By building out studios and staying focused on genres, Tencent hopes to create the next Larian or FromSoftware, developers capable of releasing year-defining hits like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Elden Ring respectively.
That’s according to Yong-yi Zhu, Tencent Games VP and head of operations, strategy, and compliance, who spoke to The Game Business about the Chinese company’s plans both globally and domestically.
Tencent, which holds substantial investments in numerous studios around the world, now including a new subsidiary of Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft, sees those exact mega-RPGs as “North Stars” for game development, Zhu says.
Rather than looking at games through a regional lens, Zhu says, “For us, it’s more about chasing high-quality talent and people that are bringing unique visions, have a very specific vision. We love to work with developers that are trying to hone their craft. The studios we cite as our North Stars, like Larian, FromSoftware, they’ve been in a particular genre for a long time and iterating on that genre.”
Mechanically and stylistically, Baldur’s Gate 3 was much closer to Larian’s Divinity series than the original Baldur’s Gate RPGs from BioWare. The studio’s fingerprints were all over the IP, even if it was D&D at its core – not that that’s a bad thing. Elden Ring, meanwhile, was essentially Dark Souls 4, 5, and 6 in a trenchcoat – a sprawling game combining everything FromSoftware had learned and tested in the action RPGs that led up to that point.
Zhu says Tencent wants to find developers who can do the same. It’s important to note that the company also owns minority but significant shares of Larian as well as FromSoftware owner Kadokawa. Last year, Tencent increased its ownership in Kadokawa further, years after it and Sony increased their ownership of FromSoftware itself.
“For us, we try to do the same thing with our internal studios,” Zhu continues. “We want to work with you if you believe one day you can be the category leader in this particular genre. That could be today, two games from now, or three games from now, as long as we see that progress. That is the long-term commitment.”
Zhu uses these same franchises as examples of how studio given long-term support can produce generational hits. “You look at those two partnerships specifically, it wasn’t an overnight success,” he says. “It was multiple Divinities into Baldur’s Gate. It was Demon’s Souls into Dark Souls into Bloodborne and then finally into Elden Ring, which was so big. We do have a long-game approach. That’s one thing that I think is very unique to Tencent and suits us well in working with a number of different developers for a long time to come.”
After Baldur’s Gate 3’s explosive success, Larian has split with Wizards of the Coast and returned to Divinity. FromSoftware used some its Elden Ring bucks on stranger games like Elden Ring Nightreign and The Duskbloods, but also seems to have another single-player epic in the chamber.
A key distinction with Tencent, as Zhu notes, is that “a lot of our games are evergreen live service titles.” He reckons this evergreen release schedule, as opposed to the huge dips and peaks that come when you release a new premium game every few years, provide some insulation against the waves of the industry at large.
Another way to minimize risk, he says, is to scale down development teams during “the riskier part of the project,” which is generally early in concepting and pre-production. Increasingly, we see pushes for smaller game development teams, with many such teams finding outsized success every year.
Tencent hasn’t been able to avoid the contraction in the games industry. Game dev layoffs look particularly devastating when you isolate them to the United States, but it’s also tumultuous across the world, with Tencent reportedly backing out of multiple studio deals this year and closing TiMi Montreal, a studio helmed by Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag director Ashraf Ismail, before it released a game.