Tencent has Invested in Grinding Gear Games

you sold out , fuk the money and fuk this bullshit , yall fukd us over, fuk this shit

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Sabranic_SilverDeth wrote:

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mtilhan wrote:

If this would be the case, I hope Chris and others offer to sell their shares and threaten the leave the company.

1) Since S. Jobs was fired from Apple and Apple sucked afterwards, investors do not want to fire founders if possible.
2) I think Chris did became face of POE, and if they left and start over with a new IP (ARPG), they can get enough playerbase to themselves as "from the developers of POE" line.

I hope it plays out that way. I really do.

My experience in the video game software industry has been the larger corp forcing changes that irked the fans, and then you have a small exodus. Income starts declining, and the larger corp then meddles more, blaming the drop-off on the original developer. This just feeds the flight, and starts a loop of more interference and more players quitting, until the game is eventually shuttered.

I wish I had not seen it happen so many times. A lucky few games manage to survive when their fans buy out the empty husk, like Broadsword did with DAoC.

Most just vanish forever however.

I know what you mean but there are a few circumstances differ here I think.

In the past, people did not know about developers that much, it was the company you faced. Also the Chris is close to playerbase is also nowaday thing. Even now you do not know much about developers in a lot of games if you are particularly researching about them. Now, we see Chris a lot, we see him talking with a lot of streamers. Hell, if GGG screws up something they can blame Tencent and no one will even question them. Power of playerbase belongs to the developers in this case, in my opinion.

Also, I keep reading this announcement but as far as I understand this move from Tencent can have two main reasons;

1) There will be a phone version, I think this will be aimed for East-Asia region. P2W probably.

2) It seems like with this move POE will be split to two. Chinese and International versions. Tencent probably do hard marketing at Chinese market and Chinese version may have a lot of P2W features.

Possible problem? People will stop buying support packs with this, and leave Tencent, GGG may thing more monetizing because of this.

For all those feel "betrayed". Well, sorry if you invested 1 day GGG invested 10 days to this game. It is their every right to want more money, and until we see a P2W, I don't think accusing them will do any good. Personally, I am in the favor of "innocent until proven guilty".

Is it to late to get a refund?

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Travesty9090 wrote:

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ComfyGangsta wrote:

This definitely will impact my willingness to spend large amounts of money on supporter packs. Before I felt like I was supporting an independent studio and their drive. Now, it would feel like I'm supporting a corporate company with more than enough funds to drive development without large amounts of money from the fanbase.

Which is very unfortunate. Since should I feel this way, I wonder if others are, and if too many people are, they will want change, since the revenue will be impacted. If the metric that the founders have to report to the board changes they will suggest (heavily handed suggest) changes be made to rectify the situation.

If this is the case, we will see changes in about two-four quarters.

Bingo. You can already see the serious backlash to buying supporter packs in these comments and on reddit.

Hahaha. There have been MANY different times over the years when people freaked out worse than this and said they wouldn't buy packs anymore, this is tame compared to some of them.

My question is, if they really just wanted to help make PoE "as good as it can be", why on earth did they need to acquire a majority stake? While I do not live in China, I am ethnically chinese and live in a country within China's economic sphere of influence, and nobody who has any idea of China's corporate and business history trusts China or Chinese companies to keep their word. As bad as American corporatism is, China has even less of an ethical culture aside from making money, and I have no problem believing that far from being the best fit for GGG, Tencent was simply the best liar.

I came over to PoE from D3 earlier this year, and it was a breath of fresh air. It's a bit disappointing to see that all the things that made PoE different from Blizzard and EA are at risk of being erased by the corporate greed of a company that GGG might have unwittingly sold themselves to. While I don't know whether this is common or practicable in the industry, I wish the community had been consulted before the acquisition had taken place, because at least from the FAQ, it really seems to a lot of people that GGG might have been a little naive in believing that a Chinese company would genuinely allow a gem like PoE to remain untouched by their dirty little money-grabbing hands.

I will now buy supporter packs to support the immortal dialectic of marxism-leninism-maoism and the international proletarian revolution!
But seriously though, even if Tencent don't directly interfere into the development of the game, they can still do so indirectly. What can you do if they ask for a better return of investment than can be achieved with the current F2P model? I'm not an expert on corporate structures, but it seems clear that Tencent will be focused mostly on profit, specifically maximizing it at all costs. Making a product, or offering a service, which people like and buy is not necessarily the best way to make money, e.g. look at what happened to Toys'R'Us. Every major corporation would sell their employees' organs if they stood to make money from it; lying to game devs isn't below them.

So ends the addition to my badge collection.

As others have stated, congratulations, I hope the Chinese money is worth selling out the integrity of your vision, and what we as supporters believed in.

I supported this game because it was a small indy company making an amazing game I loved. That support ends from me this day.

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Telzen wrote:

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Travesty9090 wrote:

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ComfyGangsta wrote:

This definitely will impact my willingness to spend large amounts of money on supporter packs. Before I felt like I was supporting an independent studio and their drive. Now, it would feel like I'm supporting a corporate company with more than enough funds to drive development without large amounts of money from the fanbase.

Which is very unfortunate. Since should I feel this way, I wonder if others are, and if too many people are, they will want change, since the revenue will be impacted. If the metric that the founders have to report to the board changes they will suggest (heavily handed suggest) changes be made to rectify the situation.

If this is the case, we will see changes in about two-four quarters.

Bingo. You can already see the serious backlash to buying supporter packs in these comments and on reddit.

Hahaha. There have been MANY different times over the years when people freaked out worse than this and said they wouldn't buy packs anymore, this is tame compared to some of them.

Those were typically design decisions. Not who owns the company. Just sliiightly different there.

I think this is a great business move for you guys, but I don't agree with it. I don't think it will be healthy for the game or your vision of it, long term. Once you lose independence, it's over. You're eventually going to get pawned off to somebody who doesn't care about you and just the bottom line.

Thanks GGG for countless hours of fun but this is were i draw the line.
Good luck in your future endeavors.