Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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?

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.

The Allen Brack letter wasn't that long ago, have we already forgotten our prizings? I wonder how that fiasco would have gone down if it was a 10% stake, instead of 5%. It would be pretty hard to top getting an American CEO to claim Chinese copy as his own in a publicity crisis management letter... addressing a Chinese censorship publicity crisis.

To be clear for people that don't know: in October 2019 a Hearthstone (Blizzard game) player protested for Hong Kong while in a tournament stream, by putting on a mask (ironic right?) and shouting "Liberate Hong Kong".

Blizzard proceeded to ban the player, take away his prizemoney and also fire the live stream casters.

Following community criticism, they gave back the prizemoney to the player and reduced his ban to 6 months. Also, they said "the specific views expressed by blitzchung were NOT a factor in the decision we made". But in the official Blizzard Weibo account, they had mentioned they applied the ban to "protect China's national dignity".

Good videos about this: https://youtu.be/uXEP02K3g5M https://youtu.be/oBpcAEMd7tc

Play stupid games...

A phrase made meaningless by its universal applicability. Blizzard management was upset about their inability to control everyone associated with them? Play stupid games...

Don't appreciate someone pointing out the fact that "Play stupid games" is mouth noise? Play stupid games...

That is good to know, Chinese games have a bad rap for being microtransaction heavy/P2W and I had assumed that Tencent would push the games under its wing to follow the same direction.

"Amazon wants to use you to get more prime subscribers"

Doesn't seem shitty to me.

I’m sure most game developers are constantly thinking: how can I get Amazon more prime subscribers? /s

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

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.

Somewhat tangent ownership factoid.

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

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.

Well ... Jack Ma was epitome of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. He knows from inside out how the CCP system works and how to push criticism about the system (subtly, privately).

It is not as if he doesn't have Xi or any other high level party official on quickdial.

Well that's obviously not reality, because Ant is in the process of being essentially nationalized or broken up to a degree because of Jack Ma's public criticism of the system. Having someone on quickdial doesn't mean having them under your control or in your pocket.

Ma didn’t publicly criticize the party as far as I know. Do you have sources to suggest otherwise?

He criticized the system in China. That's a huge no for the CCP.

He didn't just criticize the Chinese system. He criticized the Chinese system regulating themselves so that they could conform to the Basel V standards (which all major Western banks and global banks follow). Ant wanted to fight as a bank, while not calling themselves one. Ma's speech was an attack not only on China but on the Western regulated banking sector. He wants a return to the pre 08 wild west that the Western system was.

>It is not as if he doesn't have Xi or any other high level party official on quickdial.

I highly doubt it, Ma was never on Xi's side in the first place those high level party official he once had dont matter in Xi's era anymore.

They were early investor. Different companies with different focus has different exposure risk. Tencent is golden goose as long as it stays in it's lane and read the tea leaves. They've been very competent at it so far.

Domestic/geopolitics affect companies everywhere. Investors of Qualcomm (Edit: _can't_) be happy after US implemented entity list, and that affects third parties as well like TSMC and ASML. The latter got off light because semis are in such demand, but a bunch of Euro/Japan/Korean tech companies in Huawei supply chain lost out big.

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.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, not Tencent.

Well, CCP owns both, so...

It owns neither... but sure, politics only happen in china... Amazon never did anything political ever... except for that Wikileaks thing... and the Parler thing... but US gov definitely doesn’t own them

While true, Tencent could still purchase ownership in ByteDance, which is what I meant.

My mistake though, it appears Tencent sold off their ByteDance stake and it was less than 2%, so not significant.[0]

[0] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tencent-xiaomi-inves...

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.

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

"When the time comes" for what?

This is like a nuclear bomb, how they can invest that much without any benefits (look in Africa), this money is considered as military investment that's why

If you buy a rocket it's not an investment, it's to take a position, if it explode or not it's not important

May be the time will never come but like nuclear bomb, it's a strategic position and nothing else

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