A new report has emerged which claims that Chinese gaming and tech giant Tencent purchased a 15% stake in Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios last year.
According to Insider Gaming (which in turn cites Swedish publications Dagens Industri and Breakit), Tencent paid roughly $83 million for the stake, which represents a fraction of Arrowhead's reported valuation of about $532 million.
Insider Gaming also says that Arrowhead chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt welcomed the deal, claiming that it will open up the Chinese market for Arrowhead. Pilestedt also apparently said that the Chinese player base is the "holy grail" in the gaming industry (a quote for which Insider uses machine translation).
Arrowhead is far from the only Western game company in which Tencent has a stake. The company is one of Ubisoft's major shareholders, having recently had a major role in the creation of a new entity that will handle much of Ubisoft's most popular IP.
Tencent also counts Dying Light developer Techland, Elden Ring and Dark Souls studio FromSoftware, and Fortnite giant Epic Games among its investments, with the latter having landed Tencent in hot water with the US government in the past.
That's not to mention Tencent's many...
