Clash of Clans Dev Acquired by League of Legends Owner for $8.6 Billion

Clash of Clans developer Supercell Oy has a new owner.

Chinese internet company Tencent, which also owns a controlling interest in League of Legends developer Riot Games and has a stake in Epic Games, will pay $8.6 billion to acquire an 84.3 percent stake in Supercell, The Wall Street Journal reported today. This values the Finnish studio at $10.2 billion. This deal has been rumored for a while now.

Tencent, along with its partners, are buying the stake from Japanese telecom company SoftBank, the report said. The deal is expected to go through in the third quarter of 2016 (pending regulatory approvals) and will be completed in stages, not all at once.

In October 2013, SoftBank paid $1.5 billion to acquire a 51 percent stake in Supercell.

Additionally, Tencent explains that Supercell's existing management "would maintain operational independence," according to WSJ. You can read the full report here.

Supercell CEO Ikka Paananen said in a blog post today titled "The next chapter" that he sees Supercell as being only at the "beginning of what will hopefully be a very long journey."

"For us, today is all about chasing a future for Supercell that we have always dreamed of. We founded this company to make great games that people all over the world would play for decades," he said. "We have been very lucky as over the past six years we've released four top games that are now played by over 100 million people every single day.

"But more than this, we dream of our current and future games becoming a part of the rich history of games, living onto the very long term. And if you take this very long-term view, you quickly realize that we are still at the beginning of what will hopefully be a very long journey."

Paananen further explained that the deal with Tencent helps Supercell remain a privately held company--but with some of the benefits of being public.

"That is a better match with our small size and unique culture than being a public company where our concern would be the pressure from financial markets to think short term," he said. "However, while enabling us to stay private, the partnership with Tencent provides us with some of the benefits of being public: as part of this transaction, our employees will be able to sell their shares in Supercell over time (everyone at Supercell is an owner). The total equity value of $10.2 billion dollars also recognizes the value of the phenomenal company that our people have built."

You can read the full blog post here.

Clash of Clans is wildly popular. In fact, over 100 million people Clash of Clans every day, and in 2015, it was the second highest-grossing digital video game.

Some of Supercell's other popular games include Hay Day, Boom Beach, and Clash Royale. That last game is one of Fallout 4 director Todd Howard's favorites.