Did You Know That Perfect World Owns Subnautica Developer Unknown Worlds?
Perfect World has bought out many of the Western companies it has worked with, or at least become a majority owner of many of them, including Cryptic Studios and Runic Games. Given that fact, I've been conducting research to see if Perfect World has bought a majority stake in any of its other partners, starting with Motiga, the developer of the Perfect World-published MOBA Gigantic.
While I have yet to find anything suggesting that Perfect World did buy a majority stake in Motiga, I still managed to find something rather interesting. According to this document in the SEC's archive, Perfect World is a majority owner of Natural Selection 2 and Subnautica developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment. Further digging uncovered this document, which states that Perfect World "acquired 40% equity interest in Unknown Worlds" in August 2011, which was wholly overshadowed by the 100% acquisition of Cryptic Studios, which occurred at the same time. Perfect World then increased their equity interest to a majority stake in February 2013, meaning that Perfect World has now owned Unknown Worlds for a full four years. However, while we known the original percent equity interest that Perfect World obtained, we do not know what Unknown Worlds was valued at at the time, thus we do not know how much the company was acquired for.
For those that have been keeping up with Subnautica, the buyout makes sense. The public "Subnautica Roadmap" Trello board features listings such as "Chinese subtitles and triggering through voiceover (for China PW launch)," referencing the fact that Perfect World will one day publish the game in China. It simply hasn't been advertised, especially here in the West where Unknown Worlds is self-publishing—there's not so much as a mention of Perfect World on Unknown Worlds' official website.
The news follows news from earlier this week that Snail Games acquired ARK: Survival Evolved developer Studio Wildcard over a year ago without anyone noticing until this week.
So there you have it. Another independent Western developer snapped up by a Chinese publishing giant. Care to wager which independent Western developer will be next?
