It's a question and concern we've seen emerging in our communities, so I'll try to provide some answers.
Tencent has acquired 5% of Paradox when the company went public with our IPO mid-2016, there is an AMA that Fred Wester, CEO at the time and our Chairman of the Board ran on this very forum at the time: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...f-paradox-interactive-ask-me-anything.938117/. To the best of my knowledge, the answers shared there as still valid.
Tencent never got involved in Paradox's operational or design decisions and have shown no interest in doing so since then. They have a minority shareholding, so even if they wanted to do so, they wouldn't have much influence to be honest. For an overview of PDX ownership structure, you can check here https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/en/ownership-structure/. We're generally very happy with our partnership with Tencent, they've introduced us to a couple of partners in China who helped us get a better understanding and grasp of that market (Douyu for streaming for example). We also distribute some of our games on their platform (Cities Skylines at the moment, iirc). It's no surprise that China as a whole is a interesting growth market for us, we've localized recently games like Stellaris and Imperator into simplified Chinese for example, and obviously the help we can get to be better at opening our games to a Chinese speaking audience is interesting for us.
From my very personal perspective, having worked in another western video game company with similar Tencent ownership, that's as far as I know pretty much the usual way they operate as a shareholder. They have a reputation of being quite hands-off with companies they have investments in; and it's fairly common for Chinese companies to take minor ownership in other companies they want to work with as partners, so nothing really surprising here. But well, once again, my own personal experience and opinion on this, I'm in no place to make statements for other companies, obviously!
Concerning the question of censorship on the content of our games, which is the hot topic there. We don't believe that changing our games to suit the social or political preferences of specific markets is generally a good call. As pointed earlier in this thread, some of our games (HOI4 for example) are banned for sale in China, and we haven't attempted to make changes to the game, or to create a specific version for that market; and it's not our intention to do so. It's partly because we don't want to tamper with the historical accuracy of our games, but also just because it doesn't reflect our values as a company, and the convictions and believes of our game team(s). We do sometimes make some adaptions, HOI4 has a version specific to the German market, for example, to respect local laws on the display of iconography tied to nazism. It's in that case because we feel it's an acceptable compromise that doesn't go against our values to make the game available for the german audience.
Regarding censorship more generally, on this forum or our other social media platforms, we stand for inclusion, equality and open and reasoned discussion with our community, on the various topics we have set in our games (or related to Paradox as a whole). So, we're always happy to hear your feedback, concerns, and answer questions as long as you remain in those boundaries and we stick to a respectful and polite environment, as pointed by TinyWiking in the quote above.
Happy to try and answer your questions, but that's pretty much what I can tell you about that, in truth because there isn't really much else to share on that topic... On a personal note, I hope it doesn't sound like a tricky statement to you, and you don't read too much into it, or worst, just assume I'm straight-up lying to cover some big evil conspiracy ^^'
Tencent has acquired 5% of Paradox when the company went public with our IPO mid-2016, there is an AMA that Fred Wester, CEO at the time and our Chairman of the Board ran on this very forum at the time: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...f-paradox-interactive-ask-me-anything.938117/. To the best of my knowledge, the answers shared there as still valid.
Tencent never got involved in Paradox's operational or design decisions and have shown no interest in doing so since then. They have a minority shareholding, so even if they wanted to do so, they wouldn't have much influence to be honest. For an overview of PDX ownership structure, you can check here https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/en/ownership-structure/. We're generally very happy with our partnership with Tencent, they've introduced us to a couple of partners in China who helped us get a better understanding and grasp of that market (Douyu for streaming for example). We also distribute some of our games on their platform (Cities Skylines at the moment, iirc). It's no surprise that China as a whole is a interesting growth market for us, we've localized recently games like Stellaris and Imperator into simplified Chinese for example, and obviously the help we can get to be better at opening our games to a Chinese speaking audience is interesting for us.
From my very personal perspective, having worked in another western video game company with similar Tencent ownership, that's as far as I know pretty much the usual way they operate as a shareholder. They have a reputation of being quite hands-off with companies they have investments in; and it's fairly common for Chinese companies to take minor ownership in other companies they want to work with as partners, so nothing really surprising here. But well, once again, my own personal experience and opinion on this, I'm in no place to make statements for other companies, obviously!
Concerning the question of censorship on the content of our games, which is the hot topic there. We don't believe that changing our games to suit the social or political preferences of specific markets is generally a good call. As pointed earlier in this thread, some of our games (HOI4 for example) are banned for sale in China, and we haven't attempted to make changes to the game, or to create a specific version for that market; and it's not our intention to do so. It's partly because we don't want to tamper with the historical accuracy of our games, but also just because it doesn't reflect our values as a company, and the convictions and believes of our game team(s). We do sometimes make some adaptions, HOI4 has a version specific to the German market, for example, to respect local laws on the display of iconography tied to nazism. It's in that case because we feel it's an acceptable compromise that doesn't go against our values to make the game available for the german audience.
Regarding censorship more generally, on this forum or our other social media platforms, we stand for inclusion, equality and open and reasoned discussion with our community, on the various topics we have set in our games (or related to Paradox as a whole). So, we're always happy to hear your feedback, concerns, and answer questions as long as you remain in those boundaries and we stick to a respectful and polite environment, as pointed by TinyWiking in the quote above.
Happy to try and answer your questions, but that's pretty much what I can tell you about that, in truth because there isn't really much else to share on that topic... On a personal note, I hope it doesn't sound like a tricky statement to you, and you don't read too much into it, or worst, just assume I'm straight-up lying to cover some big evil conspiracy ^^'
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