David Cage’s studio Quantic Dream, creators of such iconic games as The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human, has lost its independence. The French studio was acquired by the Chinese Internet monster NetEase, which deals with mobile and online games, e-commerce, has a mail service, a music streaming service and even a few real pig farms.

NetEase acquired a large stake in Quantic Dream back in 2019 and has now completed the takeover. The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

Quantic Dream is NetEase’s first European studio, which should help the Chinese corporation increase its presence in Western countries. Another Chinese Internet monster, Tencent, which is one of the Top 10 largest Internet companies in the world, has been using this approach for a long time, buying up Western studios in droves.

“Today marks an important milestone for our studio after a quarter century of complete independence,” said Quantic Dream founder, CEO, and writer-director David Cage. “NetEase Games values our creative freedom and the drive and passion of our uniquely diverse team. We will now be able to accelerate the visionwe share as a group, of creating landmark titles that touch people on an emotional level. We have highly differentiated games in the making and I truly believe that the best is yet to come from Quantic Dream. I am particularly proud that our employees, who were offered a significant share of our capital over the past years, will fully benefit from this acquisition. It is a testimony to our continued commitment to reward all those who have made Quantic Dream the successful studio it is today.”

In 25 years of existence, Quantic Dream has created only 5 games, but each of them has collected a whole bunch of awards and has become the object of heated discussions on the network. The studio is currently working on several projects: a major game in the Star Wars universe – Star Wars Eclipse and the cinematic underwater game Under The Waves which was presented at Gamescom 2022.