Tencent’s takeover of Techland apparently cost $1.6 billion USD

A steep price for a single studio

Marco Wutz | Jan 10, 2024

Tencent’s takeover of Techland apparently cost $1.6 billion USD /

In July 2023, Chinese gaming giant Tencent acquired a majority stake in Techland, the Polish developer behind the Dying Light series, at an undisclosed price. According to new numbers from Poland, the transaction is estimated to have cost Tencent around $1.6 billion USD. Last year, this was the biggest acquisition in the entire country.

Techland has at least 400 employees with offices in Warsaw and Wrocław, but this seems like it’s quite a steep price for a single studio regardless of its impressive size, especially since the company’s output hasn’t been the greatest in the last couple of years.

The player paraglides over a city, following another paraglider, in Dying Light 2. — A screenshot from Dying Light 2, Techland's latest release / Techland

A price of $1.6 billion USD would make the Techland takeover the 14th-largest acquisition in the games industry ahead of Tencent’s 2020 takeover of Leyou and the Bandai Namco merger from 2005. Naturally, Microsoft is leading this particular ranking with its 2023 Activision Blizzard deal worth over $68 billion USD.

Techland’s latest release is the survival horror RPG Dying Light 2 from 2022, a sequel to 2015’s Dying Light. Further in the past, the developer created Wild West FPS game Call of Juarez and the zombie survival game Dead Island.

It is continuing to work post-launch support and content for Dying Light 2 as well as an untitled open-world fantasy RPG, which is going to be Techland’s first new IP in almost a decade.

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Published Jan 10, 2024

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg