Larian Studios does technically have a single shareholder in Tencent—which owns around 30% of the company. However, an important piece of context is that Tencent appears to own what’s called a “preference” share, meaning that Tencent doesn’t have voting rights when it comes to Larian’s decision making. The rest of the company belongs to CEO and Founder Swen Vincke and his wife.
Few people do because Larian keeps lying about it. Part of me understands you don‘t go around telling people a Chinese government asset has big money in your company, given the ongoing genocide and all (speaking of toxic work environment eh) but it‘s publicly accessible information anyway. They‘ve been so consistently dishonest about it that I can‘t take them all that serious about anything anymore. Because alternatively to lying they could just… shut up and keep making great games. They don‘t need that sugar coating.
Tencent own preference stock. They could sell their stock, which could potentially harm the company, but they hold no voting rights and carry no decision making power.
I am not a fan of China, nor Tencent, but spewing bile without understanding the context does NOT help this discourse.
Well, penny stocks exist. It’s possible that Tencent suddenly liquidating their 30% share could bottom out the share value temporarily. If the market decided that Tencent liquidating their holdings was a sign that the company was going under, that should drive the price down, correct?
Can’t see how it would harm the company. Stocks and shares are just a way to raise money in a company. I’ll sell you x% for $yk and own that amount now.
Even with normal shares 30% is a minority stake especially if a single entity owns the other 70% (ie. You can express your opinion but I outvote you every time). Unless Larian are planning to raise additional funds by selling equity and need the stock price to remain high for that reason, Tencent are free to sell their portion without any impact to Larian. (Heck a drop might even let Larian buy itself back)
They’re not publicly traded, and the only shares are the ones that Tencent owns. The shares are worth whatever someone buys them for. The price doesn’t fluctuate because there’s no market with which they are traded on
It is true that a non publicly traded firm won’t see an immediate effect if one of the shareholder leave the ship, but businesses work on trust. If Tencent sell its share, it is a sign that it doesn’t trust the studio anymore. Thus, potential private investors, like banks, will be more hesitant to work with them, and will ask for higher rates to compensate for that perceived lose of trust. Thus, hurting the Studio.
Shareholders have a right to sell their shares. If there is no other buyer, then the company will have to pay them for it. They may not have enough liquid capital to pay off 30%. Other assets might have to be sold off, which may make it difficult to operate.
I did a little more research, and it tends to be only specific circumstances and shareholder agreements, but there are times when a shareholder can force a company to buyback the shareholder’s stock.
It’s so irritating to see how eager people come to defend Larian on their lies every time someone calls it out. You’re acting like I said Tencent has Larian on the leash. I mean you’re not even disagreeing with anything I said. Tencent holds shares. They are shareholders, as the article states. Maybe read it again? Do you also claim Larian didn’t receive funding from Tencent? Because Larian was very vocal about not receiving any funding, playing dumb when people wondered how Larian even made such a huge game.
Rumors have it Hasbro’s gonna sell D&D and Tencent is the most likely buyer. We’ll see how much of Larian’s soul will be left when they get approached to make a huge D&D mobile gacha or whatever Tencent comes up with.
I’m getting whiplash from your logic. You just accused another user of acting like you said tencent had larian on a leash, which we can all agree is not true. Then you go on to say Larian is going to lose its soul when tencent approaches them with a gacha game, as if larian would take them up on this like Tencent has any say in what Larian does.
Also, Hasbro isn’t selling DnD. Tencent is attempting to buy adaptation rights to the DnD IP, which may not even be true. By all accounts, WotC is the most profitable division of Hasbro. Sounds like you read another headline and didn’t read the article…
No, I am saying Larian will do it on their own accord rather than losing out on money in the end. It‘s a tale as old as the gaming industry. We‘ve seen so many downfalls that parallel this pattern and if they‘re already this dishonest at their peak, then I‘m really worried how bad it will be when they‘re at the bottom. Even CDPR didn‘t show nearly as many red flags prior to the Cyberpunk debacle.
