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.
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