Scopely Takes a Strategic Stake in Shanghai Baokela: Middle East Capital Buys into a Chinese Anime-Game Studio as Tencent’s Stake Dilutes#

September 27, 2026 — Hello everyone. What I want to talk about today is not whether some new game is fun, but a capital move unfolding behind the scenes of the games industry. On September 23, 2026, the Asia-Pacific regional entity of US mobile games publisher Scopely completed a strategic investment in Shanghai Baokela Network Technology Co., Ltd., taking a new stake of about 23.94%; with the investment, incumbent shareholder Tencent’s holding fell correspondingly to 30.42%. Put another way, the cap table of a Chinese studio that makes anime MMOs now features both Tencent and a game publisher backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

As someone who tracks mobile games, online games, and market trends year-round, my first reaction was not “is this game any good” but: why are Tencent and Scopely — of all pairs — lining up on the same project back to back? In this piece, I’ll unpack the deal, the Middle East capital logic behind it, and the dilution of Tencent’s stake, all from an industry and capital perspective.

1. First, Get the Facts Straight: Who Invested in Whom, and How the Cap Table Changed#

As always, facts first, opinions after. Here is the equity-change line laid out in a table:

Two details here deserve to be pulled out separately.

First, the investing entity is not Scopely’s US parent but its “Asia-Pacific/Singapore entity.” For anyone familiar with cross-border investment, that is a telling signal — many multinationals investing in China do not hold shares through the US parent directly; they enter through regional entities in Singapore or Hong Kong with minority stakes. It is a common route for navigating cross-border approvals and tax arrangements, and it usually signals an intent to “fund the build while leaving your existing governance structure alone.” As for the valuation, amounts, and governance arrangements this time, neither side has formally disclosed them, so I won’t fill in the blanks for you.

Second, this is an investment, not an acquisition. What Scopely took is “a new stake of about 23.94%”, which does not exceed Tencent’s 30.42%. On Baokela’s cap table, Tencent remains the largest institutional shareholder, with Scopely squeezing in as a sizeable strategic shareholder. The two did not co-invest; they “entered back to back” — Tencent came in at the company’s founding in 2021, while Scopely arrived five years later in September 2026. I’ll expand on that co-opetition angle later.

2. Who Is Baokela: One Anime MMO and the 150-Person Team Behind It#

Before the capital talk, we need to know what company the money went into. You may not know Baokela by name, but plenty of you have heard of its product.

Let me pin down what Star Resonance actually is, because it determines why this investment “is worth money”. Per reporting, the game runs on Bandai Namco’s Blue Protocol IP license, but the worldbuilding, class system, and social gameplay were all rebuilt by Baokela itself, keeping only the original’s “anime-quality” art style; combat goes the lock-free action route, built as a PC-plus-mobile dual-platform title for global release. This is a classic Chinese-studio playbook — take a top-tier IP license, rebuild the core gameplay yourself, break the “copy the original” shackles, and use dual-platform global reach to cover a bigger market.

One thing must be said objectively: the game’s commercial performance has been mediocre. In other words, it has done well in Japan, but by overall revenue it never became a blockbuster. So the point of this investment is not “Baokela is already making big money” — it is the next product, and what the company holds in hand.

That brings us to Baokela’s other project in development. Per reporting, it is building a multiplayer online RPG under a top-tier IP license, internally codenamed “Project H” (also known as “Code Hydra”), in a realistic European-medieval style, supporting both single-player and multiplayer, and planned for global release with multi-platform cross-play.

Reading this far, as a mobile-industry observer I can basically guess what Scopely is buying — not a proven hit, but an in-development pipeline that “has IP, has global ambitions, and is a long-horizon multiplayer service game”, plus a 150-person R&D crew led by an MMO veteran.

3. Who Is Scopely: Backed by Saudi Sovereign Wealth, Making Its Third China Investment#

Now the camera turns to the investor. Mobile players should know the name Scopely, but let me lay out its full background first.

There is a nested structure here worth unpacking: Scopely’s ultimate parent is Savvy Games Group, owned by Saudi sovereign fund PIF. In other words, the money that actually gets spent, the strategy that actually gets executed, traces back to that Middle East sovereign capital.

And the path that capital takes into China is methodical. The key sentence: this is Scopely’s third investment in a Chinese team.

