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