Elden Ring mobile game reportedly in development at Tencent
Tencent, the Chinese games industry titan, is working on an Elden Ring gacha game for mobile devices, according to Reuters. Sources familiar with the matter that spoke to the news agency specifically mentioned that Tencent was looking for an answer to HoYoverse’s Genshin Impact, so it’s aiming at a free-to-play model with in-app purchases. Though Tencent still is the much bigger player than HoYoverse overall, the Shanghai-based studio has been happily gobbling up the lucrative Chinese gacha game market with Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail.
According to these insiders, progress on the project is slow-going, though, as Elden Ring isn’t exactly lending itself to this business model.
Elden Ring may be getting a mobile adaptation from Tencent.
FromSoftware
FromSoftware sold Elden Ring licensing rights to Tencent in 2022 and the Chinese company bought a 16% stake in the Japanese studio the same year. However, Tencent did not reveal it would be working on a mobile game using the IP at the time. Reuters wrote that “a few dozen people” were set up to work on a prototype of the game in 2022.
Tencent recently canceled a mobile adaptation of the Nier franchise due to doubts around its monetization – it looks like the Elden Ring Project mirrors some of those issues.
The Chinese gaming industry took a big hit in the stock market late last year after a regulatory body proposed several rules to limit developers’ monetization and player engagement methods. Tencent and NetEase publicly railed against these proposals, the announcement of which cost them billions of dollars in value. The Chinese government eventually stepped in, firing the man overseeing the regulatory authority and quietly dropping the proposed restrictions.
