And yet plenty of people do pay cents (and quite a few at that) GGG was doing well before this (they were up to 100 people. although I am going to assume the hires going back some months were done with this move in mind). Tencent publishers quite a few FTP games with microtransaction stores, if memory serves. This is nothing new for them.
While GGG was doing well, the amount of money they were making outside of China wouldn’t register noticably if it was added or removed from Tencent’s total books.
If GGG were still owners, and the next 3-4 (say) leagues flopped, there would be drastic changes. I’m not sure if this didn’t occur to you or what. “If POE doesn’t return an investment, there will be changes!” is banal. That said, I was commenting on the fact that you are insisting things are going to change. Which, actually, that’s sort of banal too.
Of course all sorts of things change internally, Dave Brevik talked about this some in a recent stream. But that’s not what Chris Wilson is talking about when he says “nothing is going to change”. He’s talking about how the game is developed/who is going to be primarily responsible for dictating content. I have uncovered no evidence that Tencent will change this so far. Apparently they didn’t in Clash of Clans and they sure didn’t in League of Legends (although if they did influence the decision to remove the old rune system, that’s arguably a positive). As I also said, Tencent was already requesting features for China and that will continue. Chris has said that if anything they do over there seems like a good idea to bring to the rest of the world they will. Makes sense.
What EA (or anyone else) does is irrelevant. What’s relevant is what Tencent has done and will do. That said, Tencent didn’t do this with the hopes that POE would do well in China. This announcement came nine months to the day POE released in China. They have 9 months of data to chew on. From their perspective, this was always in the works. That is, if POE got off to a good start they would want to acquire GGG (it saves them money), and if it didn’t no biggie. This likely means there were encouraging growth trends that triggered the move.
Some new business people were hired specifically so Chris could stick to the development side, apparently. So he wants to be more hands on over there. Another great point that Brevik made was that being rich changes things (again, this is not the sort of change Wilson was talking about in his quote), so it will be interesting to see how that affects the former owners of GGG going forward, even if there is no immediate change.
GGG is apparently up to 100 and change employees now. Last I checked I think it was 60something to 70something. I wonder how many hires were made as a leadup to this move, and whether there will be more. Part of me thinks that a big engine overhaul could be the result of this move. That assumes that there are things GGG wanted that were beyond “well, we’re comfortable” and of course I can only speculate.
I would like to see GGG come out and address some of this. Without getting into specifics, at least talk a little bit about how they think this will benefit the game more. Even if it’s just “we’ve got a round of hires coming, and hope to dedicate people to these broad areas”.
Another think I would like to see (h/t to a dude on ZiggyD’s stream) is someone asking about whether Tencent wants to look at the data from players outside of China. They may not care (they can’t force any of us into a social credit system, after all).
