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Techland, the game developer best known for making the first Dead Island game, and later the Dying Light game franchise. has announced that China-based Tencent has acquired a majority ownership interest in the company. Specific financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In a blog post, Techland’s CEO Paweł Marchewka stated:
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.
Marchewka added that under the terms of the deal, Techland will still own its game IPs like Dying Light, and will retain creative control over its upcoming games.
Over a year ago, in May 2022, Techland announced it was working on its next major game project. It is an open-world fantasy RPG, and the developer announced it had recruited a number of new team members to work on the project, including the Narrative Director and Narrative Lead of CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 2 and 3 games, among others.
There’s no word yet on when the game will officially be revealed. However, today’s blog post made a quick mention of the new game, with Marchewka stating:
Our open world action-RPG in a fantasy setting is already shaping up to become something truly special, and the goal here is to make sure it will live up to the expectations for our first new IP in almost a decade.
This is the latest game developer acquisition by Tencent. It has previously acquired either minority or majority ownership of game companies like Riot Games, Epic Games, Frontier Developments, Turtle Rock Studios, and Path of Exile developer Grinding Gear Games, the last in 2018.
