Tencent Acquires Sumo: Will This Mean Blockchain Games?

Tencent, a multinational technology conglomerate, has agreed to acquire Sumo, who has previously announced that they will begin working on Flow blockchain games. Tencent agreed to buy Sumo for $1.27 billion. What does this mean for the upcoming blockchain games?

Sumo Group is a well-known video game company based in the United Kingdom. With over 1,200 people in 14 studious across five countries, there’s a reason why the price tag was so high. In 2020, Sumo Group announced that they would begin exploring integrating the Flow blockchain with their games. However, there has not been any follow-up information released about any possible blockchain titles. 

What does this recent acquisition mean for future of their blockchain game development? According to Sumo chief executive Carl Cavers, the deal will strengthen Sumo’s prospects rather than diminish them. 

Cavers says, “Tencent has a strong track record for backing management teams and their existing strategies. Alongside the acceleration of Own-IP work, Tencent has demonstrated its commitment to backing our client work and has stated its intention to ensure that we have the necessary investment to continue focusing on work with our key strategic partners on turn-key and co-development projects.”

We can assume based on this information that current endeavors, including their exploration into blockchain gaming, are still in motion. It’s an exciting time to have a major game studio talking about blockchain gaming and we hope that Sumo lets us know more about what they’re making soon. 

What is Flow?

Flow is a proof-of-stake blockchain. This means that nodes are hosted based on economic wealth instead of computing power. The Flow network introduces five different nodes, which means that these nodes split the workload between them. Each node is a bit different and they all compliment each other. As a result, everybody can help to build the network, ranging from home computers to data centers.

In a traditional blockchain, every node stores the account balances, smart contract code, etc. Each of the nodes performs all of the work associated with every transaction. Because of this these nodes require strong hardware and do lots of technical work. The Flow blockchain applies decentralized participation, allowing a wide range of participants to commit to a range of technical and financial commitments. This results in five different roles: Collection, Consensus, Execution, Verification, and Observation.

For regular users it will be easy to use Flow. There won’t be any transaction fees. As a result this makes breeding Cryptokitties and sending someone in-game assets a lot more user friendly.