Tencent Buys A Stake In Another Game Developer, And It s Life Is Strange Dev Dontnod
Tencent, the Chinese internet giant that owns the developers of League of Legends, Warframe, Path of Exile, and Don t Starve, has announced yet another investment in a game studio.
Life Is Strange studio Dontnod, which is based in France, announced that Tencent has invested €30 million into the studio to claim a minority stake in the company. As part of the deal Tencent gets the option to ask for a seat on Dontnod s board of directors.
Dontnod said it s using the money to pay for the expansion of the studio s efforts to develop and self-publish games across PC, console, and mobile. Dontnod s latest games were Tell Me Why and Twin Mirror, both of which were released in 2020.
Grinding Gear Games has touted over 265K concurrent players at launch for their latest Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas expansion. This cemented the game as their most successful expansion to date, and pushed POE to the 4th most popular game on steam during launch.
Over the last decade, Klei Entertainment has put together some of the most memorable indie titles in gaming. They re the team behind Don t Starve (and its various offshoots like Don t Starve Together), Mark of the Ninja, and Oxygen Not Included. They re also working on Griftlands, which is currently in early access. While they ve mainly worked independently, the course of the company is undergoing a seismic shift with Friday s news that Chinese monolith Tencent has acquired a majority stake in Klei.
Don t Starve Together
The news comes through the Klei forums (first spotted by Shacknews Chatty community) with company founder Jaime Cheng announcing the acquisition personally. Here s some of what he had to say about the deal:
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Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas is Grinding Gear’s most successful expansion
We’re just a week on – to the day – from the Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas DLC’s launch, and it’s already been declared the most successful expansion in developer Grinding Gear Games’ history. The action-RPG game’s devs have announced the latest pack has been a hit in terms of its player counts, hitting more than a whopping 265k concurrent players during its launch.
“Echoes of the Atlas has been Path of Exile’s most successful expansion so far,” studio co-founder Chris Wilson announces in a press release. “We are so pleased to still be setting new player number records after over 30 quarterly league releases since 2013. It shows us that our development methodologies are evolving in the right direction as we work towards completing Path of Exile 2.”