Tencent expands Venture Lab initiative to better support early-stage developers worldwide

“A lot of the biggest successes start with a small studio,” says team lead Juno Shin

Image credit: Tencent

Tencent, the world’s largest games company, is expanding its efforts to support early-stage developers through its Venture Lab initiative.

The business unit helps new studios deliver their first game by providing investment, publishing and marketing support, consulting, access to tech, business planning and budgeting and more.

The team is led by Juno Shin, who has been working on business development and investment within Tencent for 12 years. Shin has been gathering a team of industry experts, with around 20 working at Venture Lab so far, to help expand the operation’s services.

Venture Lab has already offered support to Last Epoch by remote indie studio Eleventh Hour Games and Enshrouded by German developer Keen, which recently passed three million players seven months after launch.

With these projects thriving, Shin tells GamesIndustry.biz that “now is the right time to make [Venture Lab] more official and a more public offering we can be proud of.”

Crucially, it’s a chance to use the experience of his team to help early-stage studios avoid the pitfalls many startups stumble into.

“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?” he tells us as we meet at Gamescom in Cologne.

“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 maximize the success rate of their first game.”

Venture Lab is the latest initiative Tencent has invested in that aims to assist third-party developers, following the launch of its Level Infinite publishing label a few years ago.

Shin observes that, since every business grows step by step, Venture Lab focuses on those crucial first steps.

“Success rate [for debut games] is not high, but that’s why we take a great pride in helping devs cross a chasm from zero to one,” he explains. “After that, once you make a success, then it is time to scale up from one to ten, one to 100.

“Within Tencent Games, there’s Level Infinite, which helps more on the bigger budget games on publishing and helping them to further grow the game to the massive scale. So that’s how we work with each other within Tencent Games ecosystem.”

Tencent is the largest and one of the highest earning companies in the games industry, thanks not only to its internally-developed titles such as the smash hit mobile game Honor of Kings, but also its ownership of Sumo Group, Funcom, and League of Legends studio Riot Games — plus varying stakes in Techland, Yager, Supercell, Miniclip, Epic Games, Don’t Nod, From Software, Krafton, Ubisoft, Frontier Developments, Paradox Interactive, Roblox and Platinum Games (to name but a few).

Given the size of the company’s games operations, we ask if Tencent has a responsibility to support early-stage studios and indies in order to help foster a healthier global games ecosystem. Shin notes that, while Tencent is in a position to help the industry at large, it does ultimately reap benefits from these efforts.

“We’re not a philanthropic company, right?” he laughs. “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 [behind those games] are small, maybe 13 or 14 people. But they are the ones who are really try 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.”