Oh yeah if Habro says so it must be true… boy oh boy.
This is great but my fear is that one day he will go public and not share the profits with the employees. I worked at a company like that. Said they would never sell until they did for a record amount that they didn’t really share with the employees.
Okay, but where’s that money coming from? Someone has to upfront pay for things. Larian are lucky, they have a majory investor that was not looking for any control, they released in early access and had runway money from previous projects to go with. They are the exception, not the rule, unfortunately.
Publishers no longer publish third parties for the most part, so everyone who isn’t a subsidiary of a large company has to find funding somewhere.
It’s worth noting the vast gulf we are talking about here between the “self funded” indie studios and even A games, not even AA, just A.
The self funded indie game made by one person in their spare time that 200 people play (and occasionally a standout hit that 8 million people play) really isn’t under contention here. We’re talking about the responsibilities when starting a business.
We are not talking about making an AAA game, an equivalent of an MCU film (as those are limited to the deep pockets of large companies).
Most companies that aren’t making AAA games, are also taking funding because people have to make rent, and workers deserve to get paid a wage.
From me for example. I follow this studio and team since many years and i’ve participated to the funding of Divinity: Original Sin (DOS) more than a decade ago…
They got money from several sources but mainly because (or i should say thanks to) they delivered good products, they have being able to survive and work on BG3. Luck is not the reason, they’ve worked hard to achieve that…
They have, I’ve been playing their games from their first divine divinity game. But they are still in a lucky situation, privileged from the reality that everyone else has to go through.
They worked hard for decades. They’ve been betrayed and hampered by editors in the past until kick-started. It’s not a lucky situation, they built this luck.
they worked hard, they are in a lucky and privileged situation unlike almost every other company.
Consider an amazing actor or director that you respect. They worked hard, they made amazing things, and they got super lucky. Talent and hard work guarantees nothing.
If the implication is that they should be negotiating better terms. Well, good luck with that. I’ve been a part of many teams involved with investor negotiations. You need their money a hell of a lot more than they need your teams risk.
I don’t say it’s easy. But if you want to make a good creative product you have to be able to keep the creative control, that is part of your job and what makes realization of creative ideas, especially on big scale, more difficult. It’s the same with other creative media like movies.
Spending well over a decade pushing out moderately successful shovelware on consoles before crowdfunding D:OS and its sequel, which provided enough of a portfolio to attract the CCP’s money and allow for the development of BG3.
Depends, some people do other jobs to fund their projects. Some just do low budget stuff. Some are good at negotiating or find funding programs. Sure it’s an effort but people out there are doing it in all kind of ways.
I'm still unreasonably mad that they marketed the first game as a remake - even literally titling it 'FF7 Remake' - and then it turns out it isn't a remake at all, it's some poorly-written Kingdom Hearts nonsense about how bad it is to be restricted to telling the story you're fated to tell and how you need to break free from the shackles of destiny. I can't imagine a bigger "fuck you" to fans of the original game. If they hated the idea of having to remake the original story so much, then they should have just not made it!
It should have been called Reimagination to set expectations for existing fans. FF7 original is probably my favorite game of all time (tie with FF6) and I still did not play Remake (lost interest waiting too long and then asking price on Steam is 80 Euros, fuck you SquareEnix!).
But you know, I am not entirely opposed to changes in story and character handling, if its done well. They even changed up the battle system. To me this is an opportunity to re-live the game, to experience it with new perspective and see details I could not before. If it was exactly the same game with better graphics, that's just playing the same game again. But the Remake... ahem, I meant Reimagination, is different. And you know what, I kinda like this idea. But off course, I still did not play and don't know how bad it is. And oh god, I hope they don't change the important story line in part 2... this would be a huge fuck.
It would have been nice to have a proper Remake but this is not bad per se, though I'm not a fan of how much it's being dragged out, and that Vincent and Cid still won't be playable still.
Oof. You’d think if they wanted to surprise people with twists and turns they’d just make a new game instead of altering the plot of a remake (unless I’m misunderstanding).