I especially want you to notice the rhythm and the category spread: the first two moves built a local R&D center and a Marvel IP ARPG team; this time, the hand reaches toward anime MMOs and large-world multiplayer online RPGs. In other words, Scopely’s three China moves trace exactly the line of “R&D infrastructure + mid-to-hardcore teams across categories” — not random scattered bets.

Now the parent, Savvy Games Group. Per reporting, PIF’s Savvy Games Group has invested in or acquired Scopely, ESL, FACEIT, VSPO, and a roster of other companies, aiming to take positions along the global games value chain. I want to stress: it is not betting on any single game, but on the entire pipeline — from development (Scopely’s studios), to esports events (ESL, FACEIT, VSPO), to publishing. That “full-chain positioning” play is the most typical — and most unsentimental — move sovereign capital makes when it enters gaming.

4. Why “Middle East Capital + Chinese Anime R&D”: a Complementary Combination#

At this point you may ask: why would Saudi money come to China to invest in an anime MMO team? Break it into two ends — “what Middle East capital lacks” and “what Chinese teams lack”.

Let me make the logic concrete. Publishing-led companies like Scopely are best at “pushing products into global markets”, not “building a large anime world from scratch.” Monopoly GO!, a product that has ranked among the top-grossing mobile games worldwide since 2023, proves its capability in publishing, user acquisition, and long-horizon live operations — it does not necessarily prove in-house capacity for mid-to-hardcore IP content.

Conversely, Chinese teams like Baokela are best at exactly “building a licensed-IP large-world MMO” — rebuilding the worldbuilding, the class system, the social gameplay, while preserving anime-quality art. That is a nearly one-of-a-kind capacity Chinese studios have trained over the past several years on the anime-game track.

So rather than a “financial investment”, this stake is better read as a complementarity of capacity and channels: Middle East capital brings money and channels; the Chinese team brings R&D and content. Scopely is backfilling its China gap in mid-to-hardcore, IP-driven R&D capacity, while the Chinese team is backfilling the global publishing and long-horizon operations gap it could hardly close alone. On industry logic, this move adds up.

5. Tencent’s Diluted Stake: a Case Study in “Co-opetition”#

Now for the most overlooked yet most interesting part of this deal — Tencent.

Let me first pin down Tencent’s role at Baokela: Tencent invested at the company’s founding in 2021 with a 20% stake, making it the earliest institutional investor. Once Scopely came in at 23.94%, Tencent’s holding settled, diluted, at 30.42%. But note — Tencent remains the largest institutional shareholder, and did not lose its leading position just because Scopely entered.

That leads to the most interesting part of this deal. Per reporting, Baokela’s cap table marks the first genuine commercial convergence of Tencent and Scopely — note, I said “commercial convergence”, not “co-investment”. The two are strategic shareholders who entered back to back, not co-investors on the same ticket.

So are Tencent and Scopely competing or cooperating at Baokela? My read: this is textbook “co-opetition”, and it cuts both ways.

One layer is competition. In the mobile and anime-game landscape, Tencent is the heavyweight holding domestic channels, licenses, and the WeChat ecosystem, while Scopely stands behind Middle East sovereign capital with global-class publishing assets like Monopoly GO! and Pokémon GO. The expansion of Middle East capital across the global games value chain objectively overlaps with Tencent in overseas publishing and in the contest for quality R&D targets. That both appear on Baokela’s cap table is, in a sense, the result of each taking a seat and neither yielding.

The other layer is cooperation. What Tencent anchors is the domestic pipeline — licenses, publishing, the WeChat ecosystem; that is its irreplaceable value on projects like this. Scopely fills in publishing capability for overseas markets like the West and Southeast Asia. On the same project, one covers domestic and the other covers overseas — which, in a sense, forms a division of labor. One more point worth adding — per reporting, Jingxiu Games under Tencent-affiliated China Ruyi has already used Scopely’s resources to achieve North American publishing. This shows that beyond the equity entanglement, the two giants already have real business dealings at the publishing layer; this is not pure confrontation.

So on the dilution of Tencent’s stake, my judgment is: it is not a “loss of control” retreat, but “bringing in a well-funded strategic partner who patches the overseas publishing gap while keeping the position of largest shareholder.” The dilution is a fact, but reading it as “Tencent exiting” or “Tencent losing” is too emotional — in this deal, Tencent has neither left the table nor taken full control; it stands at a subtly balanced position of co-opetition.

