Tencent to get a majority stake in Dying Light dev Techland

I'm not allowed to openly express my feelings regarding this topic, so I'll censor myself and will say; blimey! Not good :(


Last edited by Arehandoro on 25 July 2023 at 10:54 am UTC

This is one of the big problems with globalism. No longer do megacorps stop at national borders. No longer does corporate interest and influence stop at national borders. Thanks to globalism, we are marching toward gigantic multinational corporations controlling everything we consume, and eventually, even more than that. Look at how Microsoft steamrolled all the objections to its merger with ease. Money buys influence, and influence buys power. These corporations are only going to consolidate their power further, the more we shift to globalism.

[quote=Lofty]What we need is more opensource games, crowd funded or via donations using powerful modern FOSS game Engine

Games are not all about graphics, look at battlebit remastered for instance.

It's a fun game but you can get away with those graphics on a indy game.priced at 14.99 that's great and fair price.

The problem with Indies is the reality is they want the resources to make more games. Ninja went to Microsoft first chance they got so did double fine as did arkane and so on. Hell bungie went independent then we t back to being publisher owned. The battle bit guys I understand have been approached by various publishers

Quoting: Whitewolfe80It's a fun game but you can get away with those graphics on a indy game.priced at 14.99 that's great and fair price.
The problem with Indies is the reality is they want the resources to make more games. Ninja went to Microsoft first chance they got so did double fine as did arkane and so on. Hell bungie went independent then we t back to being publisher owned. The battle bit guys I understand have been approached by various publishers

My battlebit example was referencing the simple graphics.The game is not free, it's not FOSS, it has anti-cheat / DRM and afaik even the microphone audio is monitored in real time to auto ban players if they cross the lines laid out by the company. But it was made by just 4 people in their spare time and on the lower tier unity contract. It took 7 years.. so do many FOSS game engines and they keep improving, just like openmorrowing (yes i know the base game is not free)


Which is why i said we need crowdfunded, opensource titles on opensource game engines. Not indie, no studios involved, but pure FOSS. Nobody owns it, it cannot even be sold. It's a solid community game with modding / fork potential that was given a big pile of cash to share between developers or based on a patreon style donation model to keep the funds flowing..

The second you monetize a product and have publishers involved is the same second you start the egg timer counting down to its eventual gobbling up by a larger fish (if the game/ studio is successful that is)


Last edited by Lofty on 25 July 2023 at 2:54 pm UTC

Quoting: LanzThis is one of the big problems with globalism. No longer do megacorps stop at national borders. No longer does corporate interest and influence stop at national borders. Thanks to globalism, we are marching toward gigantic multinational corporations controlling everything we consume, and eventually, even more than that. Look at how Microsoft steamrolled all the objections to its merger with ease. Money buys influence, and influence buys power. These corporations are only going to consolidate their power further, the more we shift to globalism.

The problem is that the term 'globalism' has been politicized and even racialized. Almost certainly astroturfed online by the same corporations to cow people into not being able to question why McDonald's(™) now owns their entire street, and now you have to use Google to sign into "your" home.. as long as you think the right way of course .. or you will be forced to sleep outdoors in the electric car you don't own either .. so papa Musk can watch you awkwardly sleep to relaxing music that you don't own on your expiring youtube music subscription.

you could complain to the government that's been globalized too. /S

Obviously i am being satirical with the above..

Quoting: Lofty[…]McDonald's(™) now owns their entire street, and now you have to use Google to sign into "your" home.. as long as you think the right way of course .. or you will be forced to sleep outdoors in the electric car you don't own either .. so papa Musk can watch you awkwardly sleep to relaxing music that you don't own on your expiring youtube music subscription.

you could complain to the government that's been globalized too. /S

Obviously i am being satirical with the above..

Are you sure that you aren’t just predicting the future?

Quoting: Guesthow exactly is Tencent "shady"? They are one of the most hands off publishers on the market. If anything, thats a boon for techland

The fact that they interfere so little is part of the 'shady' bit, even if it seems like a better approach than what EA and others are doing. But if a company (seemingly) only throws money somewhere without any obvious motivation and action behind it, one starts to wonder what those motivations might be. Best case: they are the only company that is fine with a positive ROI instead of being greedy and striving to squeeze out every last bit of (im)possible growth. But it's hard to believe such a company exists...

Dying Light 2 was certainly not as good as it could have been, it did receive a fair bit of creative cuts over its development phase. No doubt mods will be restoring that game to original vision for a while to come.

Not so sure they should make any more zombie games since the world is being saturated with ZOMBIE games again... hope they move on to something else.


Last edited by TheRiddick on 26 July 2023 at 6:53 pm UTC

I already thought this was bad news but when I looked at the list of other studios this happened to I realized that I have steadily liked the games from these studios less and less. Not a good sign at all. One more reason to support FOSS games in my opinion.

It might have no effect on Techland and actually help them, or it will make their products/decisions more "corporate". - Even though I was fairly excited about 'Dying Light 2', and definitely approve of their long-term support for the first game, which they could've stopped working on as soon as the first year and moved on (but actually kept at it for a decade, which is kinda nuts), I found this second game to be a bit... "too triple-A"?...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not some kind of hipster that needs everything to be "indie" or "double-A" or open-source, even though I'm here. But the first game had that good balance of it being kind of high-production, but not too much and just being a solid game in general. - The new one is trying to be higher-production, which is just logical for a studio/company to strive for, and not bad for the product, but it feels like it's MORE for the business-appeal than the game.
And so it shows, now that they caught the attention of a titan like Tencent. They've "made it". - But at what cost?... We'll see. - Their next game will probably be like a decade away as well, as they will probably stick to "DL2" for years to come. But considering now there is a bigger investor in the picture, who knows what will be shoehorned into that game. - I wouldn't be surprised if some controversial decisions will be made down the line, and we'll hear of it...