There is this exercise you can do for Agile/Lean estimation where you run a multi stage beer store by passing only order quantity notes up and down a chain.
The intent is to trick the participants into a whiplash effect where the retail store has a one off jump and so orders bigger than normal, and the whole supply chain then gets excited and thinks this is the new normal rather than an anomaly.
The exercise ends and the excess beer in the chain is counted.
You are not wrong, but remember that they only employ like 40-50 people. Even if the playerbase goes down to 10% of what it is that’s still not a lot of people.
I’m taking my conversation-level Japanese courses this year and have been looking to land a dev job in Japan. From the sound of it, I’d like working for Pocket Pair a lot. But then again, most companies make their employment sound fantastic…
Haha, yeah, I’m familiar with the work culture in Japan. I’ve heard from other developers currently working there that it’s much better working for newer and/or international companies.
From what I’ve read about their Daily Active Users they’re going to be overstaffed soon. No hate but they exploded and when things settle they might not need as much staff. Thoughts?
You’re good. I’d have thought the same thing had I not been following the development story.
Their game pass numbers also seem to be going up, which is harder to dev for as well. I know my steam friends got sick of it after putting in 100 hours in three weeks though
I too have sunk more then 100 hours into the game. It was worth its purchase already. Yet in a year or however long it takes to be complete… i and many others will jump right back on to see how everything has progressed. Plus they’ll release on play station and that alone will be millions more copies sold.
This is how it happens. If they dont staff to meet the demand the game suffers and dies out, if they do in a few years when the player base falls off and they announce layoffs everyone makes the shocked Pikachu face.
Live service games really did a number on people. Why does it matter if people stop playing Palworld between now and when those new people they hire can produce the things they're hired for?
Yeah I keep thinking this too, it’s a buy once game, they still have the money they made. They’re trying to push more content as quick as possible to get more waves of players, new and old. I’m positive their accountants know the player base isn’t rebuying the game.
There's something called "Brook's Law" that basically observes that a software project which onboards more developers in order to catch up will fall further behind. I hope they're careful about how they allocate new developers or they'll end up doing a year of onboarding, rewriting core code, and have no meaningful updates for 6-12 months. I know they have the resources to spare, and that scenario worked out okay for Valheim, but I hope the game doesn't lose momentum because they overhire or don't allocate enough senior devs to continue feature development while they catch the new devs up to speed.
Edit to add: I don't think it actually matters in this instance if they don't have a large player base by the time the game is feature complete. They don't have continuous revenue streams like a live service game, so hiring more devs is ultimately just about making sure they have enough talent to make good on their early access promises. The company could probably dissolve tomorrow and all the staff could live the rest of their lives in luxury never working again. It'd be a dick move, but they already sold an insane number of copies.
They don’t have continuous revenue streams like a live service
Yet. The game seems extremely easy to monetize, up to them how evil they go. To be successful longterm (if thats something they even want) they will need to add more content first but they could cash in in so many ways. Dlc, selling servers, cosmetics or more nefarious stuff lkke boosters to speed up mechanics, pals that take huge grinds without payments. It would be very easy to do.
That was me! I figured that I succeeded by getting to 3bc. I played 3bc for a long time and realized that after a while that I was at my level. I guess I didn’t have the will to grind the skills needed to go further. Many great memories and I’m so glad I played it. Been seriously the best game I played in years.
6 months from now: “We didn’t sell it, we granted them a non revocable permanent license to be the exclusive producers of D&D content, but we still receive a royalty fee and have no control over it”
Can’t vouch for performance or technical stuff on PC, but I was checking out Lost Judgment on PS+ after hearing a lot about the Yakuza series and I’m loving it. It’s kinda like Shenmue, but with real, good combat and not QTEs. Or a Japanese GTA with all the extra side stuff you can do as you wander around the neighborhoods the game takes place in. I definitely want to check out the others in the series now.
Infinite looks just as good, but I am probably going to go backwards because I am not sure if I would like the new turn based combat system. I like the more Sifu-ish combat.
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