the risk of antitrust violations like making Activision Blizzard games only work on Microsoft Consoles.
TechLand isn’t worth the FTC trying to use its clout, especially since the Treasury Department has already blocked action against Tencent previously. It would make the FTC look like fools if they tried to use their clout outside of their jurisdiction and were shut down not just by China, who would love to make the US look foolish in any way, but also by their own government.
The UK is using their clout outside of their jurisdiction on a much more significant market disruption to their own country and in the jurisdiction of a mostly cooperative ally.
“Teaming up with Tencent will allow us to move full speed ahead with the execution of the vision for our games. We have chosen an ally who has already partnered with some of the world’s finest video game companies and helped them reach new heights while respecting their ways of doing it become wealthy beyond anything we could’ve imagined”
Is it not enough that epic stole dead island? Now they’re gonna keep dying light forever too. And Microsoft controls COD. The zombie game craze finally died down and these big corpos bought up all the winners. Makes me wish killing floor was fun.
Maybe it’s on me for thinking it would be more cod like and less l4d, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting going in. Plus the audio was a complete sensory overload and I couldn’t pay attention. I need my games to shut up for a millisecond here and there.
Yeah, what? Killing Floor is probably the only multiplayer zombie game I even care for. It's phenomenal. Unless he's talking about KF2 then I understand completely.
Can someone explain the economics of Tencent to me? Rather than, say, publish studios’ games like many American companies would, it seems they almost exclusively just buy chunks of these studios instead. They long ago invested in Epic when they were transitioning to live service games, they acquired Riot (and eventually Hytale in turn), they’ve got some share buy-back deal with Ubisoft, they just picked up Sumo Digital recently, there’s this now, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. It’s never “oh Tencent will be publishing Dying Light 3.”
Tencent, the owner of WeChat, is likely the most powerful software company in the world. It’s essentially an extension of the Chinese government.
edit: Discussing its economics might be a bit contentious, to say the least. Suffice it to say that I will never run anything they own on my primary OS (LoL, Valorant, etc.). A government-controlled company installing software that demands kernel-level access is a huge red flag for me.
Everyone just rolled over when they wanted to rootkit everyone’s desktops for an anti-cheat and I still find it insane. I refuse to install their games and constantly get shit from my friends who play them.
Back in the day techland made one of the better d3d->opengl wrappers for running on cards without native opengl drivers. I own crime cities, been meaning to play it.
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