TENCENT BEEFS UP VIDEO GAME HOLDINGS WITH $1.5B LEYOU ACQUISITION

Chinese entertainment giant Tencent Holdings has added several more game developers and publishers to its portfolio after acquiring Leyou Technologies for $1.5B USD.

The acquisition was announced earlier this year, but officially finalised on Wednesday 23 December when Leyou withdrew its listing from the Hong Kong stock exchange. 

In addition to Tencent, since Leyou was offered for sale nearly a year ago several other parties had also reportedly expressed an interest, including iDreamSky, Zhejiang Century Hautong Group, and Sony Corporation.

The deal sees UK-based Splash Damage, and Canada-based Digital Extremes join Tencent, and also gives the Chinese conglomerate a minority stake in Certain Affinity and Athlon Games.

Splash Damage has collaborated with Activision Blizzard on several first-person shooter games, Digital Extremes is developer of Warframe, Certain Affinity has worked on Call of Duty and Halo, and Athlon Games is currently partnered with Amazon for a Lord of the Rings MMO. 

Leyou’s properties join Tencent’s already impressive video game holdings, including Riot Games, Supercell, and Funcom. Tencent also has minority stakes in Epic Games, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Krafton and others. 

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