Chinese Internet giant Tencent made a strategic investment of GBP17.7 million, which is about CNY156.3 million, into the UK game developer Frontier Developments.
Tencent purchased 3.39 million newly issued common shares of Frontier at the price of 523.2 pence per share. With this investment, Tencent will gain a 9% stake in Frontier after the new share issuance, making it the second largest shareholder of Frontier following its major shareholder and chief executive officer David Baraben.
Tencent said that they value the channel and technology abilities of Frontier and it will lay a foundation for the overseas expansion of Tencent's games such as "King of Glory". Meanwhile, Tencent said Chinese users are interested in space exploration and business simulation games, which Frontier is good at developing.
Frontier believes that by cooperating with Tencent, the company can better explore the Chinese market, which will accelerate the growth of Frontier.
During the first quarter of 2017, King of Glory had over 200 million registered users and over 80 million daily active users. It brought over CNY12 billion revenue to Tencent with a monthly average revenue of CNY4 billion.
So far, the overseas edition of King of Glory has gained related authorizations from Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment and it is ready to be released in America and Western Europe in September 2017 at the earliest.