Tencent Has Now Become Marvelous’ Largest Shareholder

Tencent has just become Marvelous Inc.’s largest shareholder. The company recently bought 20% of the Japanese developer’s stock, allowing Marvelous to further invest development into their own IPs. The developer has already made plans to use this money to bolster existing franchises such as Daemon X Machina and the Story of Seasons series. [Thanks, Bloomberg and Famitsu!]

As reported by Bloomberg, Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute, said “Tencent’s reason for the investment is probably to learn how to make console games from Japanese companies, one of the last frontiers for the Chinese tech company’s game business,” in response to Tencent’s investment into Marvelous. With this new development fans of Marvelous properties outside of Japan could see more Western releases of domestically popular titles.

Marvelous also mentioned in their recent statement that their reason for this partnership was so they could invest in more games. In addition to this they said that this would allow them to “launch new initiatives and expand globally.” Marvelous currently has plans to release both new and existing game franchises within the next three years with the money from this investment.

Earlier this year, Platinum Games announced their partnership with Tencent. Their reason for partnering with the company was to help with self-publishing their games.