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Tencent Acquires Soleil, Valhalla Game Studios' Parent Company

Business news website Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Chinese internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings has acquired a 90% controlling stake in Wake Up Interactive, the parent company of Japanese developers Soleil and Valhalla Game Studios. The purchase took place in September.

Soleil developed games such as Ninjala, Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, and Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker, and also assisted on the development of Grasshopper Manufacture's Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes. It is currently developing the Wanted: Dead game.

Valhalla Game Studios developed Devil's Third. Tomonobu Itagaki (Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden) founded the studio in 2009 after leaving Koei Tecmo Games in 2008, but resigned as the company's Representative Director and Chief Technical Officer in 2017. Soleil was previously a subsidiary of Valhalla Game Studios.

Most recently, Tencent announced in October that it will acquire a 6.86% stake in Japanese publisher Kadokawa.

Tencent invested 65.7 billion yen (about US$567 million) into retail company Rakuten in March.

Tencent, through its Hong Kong-based Image Frame Investment subsidiary, acquired 8.6 million of shares in Marvelous, along with 708,600 of primary shareholder Hayao Nakayama's shares and 2.83 million of Amuse Capital's shares, in May 2020.

Platinum Games announced in January 2020 that it has received a capital tie-up with Tencent. Square Enix and Tencent announced in August 2018 that they had agreed to form a strategic partnership. The companies are establishing joint ventures, jointly developing AAA titles based on new IP, and licensing existing IP to expand content services both in the Chinese market and globally.

Source: Bloomberg (Takashi Mochizuki, Zheping Huang) via Siliconera