Chinese video game giant Tencent acquired Sumo Group earlier in July this year for £919 million ($1.27 billion). It currently holds an 8.75% stake in the company whose subsidiary, Sumo Digital has developed games like Sackboy: A Big Adventure, Hood Outlaws & Legends, Crackdown 3, and Team Sonic Racing. However, the acquisition is now being investigated by a U.S. national security panel.
According to a Reuters report, "Tencent had agreed to offer undertakings to gain approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which assesses deals to ensure they do not hurt national security."
The report also claims that the committee has tightened its scrutiny of Chinese deals since the Trump administration and is also currently investigating the U.S. sale of TikTok. The two parties are reportedly in talks with the CFIUS in order to clear the acquisition before the end of the year.
The spree of video game studio acquisitions has shown no signs of slowing down. Most recently, Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red acquired The Molasses Flood, the developer behind popular survival and base-building games like Drake Hollow and The Flame in the Flood. Tencent's biggest Chinese rival, NetEase, acquired No More Heroes developer, Grasshopper Manufacture, and is already aiming to bring "three even higher-quality "Grasshopper Manufacture Games" to all gamers in the next ten years".
In late September, PlayStation announced the acquisition of Bluepoint Games, the developer behind theDemon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes. While this could mean that a lot more remakes are on the cards for classic PlayStation games, Bluepoint Games president, Marco Thrush did say, "We have that original game development mindset in our hearts, [...] that’s the next step in the evolution for us."
To add to that, Xbox's Phil Spencer noted that the company is not done with its acquisitions and is always on the lookout for new partners. “We’re always out there looking for people who we think would be a good match and teams that would be a good match with our strategy... we're definitely not done. There’s no quota. There’s no kind of timeline where I have to go acquire studios by a certain time.”