Gobble, Gobble. That’s the sound that Chinese mega-company Tencent presumably made as it snapped up Lucid Games, absorbing it into one of its multiple subsidiaries. In this specific case, the subsidiary is LightSpeed Studios that describes its vision as being “To create the Lightspeed Universe, the ecosystem that connects players and developers around the world.”

As for Lucid Games, the last game the studio developed was Destruction Allstars, a Playstation exclusive vehicular combat game that launched in 2021. It was initially going to be a $70 title, but after being delayed Sony announced it would be given away for free to PlayStation Plus subscribers for the first two months of its lifespan instead. It didn’t exactly do very well, and I was fairly underwhelmed by it, sadly, but did think it had some potential.

While Destruction AllStars may not have done very well, many people did speculate that Sony might be interested in buying Lucid Games, especially as Lucid was linked to the upcoming Twisted Metal reboot, which has allegedly been moved over to Sony’s newly-acquired Firesprite.

But Lucid have also done quite a bit of support work. Lucid’s own game page states the company has done support work for the likes of Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Sea of Thieves and Apex Legends. Perhaps Tencent intends on deploying them in a support role for future titles.

On a more personal level, its always a shame to see any studio being bought. In a perfect world I’d prefer to see them remain independent, but this is obviously not a perfect world. In this imperfect world, I would much rather Sony bought Lucid instead of Tencent, a behemoth of a company that has many ties to the problematic and frequently horrifying Chinese Communist Part. The bigger Tencent gets, the more influence can exert over our games.