Ownership of System Shock 3’s website has been transferred to Tencent

Ownership of System Shock 3’s website has been transferred to Tencent Holdings, suggesting that the troubled sequel could have found investment.

Both SystemShock3.com and SystemShock4.com had their ownership transferred from developer Otherside Entertainment to the Chinese corporation last week, analysis of the domains by VGC shows.

Prior to this month, the domains were registered to Otherside Entertainment director Paul Neurath.

Tencent is Asia’s second-biggest company by market value ($490bn) and has invested in more than 800 companies including Epic Games, Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft.

System Shock 3’s developer had been searching for new investment for much of 2019, following its separation from former partner Starbreeze in February of the same year.

Creative director Warren Spector told VGC in May 2019 that talks were progressing with “a lot” of interested publishers and that OtherSide had enough capital to fund itself for “quite a while.”

However, the Otherside Austin studio appeared to be in trouble this year when an anonymous developer claimed its development team was “no longer employed” and LinkedIn confirmed an exodus of senior leads.

Since that report OtherSide has failed to respond to requests for comment and studio director Warren Spector hasn’t been active on his social media channels for more than four months.

OtherSide’s official Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages haven’t been updated at all this year.

At the time of publishing, just four people, including Spector, are listed as working at OtherSide’s Texas studio on social network site LinkedIn.

Last month the company’s marketing head Walter Somol broke the silence, insisting “we’re still here,” but shortly after he confirmed his own departure from the company.

Somol is based in OtherSide’s primary studio in Boston, Massachusetts, which worked on 2018’s critically panned Underworld Ascendant, and not the Austin, Texas-based System Shock 3 team.

System Shock 3 was most recently shown at GDC in March 2019, when Spector confirmed it was being made with the Unity engine.

The game was being developed under license from Vancouver-based Night Dive Studios, which owns the rights to the System Shock franchise.