Tencent is to focus on fewer big budget games as it signals a shift away from its IP licensing strategy that has seen it work on titles like PUBG Mobile and the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Jade.
As reported by Reuters, the publisher has shifted hundreds of staff away from its Assassin’s Creed Jade team to focus on DreamStar – its own internal IP designed to compete with NetEase’s user-generated content-powered party game Eggy Party.
Sources said that workers have been moving from the mobile Assassin’s Creed project to DreamStar since “late last year”, and that the move is likely to delay Assassin’s Creed Jade into 2025.
Reuters also claimed that Tencent is also looking to change its approach to IP partnership deals, aiming to get royalties owed to below 10%, instead of up to 20% that it currently pays.
Smash hit?
This move from the gritty, realistic Assassin’s Creed franchise to the colourful, bombastic DreamStar is the latest evidence of the Chinese conglomerate’s determination to make its party game a hit – even having parked its rivalry with ByteDance last December for this cause.
Eggy Party has proven to be a massive hit for NetEase, smashing its way to 500 million players in less than two years and surpassing 40 million daily players during the Lunar New Year.
The title helped drive NetEase’s game revenues up by 9.4% in 2023 to $11.5 billion and has clearly been enjoying the party game pie Tencent wants a slice of.
DreamStar launched in December 2023 as Tencent’s answer to Eggy Party, full of cute characters and obstacle courses in easy-to-grasp casual gameplay scenarios.
But moving its workers away from the Assassin’s Creed project with France’s Ubisoft, and focusing instead on the internal DreamStar project, suggests a change of strategy.
Of course, if Tencent does make a similar hit out of DreamStar as NetEase has of Eggy Party, the developer would get to keep all the profits – unlike its shared venture with Ubisoft. The move back to an internal focus is also in line with Tencent chief strategy officer James Mitchell’s recent company earnings statement.
“We’re focusing on fewer bigger budget games,” said Mitchell. “Typically, we’re seeking to make the biggest bets around games that either iterate on a successful IP … or games that are iterating around proven gameplay success within a niche and taking those to a more mass market.”
