Tencent Reportedly Looking to Invest Nearly $500 Million in PUBG Dev Bluehole
Fortnite and PUBG are continually vying for views, that’s for sure — but it looks like Chinese tech giant Tencent might be soon making a bid to beef up PUBG even further. According to The Korea Herald, the company is interested in potentially buying a 10 percent stake in Bluehole, which amounts to a whopping 500 billion won, which translates to $468 million. Yes, you read that right. It’s a disgusting amount of money, but that’s the kind of cash Tencent is dealing with.
It isn’t new that Tencent would own a portion of the studio, since the company already owns about 1.5% of Bluehole to begin with, but this would increase its stake to around 11.5%, with room to grow from there. This would essentially make Tencent the second-largest Bluehole shareholder by far, only behind the company founder and chairman Chang Byung-gyu at 20.6%. Bluehole is actively looking for investors, and this could be the push the company needs to make PUBG an even bigger hit than it already is.
PUBG is already on mobile devices, and it’s available in China, so it naturally has a few more hurdles to cross with those two developments, and its Xbox One version still needs some work before it can get on par with the PC version. But it’s clear that Tencent has huge plans for its breadwinner (or winner winner, chicken dinner perhaps) before it leave well enough alone.
Eventually, Tencent is probably going to own the world, you know, so this is one stepping stone toward owning the universe, apparently. We’ll see what happens to PUBG as the company’s stake increases — can we get a third map, pretty please? Miramar’s only going to go so far before people lose interest, after all.