Tencent Buys a Chunk of Sumo Games

If you know me, you know that I’ve always got an eye on the Chinese mega-company Tencent, who’s got an increasingly tight stranglehold on the video game world. They own League of Legends developer Riot Games and Path of Exile developer Grinding Gear games, they own huge shares of Fortnite and Borderlands developers Gearbox, as well as Ubisoft, Paradox, Funcom, Bluehole, Frontier Developments, Glu Mobile, and of course Activision-Blizzard, which is one of the many reasons people suspect they decided to ban “Blitzchung” for his controversial statements regarding the ability for people to self-govern and live free.

Well, now they’re adding yet another game studio to their increasingly large portfolio: they now own 9.96 percent of Sumo Games, the people behind Hitman 2, Crackdown 3, Team Sonic Racing, Dead Island 2, Forza Horizon 4, and more. They employ about 600 people and has seven studios all around Europe and India.

Tencent Games boss Steven Ma had this to say:
 

"We are glad to invest in Sumo Group, a leading independent co-development studio. We look forward to supporting Sumo's growth and exploring collaborations with the Company to bring more interactive entertainment experiences to global audiences."

And Sumo Group CEO Carl Cavers said this:
 

“We are delighted that Tencent have chosen to acquire a shareholding in the company, and we look forward to working with Tencent to explore co-development opportunities."

An investment of this size is comparatively small, as far as Tencent standards go, so it’s overwhelmingly likely that this purchase was just so they could get a slice of Sumo’s pie, which has been growing quite incredibly over the past few years (appropriately enough, considering the name). Sumo, unlike Blizzard and Riot, also doesn’t exactly have an enormous presence in China, so it seems unlikely that there will be any nefarious back-alley planning to inject Chinese values into their games, as both Blizzard and Ubisoft have been caught doing.

But still. Small as it may be, it’s worth making a note…