Chinese giant Tencent purchases majority stake in Path of Exile developer

Grinding Gear Games, the Path of Exile developer based in New Zealand has just announced that the huge Chinese publisher Tencent (Moonlight Blade, Fortnite China and so many more games, including Path of Exile in Chinese territory) has acquired a majority stake in the studio.

What does this mean? Is Grinding Gear Games not independent anymore? Will Path of Exile wither and die a horrible death at the hands of a mega-corporation? Well, we can't be too sure about the latter, but we know the answer to the former, as the studio has created a FAQ on Reddit detailing the situation:

“Grinding Gear Games is still an independently-run company in New Zealand. All of its developers still work for Grinding Gear Games and have not become Tencent employees. The founders (Chris, Jonathan and Erik) are still running the company, just like we have been for the last 11 years. Going forward, we will have financial reporting obligations to Tencent but this will have minimal impact on our philosophy and operations.”

The million dollar question is, of course, if Path of Exile will become pay-to-win (as if anyone ever would admit that). Grinding Gear Games, once again, wants players to remain calm about this:

“No. We will not make any changes to its monetisation on our international servers.”

Alright then. What else? Tencent won't try to interfere with Path of Exile's international servers, the Chinese version won't take any priority over the original version, and nothing will change in the way that players have access/log into the international servers.

Grinding Gear Games ends the statement by saying that they have a lot of plans for Path of Exile, with the current schedule of four releases per year and multiple 3.x expansions in 2018 and 2019, having just started development in 4.0.0, with a beta test planned for early 2020.

Good news or bad news for Path of Exile? Let us know what you make of this.