Billion-dollar Chinese Internet firm Tencent bought a majority stake in Riot Games back in February 2011, and now it has closed out the deal by fully acquiring the games firm behind hit title ‘League of Legends’.
That’s according to a post from Riot Games — hat tip to Polygon for spotting — which disclosed a change to its equity and employee rewards structure after “our majority investor, Tencent, recently purchased the remaining equity of Riot Games.”
We contacted Tencent for further details, but did not hear back.
Update: Tencent confirmed the deal in a short statement to TechCrunch:
We confirmed that we recently purchased the remaining equity of Riot. We owned around 93 percent of Riot prior to this recent purchase.
Tencent is believed to have bought its majority stake for “more than $350 million” according to a Wall Street Journal report written at the time. Since then, it has steadily increased its ownership in the games company. The value of its latest transaction was not disclosed, however.
One of the few Chinese companies to be globally-minded in terms of its business and acquisitions, Tencent’s other gaming deals include investments in Activision Blizzard, Korea’s 4:33 Creative Lab, Glu Mobile, and Epic Games. Gaming is a core part of the company’s revenue, via its hugely popular QQ desktop messaging service and WeChat, China’s most popular mobile chat app with over 500 million users.
