Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Larian Studio & Tencent?

Just read a report that Tencent owns 30% of Larian Studio now? Haven’t heard any announcment on the matter. Is this recent?

Can't say I've ever heard about it, either.

If this is accurate it would leave a very bad impression with me. Tencent is not just a Chinese company. It is a Chinese *government* owned and controlled company. I want nothing to do with anything Tencent-related.

This will be a result of Tencent's very aggressive acquisition policy, they have partial ownership of hundreds of non-Chinese media companies, and act as publishers/distributors for foreign media across China.

I'm not a fan of them or their strong-arm tactics, do you have a link to this report for us?

Guess there's a lot you don't want to be related to then because of their aggressive acquisition policy. But this "news" came out last year when Gamer&Trader stated he found out that one of Larians holding companies are 30 percent owned by Tencent.

It would be very bad for Larian to have any connection to the chinese communist party. If evidence of this is provided, it will definitely be covered in the media.

I remember hearing about this over at ResetERA about a year ago, but the thread devolved into sinophobia and got locked before anyone could really look into the claims.

If this is true at all, Larian has kept it extremely well hidden. In this case, I wouldn't be concerned about the Tencent side of things as they're pretty much everywhere nowadays, it'd be more about Larian pretending to be an indie company for the goodwill if it turns out that they're having secret acquisitions.

The only source I could find in regards to all this stems from a couple Twitter threads. Seems rather dubious to be honest.

https://twitter.com/GamerTrader1/status/1431899588324175873

There are good reasons to dislike state-sponsored intellectual property thieves. That's not racist.

Yea, about that thread, I just read the whole thing, and while a bunch of posters were accusing everyone of being sinophobia, no one said anything negative towards the Chinese people, they just expressed concerns towards Tencent being an arm of the Chinese government.

China isn't a democracy, so when powerful Chinese companies that have to operate in China start buying large chunks of non-Chinese companies, people are going to be a bit anxious. that's not sinophobia. This reminds me of the current "russiaphobia" that is going around.

You can't criticize communism without the SJWs ganging up on you.

Let's not bring communism or race into this. The issue is that Tencent is a big corporation that is also arm of an *Authoritarian (possibly approaching totalitarian?)* government. Either of those issues would be bad enough alone (owned by big corporation = not indie & pure-profit motives will inevitably stifle creativity and fun; owned by an authoritarian government = possible censorship or forced content), and both together is obviously worse.

BUT, 30% ownership doesn't mean much(right?), especially when Swen owns >50%. That means that Larian still retains control of their products. Tencent could cause a lot of financial harm to Larian by suddenly selling all their shares, and may try to influence Larian's products through such threats, or they may try to buy more shares of Larian to get >50% which then would be bad. But as is, things seem...fine?

^Agreed.

No one is "bringing" communism "into this." The point of the thread is that Larian may have communist business partners. If true, that will tarnish the studio's reputation.

I probably worded that wrong, the thread was more closed out of accusations of sinophobia towards the OP and the tweets quoted. I'm Chinese myself and I still say fuck the CCP, I know the difference between people talking shit about the government and actually being racist.

Either way, I still think the sources of this supposed 30% stake are dubious. No one seems to have dug up anything further or bothered to really investigate to verify this. Even if the source seems trustworthy, it's still just one person that has looked into this. 30% stake isn't majority ownership but it's a huge chunk and a big cause of concern if true, and I'd be VERY concerned if this was somehow managed to be hidden for at least a year.

I had to go fairly deep for this one, but i found a secondary source that connects the two:

https://ie.globaldatabase.com/company/larian-group-holdings-limited

interesting.

It says that Tencent has preference shares where the other two have ordinary shares. I didn't know what preference shares were so I found this:

"Preference shares are most often issued to investors, while ordinary shares are often given out to startup business founders. Preference shares give shareholders a priority when it comes to being paid company dividends, but they have less input into the strategy of the business."

Source:
https://crestlegal.com/ordinary-shares-vs-preference-shares/

So at least it sounds like they have less say into how Larian does things due to their share type.

Fair, "bringing" was probably the wrong word because, sure, Larian does technically seem have a communist business partner. And yes, some people will dislike that association purely because of the word "communism."

But in the phrase "Larian may be partnered with Tencent, a big company owned by the Chinese Communist Government," the words "big company" and "government" (specifically, the authoritarian nature of said government) are by far the most important. So I suppose it would have been better so say let's not *focus* on communism or race, but instead on the more important things, some of which (cough cough EA, Activision, Ubisoft) have been proven to have disastrous effects on small studios.

That's good.

My indie dev narrative is crumbling...

I'm also mildly concerned about how Tencent managed this, and not like, anyone else being in on it. Did someone at Larian just personally invite them in?

Can Larian still call themselves indie anymore? It's all so weird.

I thought this was common knowledge. I swear I've seen this topic come up on multiple forums. Sven owns 62% of the company. His wife owns 8%, and then Tencent owns 30%.

IIRC, him and his wife used to own 100% and funded his company via loans, but after that almost bankrupted Larian during the making of DOS (since they require constant repayment) I think he probably thought Equity funding was the way to go. For the majority of "companies" that have staff and need a steady cashflow, you're either funding yourself via Equity (i.e. Venture Capital or a stake like this from Tencent), or you're taking on loans. Both ways have cost.

I never thought it was a huge deal myself. Owning 51% of a company is essentially the same as owning 100% from a control standpoint. The unfortunate truth is most of the funding/capital available comes from pretty sketch sources. Even loans come from banks who are basically sketchy AF (especially if you think about who's money they tend to manage).

It's exceeding rare for a proper indie gaming "studios" (i.e. with staff and salaries that you have to pay) to be 100% owned. That really only works when you're 1 person with savings, working from home. Once you have a staff before you've even sold one game, the money's gotta come from somewhere.

For example, Owlcat is an "indie studio", but it's also a full subsidiary (i.e. owner has less than 50%) - previously it belonged to My.Games / VK.com (Russian social media megacorp). Now it is a subsidiary to GEM Capital a private equity / venture capital based in Cyprus.