User Banned (1 Month): Sinophobia
Larian Studios, the developers of the Divinity series and Baldur's Gate III, is known as one of the biggest independent game development studios in Europe. It's not part of a bigger publishing structure or publicly traded company.
In the last couple of years, very hungry caterpillars like Tencent, Embracer, and Keywords have been gobbling up companies everywhere. While I was under the impression that Larian was still wholly owned by its founders and some early investors, a friend of mine and I did some research into the company and we found out that Tencent actually holds 30% of the shares of the company. As far as I knew or could find online, the acquisition of a minority stake in Larian Studios by Tencent was never publicised or reported on (but maybe I missed it?).
While we don't know exactly when the acquisition happened, there are signs it may have been around September 2018, when the company was restructured from a legal perspective and a holding company in Ireland was established (this correlation is just a guess of ours though). In the financial filings we found of that holding company for 2019, the following shareholders are listed: 62.04% by Swen Vincke (the founder and CEO), 30.00% by Tencent Cloud Europe BV (a Dutch letter box company wholly owned by Tencent), and 7.96% by Swen's wife.
So yeah, Tencent owns part of Larian Studios. I thought this was newsworthy. Sell my company to China if old.
In the last couple of years, very hungry caterpillars like Tencent, Embracer, and Keywords have been gobbling up companies everywhere. While I was under the impression that Larian was still wholly owned by its founders and some early investors, a friend of mine and I did some research into the company and we found out that Tencent actually holds 30% of the shares of the company. As far as I knew or could find online, the acquisition of a minority stake in Larian Studios by Tencent was never publicised or reported on (but maybe I missed it?).
While we don't know exactly when the acquisition happened, there are signs it may have been around September 2018, when the company was restructured from a legal perspective and a holding company in Ireland was established (this correlation is just a guess of ours though). In the financial filings we found of that holding company for 2019, the following shareholders are listed: 62.04% by Swen Vincke (the founder and CEO), 30.00% by Tencent Cloud Europe BV (a Dutch letter box company wholly owned by Tencent), and 7.96% by Swen's wife.
So yeah, Tencent owns part of Larian Studios. I thought this was newsworthy. Sell my company to China if old.