Path of Exile is one of the dominant action role playing games in the market at the moment. Thanks to the developer Grinding Gear Games’ no pay-to-win monetisation policy and regular content updates, the 5 year old F2P game boasts a playerbase of more than 15-20k players on an average basis.
Today they have announced that Chinese publisher and all-round mega-company Tencent has acquired a majority stake in Grinding Gear Games. Grinding Gear Games said this in their forum post;
“We have been approached by many potential acquirers over the last five years, but always felt that they didn’t understand Path of Exile, or that they had other agendas (like signing users up to their services). Tencent’s agenda is clear: to give us the resources to make Path of Exile as good as it can be.”
GGG also said that there will be any change to the monetisation policy. Tencent may request changes to the Chinese version and GGG says that if any of these changes are a good fit for the international servers they may get rolled out.
When asked what’s next for the studio, CEO Chris Wilson said,
“A lot more Path of Exile! We are committed to our current schedule of four releases per year, and we have some really big plans for future expansions. If you like what we’ve done so far, you’ll love what we’re working on next. As well as multiple 3.x expansions in 2018 and 2019, we’ve just started development of 4.0.0, which is currently targeted to enter Beta testing in early 2020.”