Tencent acquires majority stake in Don't Starve developer Klei

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Hello everyone!

I want to take a moment to announce that we have agreed to deal for Tencent to purchase a majority stake in Klei Entertainment.

As part of this agreement, Klei retains full autonomy of creative and operations across all aspects of the studio, including projects, talent, and more.

What’s going to change? There are some boring accounting changes that we will need to adjust to. Other than that, I will continue running the studio as before, with no changes to staffing, projects or other operations.

Why are we doing this? Klei has been around for 15 years, and we have made many changes over the years in order to respond to a changing world. Consistently, my wish has been to enable people to do their best creative work, to learn and grow, to not have to worry about finances, and be able to enjoy their lives outside the studio. This has not changed.

This partnership helps us navigate a changing industry, and helps us focus on what we do best: making unique experiences that no one else can.

Who is Tencent? Tencent has been in the games industry for many years, investing in companies that produce games such as Path of Exile, League of Legends, PUBG, Clash of Clans, Fortnite, and more.

In 2016, Tencent helped us distribute Klei games in China, with Don’t Starve Together being the very first game to launch on their WeGame platform. More recently, we’ve been collaborating with them on Don’t Starve: Newhome on mobile.

Why Tencent? We looked at a lot of different companies, and over the years, we’ve worked with a large number of publishers and distributors. Tencent is the only company that we felt would let us retain the level of control that we demand.

We’ve been working with Tencent for years and even at points where we disagreed, they were always willing to work with us to find the best solution for everybody involved and defer to us when we felt strongly.

How does this affect Klei games in China? As mentioned, we’ve been working with Tencent for quite some time. We worked with them to launch Don’t Starve Together in China in 2016, and have been working with them on our China launches ever since.

Players in China make up a large proportion of the players of our games, and we have been supporting them alongside our North American operation for several years. We don’t expect significant operational changes for China or anywhere else in the world, but we do expect that this partnership will help us to better support our players in China.

Studio Announcement - The Off-Topic Area - Klei Entertainment Forums

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Wonder why Tencent is only acquiring stakes in companies instead of outright buying them like they did Leyou. Oh well, good for Klei, I enjoyed their games, hopefully Tencent doesn’t run them into the ground but I haven’t heard of any major issue where Tencent destroys studios. They seem to be fine with developers running autonomously

May be because FTC will axe US buys?

I think I’m too dumb to understand what is Tencent’s strategy

Aren’t Klei a Canadian developer?

It’s clearly a long-term strategy, but I’m not sure of the endgame myself. They’ve been investing in a lot of indie and mid-tier studios across the board, with an investment in some larger developers like Bungie, and they seem to have been made at a steady pace, and picking up steam. They appear to be hands-off, and haven’t made any significant changes or demands, so, my thoughts are it has to be for the long play of industry reach and influence. Maybe it’s for their cloud strategy that was rumored.

I think NetEase is the one that invested some money into Bungie.

My bad, you’re right.

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No worries. Was concerned that I had missed something.:slight_smile:

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This is one studio I was hoping to end up with Microsoft. They’re one of the most consistently good devs out there.

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How sad. :frowning:

Ah well, looks easy enough to avoid.

Yeah, I’m also baffled as to why they keep buying small stakes in lots of different devs and publishers. My only guess is that they are doing it to gain IP from them all. There certainly isn’t a huge return on investment for them. But then again, I’m still trying to work out what was in it for Sony when they dropped 250 mill into Epic. They could have bought out Bluepoint and House studios for that same money, and it would have had a far better pay off for Sony and the PS5.