Wake Up Interactive is the parent company of Tokyo Soleil, which isNintendoSwitch game console developed the well-known game “Ninjala” and helped produce “Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes” (Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes).
Analysts said that for Tencent, the almost complete acquisition of Wake Up Interactive is also extraordinary. Previously, Tencent had only made small-scale investments in the Japanese market, the main purpose of which was to ensure the international copyright of future games.
People familiar with the matter said that Tencent acquired Wake Up Interactive in September this year, which is also one of several deals that Tencent has reached with Japanese privately held game developers this year. Soleil thinks that game consoles, PCs and smartscell phoneKnown for developing high-quality action games, this is part of the reason Tencent approached them.
In response, representatives of Tencent and Wake Up Interactive did not immediately respond to reporters’ requests for comment.
In the past two years, Tencent and NetEase have actively recruited new talents in Japan, hoping to obtain valuable intellectual property rights in the fields of animation and video games, while reducing their reliance on domestic businesses.
Japanese publishing house giant Kadokawa said last month that Tencent plans to spend about 30 billion yen to acquire a 6.86% stake in it. The Japanese game developer Grasshopper Manufacture has become a subsidiary of NetEase. Grasshopper Manufacture was established in 1998, and its representative works include “Seven Killers” and “No More Heroes”.
In addition to several publicly announced transactions, Tencent and NetEase have also acquired or invested in many smaller Japanese game developers in the hope that they can make a sensational game. In most cases, these transactions are kept secret from the public.
Serkan Toto, a gaming consultant based in Tokyo, said: “Tencent believes that there is no benefit in announcing these transactions because it does not want to alert competitors or let them understand its strategy.”