Tencent exercising greater control in companies like Techland, Funcom and Sumo

Chinese tech and entertainment giant Tencent has said that it is having more of a say in the strategy of the companies it owns, such as Techland, Funcom and Sumo Group.

That’s according to Bloomberg, which spoke to CEO of the company’s games division, Michelle Liu, and details a number of recent instances of the firm playing a bigger role in strategy at the developers it owns.

One such instance is Poland’s Techland, which Tencent acquired for $1.6 billion back in 2024. Following the deal, the company embedded staff at the studio at Liu’s behest, including support on-site in order to help the studio out. Liu also invited Marchewka to Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters to discuss strategy on pricing for Dying Light: The Beast, resulting in its release as a full-price title.

“We can always count on an extra point of view that helps us to improve the game,” Techland founder Pawel Marchewka told Bloomberg.

Liu added: “I fundamentally don’t care who’s calling the shots. Whatever makes the most sense for our projects to succeed, that’s the way to do it.”

Tencent has also played a greater role in steering Norwegian studio Funcom, with the Chinese firm urging the developer to focus on Dune: Awakening rather than other projects.

“When Tencent came in, they said: ‘Look, you’re spreading your attention.’ You have a great IP that you’ve secured, you should really focus on that and drop the other things,” Funcom CEO Rui Casais explained. Funcom cut staff and shuttered The Outsiders in October.

Meanwhile, Tencent has also encouraged Sumo Group’s away from its notions of creating original IP, instead saying that the UK company should focus on its historical bread and butter, which is contract work for other studios. In this instance, the firm was brought in to help Digital Extremes on seasonal content for Warframe, resulting in a boost in sales for the 12-year online title.

“It is not a push, it’s a pull,” Juno Shin, a member of Liu’s team, said.

“We 100% stay away from creative intervention. However, creative people do not always know how to do finance or production or hiring.”

These remarks echo those made by Tencent’s VP and head of business operations, strategy, and compliance Yong-yi Zhu to GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year, where he discussed Sumo Group and Funcom.

For the former, Zhu said that Tencent helped the company “set strategic direction” on topics such as budgeting or trends. Meanwhile, when it came to Dune: Awakening, it was more about assisting Funcom with releasing a game as big as Dune: Awakening.

“We had our tech teams go and visit Funcom and sit there and work with them on backend technology, on servers and things like that, to make sure everything was stable. And also we can help them scale in that regard,” Zhu explained.

“And then on publishing, they had expertise in certain geographies, and for us, we had expertise in others, so we partnered together to figure out how we reach more of an audience across the world.”