China’s Tencent Rescues System Shock 3 From Certain Death – But Why?

• OtherSide Entertainment recently announced that Chinese company Tencent would be “moving forward” with the troubled System Shock 3.
• Right now, the tweet is not particularly clear on what that actually means.
• If developing this game has been this hard, is it even worth continuing?

System Shock 3 is a game we’ve been for, for a long time. In the 5 years since the original announcement, the game has had a troubled development cycle. Although owned by Nightdive Studios, the IP is being developed by OtherSide Entertainment.

OtherSide has tried partnering with other companies, such as Starbreeze, to get the game off the ground. None of these attempts have been all that successful.

That is until recently when it was announced via Twitter that Tencent Games would be “taking the franchise forward” . So, it looks like we’re definitely getting System Shock 3 now, but is that necessarily a good thing?

There Is a Lot of Concern Surrounding Tencent

Whenever Tencent gets brought into the conversation surrounding gaming, people show a lot of concern. Not so long ago, gamers were worried about Tencent’s involvement in Epic Games. The fear being that they would be forced to collect user data for the Chinese government.

In many cases, these fears are unfounded. Certainly, this is the case with Epic Games . But that’s not the only reason people are skeptical about System Shock 3. Other problems with Tencent apparently revolve around censorship of western titles.

The only evidence to be found for this was a time they asked for changes to get Rainbow Six: Siege released in China. For some reason, Ubisoft made these changes to the western version too, then changed them back when they got backlash.  

System Shock 3 Probably Won’t Have That Much To Do With Tencent Directly

Realistically, Tencent doesn’t own System Shock 3 now. Hell, OtherSide doesn’t even technically own it. They’re licensing it from Nightdive. It seems more than likely that Tencent will shop the project out to one of their developers, and then share in the subsequent profits.

Not that we actually know that of course. The tweet is very vaguely worded. Tencent could be doing anything from investing money into the project, to handling publishing, to just giving advice to OtherSide for all we know.

But, realistically if System Shock 3 is this hard to make maybe the universe is trying to tell us something. Perhaps two games in the series were enough? after all, the legacy of the games continued with BioShock anyway. Better a spiritual successor than a lifeless sequel.

About the Author

William Worrall

William Worrall is a professional writer based out of the UK who has been writing about video and tabletop games for over a decade and has covered industry events such as EGX and UKGE. Contact him at [email protected], see his LinkedIn profile here.

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