이 기사는 2022년 02월 04일 07:47 thebell 에 표출된 기사입니다.

ThumbAge, South Korea’s mobile game developer and publisher, has granted a call option to Tencent, which acquired ThumbAge's subsidiary Royal Crow last year.

ThumbAge signed a call option agreement with Tencent that allows the Chinese tech giant to buy a remaining stake in Royal Crow, industry sources said on Thursday. It is not known how much of the remaining stake is subject to the call option.

ThumbAge sold 296,707 shares of its subsidiary Royal Crow to Tencent in February 2021. The Chinese tech giant became the largest shareholder of Royal Crow with a 41.4% stake and ThumbAge became the second largest shareholder with 14.4%.

The deal was struck as ThumbAge was in urgent need of working capital while Tencent was looking for a promising first-person shooter (FPS) game. ThumbAge recorded an operating loss for four years and decided to offload its crown jewel Royal Crow.

Tencent was attracted to Royal Crow, which is developing the FPS game Crowz. The game is being produced by a team led by Baek Seung-hun, who developed mega-hit FPS game Sudden Attack.

But the two companies seem to have had different views on the value of Royal Crow given that their deal carried earn-out provisions to offer an additional payment depending on the Crowz’s performance after its release.

The call option will be positive to ThumbAge in the short term as the game company will earn a large amount of money depending on the game’s performance. A 41.4% stake in Royal Crow was valued at 17.7 billion won, 12.6% of mega-hit shooting game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ earnings.

Crowz, which recently completed the third closed beta test, is expected to be released in March or April.

ThumbAge has also secured the publishing rights of Crowz in Korean and worldwide in return for its core subsidiary Royal Crow. ThumbAge will secure 45% of a profit as the publisher while Royal Crow, the developer, will have 25%. The remaining 30% will go to PC game distribution service provider Steam.

The deal, however, may damage ThumbAge’s corporate value in the longer term as the company won’t be able to receive dividends from Royal Crow while its influence on Royal Crow may weaken as Tencent's dominance increases.

In case Crowz becomes a success and Tencent exercises its call option, the Chinese company’s stake in Royal Crow will increase to up to 55%. Although ThumbAge currently owns publishing rights for Crowz, they may fall into Tencent’s hands if the Chinese firm’s ownership increases.

Tencent already filled two out of three members of the Royal Crow’s board of directors with people who are presumably friendly to the Chinese firm last year.

Both ThumbAge and Tencent declined to confirm the details of the contract. (Reporting by Won-ji Hwang)