6. Investing Through a Singapore Entity: a Capital-Structure Template Worth Studying#

Beyond the deal itself, I want to isolate the question of “how the money went in”. Because in cross-border games investment, “which entity invests” often reveals more about intent than “how much is invested.”

Pulling this playbook apart, several traits stand out.

First, not the US parent directly, but a regional entity in Singapore or Hong Kong. I mentioned this in section one; here’s the deeper layer — Asian entities are usually the preferred channel for multinationals investing in China, far more flexible than holding shares through the US parent when it comes to approval timelines, tax arrangements, and subsequent cross-border capital flows. For a publisher planning to keep shopping in the Asia-Pacific, setting up a regional entity first amounts to building an “investment container” in advance.

Second, a minority stake instead of a takeover. 23.94% is a share that “carries real voice without seizing control”. For Scopely, it means carrying none of the full management cost of a 150-person team while binding this R&D capacity through the equity relationship; for Baokela, it means the team retains a considerable degree of autonomy and doesn’t lose its R&D initiative post-acquisition. This “no control, but deep binding” structure is increasingly common in cross-border games investment.

Third, what’s contributed is not just money but resources. The failure mode of minority-stake investment is “money in, nothing else” — a purely financial play. But per the analysis above, what Scopely transfers to Chinese teams is mostly overseas publishing capability — exactly what a standalone Chinese developer struggles to build by itself.

So: a Singapore entity, a minority stake, and publishing resources — together these three form a “light-asset, heavy-binding” cross-border investment template. It differs from the earlier brute-force model of “buy everything, absorb everything”, and it helps both sides form a stable community of interest over the long run.

7. Spread Out the Board: Which Ecosystem Slots Is Middle East Capital Locking Down#

So far I’ve talked about the Baokela deal alone. But to see the deal clearly, I suggest pulling the camera back and asking what game PIF and Savvy Games Group — the layer above this money — are actually playing.

First, the key assets in Scopely’s hands, so you can feel the footprint:

Now place those assets back on the “value chain” axis and the ecosystem slots become visible:

See it? From development, to publishing and operations, to esports events, PIF and Savvy have placed a stone at every key link of the chain. I especially want to dwell on the “esports events” link, because it is easily overlooked — companies like ESL, FACEIT, and VSPO essentially control the organizing and broadcasting gateways of global esports. Only by stringing together development, products, and events can you form a complete, self-sustaining games ecosystem.

So when I see Scopely making its third China investment and reaching once more toward large-world anime MMOs, my judgment is: this is by no means a publisher casually “buying some R&D capacity” — it is the natural continuation of Middle East sovereign capital systematically “locking positions” across the global games value chain. The Baokela deal is precisely a key stone placed to fill the gap of “mid-to-hardcore, IP-driven, globally operated long-horizon products”.

8. Four Takeaways for Chinese Anime-Game Developers Raising Money to Go Global#

As someone who has long watched Chinese mobile games go overseas, what moves me most about this deal is the fundraising and globalization template it offers to the “Chinese anime-game developer” community. Here are the takeaways.

Point one: quality R&D capacity is becoming the scarce asset that capital “rushes to buy”. Baokela itself is not a blockbuster factory — which proves precisely that what capital markets value is not only a product that already makes money, but the in-development pipeline a team holds that “has IP, has global ambitions, and is a long-horizon service game”. For many Chinese anime-game teams still grinding toward one hit, that is a signal: your R&D capability itself may be an asset worth pricing.

Point two: going global doesn’t require “doing everything yourself” — borrow others’ publishing resources. Many Chinese teams, the moment they go overseas, rush to build their own overseas publishing, user-acquisition, and operations teams. But Baokela’s example shows that the borrowed-leverage approach of “handing China publishing to Tencent and certain overseas regions to XD and other partners” actually lets the team concentrate on what it does best: development. And when Scopely arrived with global publishing resources, it did not seize full publishing rights — it participated as a shareholder. This division of “development stays home, publishing borrows muscle” may be the more realistic path for Chinese teams going global.

Point three: when bringing in strategic capital, read whether the counterparty is a “financial investor” or an “industrial shareholder”. I want to stress this one. Much of the funding coming into games companies is purely financial — they care about return rates, not products. Behind Scopely stands Savvy Games Group, stands PIF — industrial capital out to “occupy value-chain positions”; shareholders like that bring not only money but channels, publishing capability, and long-horizon operations experience. For developers, choosing the “shareholder with resources” often matters more than choosing the “shareholder with money”.

