Athlon Games Inc. is an American video game publisher owned by Leyou and based in Los Angeles, California. Best known for acquiring a controlling stake in the successor to Telltale Games,[1] while also publishing SNK's weapon-based fighting game Samurai Shodown outside of Japan and China in 2019.[2] The company is currently set to co-publish The Wolf Among Us 2 with Telltale.[3]
History
On May 24, 2018, it was announced by Chinese holding company Leyou that they had formed a new publishing division for PC and Consoles called Athlon Games, the company would be based in Los Angeles, California and would help co-publish games with other companies.[4] In September 2018, Leyou had announced that they signed a deal with Middle-earth Enterprises to allow the company to develop and publish an online free-to-play game based on The Lord of the Rings.Amazon Game Studios (a division within Amazon) would join the project in July 2019, and would agree to co-develop and also publish the game globally, with Athlon set to publish the game in China and Taiwan.[5] Later that year Athlon had announced that they had become the publisher of Samurai Shodown excluding in Japan and China, while also becoming a shareholder of LCG Entertainment, a company that had acquired the assets of Telltale Games, while also announcing that they'd become the future co-publisher of all upcoming Telltale titles, starting with the release of Batman: Shadows Edition in December 2019.[1][6] In December 2020, it was announced by Leyou that they'd be acquired by Tencent under their Image Frame Investment subsidiary.[7] On April 17, 2021, after several years in development, Tencent and Amazon had announced that when they had been in contract negotiations for the planned The Lord of the Rings game, a dispute had begun between the two, ultimately causing Amazon to cancel the planned title.[8]
