Tencent introduced in the present day that it has added one more sport studio to its steady by means of the acquisition of Slamfire, the guardian firm of Back 4 Blood developer Turtle Rock Studios.
Turtle Rock will proceed “impartial operations” out of its present workplace in California, with cofounders Phil Robb and Chris Ashton remaining on the helm. The studio stated the acquisition will allow it to develop in measurement and increase its ambitions for Again 4 Blood.
“We are going to proceed to transparently talk with you all, present updates on all our progress by means of our Trello board, and increase upon what makes Again 4 Blood so particular,” Turtle Rock said. “Moreover, we get to do one thing we now have by no means performed earlier than as a studio: flip a universe we created into a real long-standing AAA franchise. We are able to now be certain that the Again 4 Blood franchise is right here to remain and we can be engaged on it nicely into the longer term.”
“We’re big followers of Turtle Rock’s video games, particularly their wonderful method to creating co-operative on-line video games,” Tencent Video games World chief technique officer Eddie Chan stated. “We are able to’t wait to see what comes subsequent, and we’re excited to be a part of their future.”
Based in 1998, Tencent has grown to develop into a significant participant within the world videogame enterprise. Together with its inside studios, it owns Riot Video games, Funcom, and Fatshark outright, and it has holdings in firms reminiscent of Epic, Bluehole, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, Frontier Developments, and Paradox Interactive. In November it picked up a minority stake in Yooka-Laylee studio Playtonic; in July, it acquired the Sumo Group, a UK-based developer with 14 studios worldwide.
We stated following the Sumo Group acquisition that it is troublesome to overstate how a lot of the trade Tencent now owns—it invested in 31 game companies in 2020 alone, though clearly not all of these investments led to possession—but it surely’s additionally going through some main challenges at house. A crackdown on gaming in China earlier this 12 months, which grew to incorporate an outright halt on licences for brand new video games in November, took a big toll on Tencent’s share worth, which stays nicely under the height worth it achieved in February.