Point four: Middle East sovereign capital is becoming a variable that cannot be ignored in Chinese games’ overseas fundraising. In the past, overseas fundraising for Chinese games came mostly from domestic giants, dollar funds, or Japanese and Korean capital. What this deal reflects is a trend: Middle East sovereign capital, through vehicles like Scopely, is systematically entering the Chinese games industry — and it is investing in mid-to-hardcore, IP-driven, long-horizon targets. For Chinese anime-game teams looking for a way out, whether to take this money, and how, deserves serious weighing.

9. Closing: an Overture of “Capital Convergence”, Not the Finale#

Finally, let me put this deal back into a bigger frame and raise a question that is not yet fully answered but weighs on my mind.

I note that per reporting, whether Tencent and Scopely will deepen their cooperation around Baokela remains officially unaddressed; the post-investment governance arrangements (such as board seats) are also undisclosed. Moreover, the post-money valuation and the specific amounts of this deal were never published. On these unverified, undisclosed details, I will not draw conclusions for anyone. The only things I can confirm are the ones already stated as facts: on September 23, 2026, Scopely’s Asia-Pacific entity invested in Baokela for about 23.94%, and Tencent’s holding fell to 30.42%.

But it is precisely these “not yet settled” parts that make this deal feel like an overture rather than a finale. Consider:

• A global publisher backed by Saudi sovereign wealth, holding Monopoly GO! and Pokémon GO, is systematically positioning Chinese R&D capacity through a Singapore entity, minority stakes, and resource transfer;
• And its chosen targets are anime MMOs and top-IP-licensed multiplayer online RPGs — exactly the categories that will need long-horizon operations and the deepest R&D craft in the years ahead;
• On the other side, Tencent has not left the table: as the largest institutional shareholder at 30.42%, it now “coexists” with Middle East capital on the same cap table — one anchoring domestic, one testing overseas.

For those of us making games content, the long-term meaning of this may not be “whether Baokela can turn this money into its next hit”, but this: when sovereign money, Chinese R&D capacity, and global publishing demand begin to meet on one cap table, the capital narrative of Chinese games going global is quietly changing. As for what the next episode brings, our editorial desk will keep watching.

Here I also want to give fellow industry watchers a pointer: what’s worth tracking next are precisely those things “not yet disclosed”. For instance, whether Baokela’s top-IP multiplayer online RPG “Code Hydra” will ride Scopely’s publishing network overseas more smoothly; whether Scopely’s entry will change Star Resonance’s publishing rhythm in the West, given that Tencent anchors the China server and XD and others handle certain overseas regions; and whether Tencent and Scopely, beyond Baokela, will spark deeper cooperation from this “commercial convergence”. On the parts without official statements, I won’t predict — but I will keep following. When new official disclosures land, I’ll report back.

— Wubian, NTGame Editor-in-Chief

Appendix: Sources for This Piece#

The core facts of this piece (the investing entity and shareholding changes, Scopely’s parent-company background, Baokela’s company background and flagship title, the founder’s track record, team size, the status of Project H, Scopely’s China footprint, Tencent’s shareholding history, the North American publishing by China Ruyi’s Jingxiu Games, and Savvy Games Group’s moves) all come from the following retrieved sources, compiled for information and industry analysis only; no endorsement of these outlets’ positions is implied:

1. 36Kr / Yule Capital, “Saudi Capital Partners with Tencent Again to Back a Chinese Game Company” — the most detailed source, covering the investing entity, the shareholding path, the background of Tencent’s 20% entry, founder Chen Min, the team of about 150 people, the list of Chinese teams Scopely has invested in, Savvy’s moves, and the Singapore-entity investment logic
2. Eastmoney Caihao, “Scopely Invests in Another Shanghai Game Studio, with Tencent Also on the Cap Table” — confirms Scopely’s new stake of about 23.94%, Tencent down to 30.42%, Star Resonance’s strong Japan performance, and Project H as a European-medieval multiplayer online RPG
3. Tencent News / Youxi Xinzhi — confirms the investing entity as Scopely South East Asia Pte. Ltd., Scopely as a Savvy Games Group member, Tencent down to 30.42%, and Project H’s global multi-platform release
4. 36Kr European edition English report — English cross-verification of Scopely’s publishing strength and Monopoly GO! ranking among the world’s top-grossing mobile games since 2023