After teasing big news to come earlier this week, Platinum Games has delivered on that promise. The company detailed in a blog post that they have reached an investment partnership agreement with Tencent. This partnership will allow the company to continue to operate independently while allowing the developer the ability to self-publish their own work.
Tencent is a Chinese company that owns or has a stake in many games, including PubG and League of Legends. The developer commented that
We would like to announce we have received a capital investment from Tencent Holdings Limited as a basis for partnership. This partnership has no effect on the independence of our company, and we will continue operations under our current corporate structure.
We hope to use this capital to strengthen our foundation as a business and expand from game development into exploring self-publishing. We also hope that this partnership can give us a wider global perspective, while still creating high quality games that stay true to our name
With titles such as Bayonetta, Astral Chain and NieR: Automata, Platinum has a wide variety of successful titles under their belt. The ability to self-publish could provide them with much more financial security and freedom to develop more expansive titles in the future. Relying on third party publishers as Bayonetta does often hamstrings the developer into working from behind based on the revenue that is available to them.
Personally, I’m still upset about Scalebound being cancelled, but that’s a story for another day. We’ll have to wait and see what the developer has in store for us in the future.
