Tencent is scaling up the efforts of its Venture Lab initiative, a section of the company that operates in parallel to its Level Infinite programme, with Venture Lab helping small startups and Level Infinite aiding already established companies.
Venture Lab, run by Tencent’s Juno Shin, is comprised of around 20 industry experts who assist developers with support in investment, publishing, marketing, and many other business-focused aspects of running a startup.
Speaking at Gamescom, Shin said: “Now is the right time to make Venture Lab more official and a more public offering we can be proud of.
“After working with hundreds of studios, you sometimes enjoy the success and, unfortunately, more often you share the pain of failures – but that’s the nature of the business, right?
“There are so many common mistakes studios make, especially the early stage studios because no one is born as a CEO. These people are just inherently positively minded, optimistic creators, but they are not necessarily very seasoned managers or know about setting up a bank account, payroll and technology issues, and talking to publishers and platforms.
“Our job is to really help reduce the risks of making the same mistakes, and show how to maximise the success rate of their first game.”
Of course, Shin noted, Tencent is a business – it certainly hasn’t become the world’s largest games company by being generous, it’s done it by making smart business decisions. Shin firmly believes that the expansion of the Venture Lab initiative is one of these.
He said: “We’re not a philanthropic company, right? We do it for a reason.
“All the innovations eventually happen from small studios or making new stuff. Rust, No Man’s Sky, and so on – all the studios are small, maybe 13 or 14 people. But they are the ones who are really trying to innovate a new game genre because they have nothing to lose and they have nothing in the first place.
“So how do you maximize the creative freedom? The only way to do that is to start a new studio, a new project, and take the maximum risk. Because otherwise if you become a big company like Tencent, you have to care about profitability and sustainability.
“A lot of the big successes we now enjoy started from very small studios. Riot Games, for example, but even Enshrouded, Last Epoch, and Black Myth: Wukong. We do believe that betting on and helping the early stage studios to succeed is in our best interest, so we can co-create these successes together and enjoy not only the creative breakthrough, but also financial breakthrough.
“We’re doing it for our best interests at the same time, so we win, but they also win, and consumers win because there is a new game innovation from a new studio, rather than sequel after sequel”(thanks, GamesIndustryBiz).