Grinding Gear Games

What Grinding Gear Games is

Grinding Gear Games is a studio based in Auckland, New Zealand. Its own site states that the company was founded in November 2006 in Auckland, and that its founding members come from various countries with backgrounds ranging from artificial intelligence and software security to industrial design and professional tournament play. The company describes Path of Exile as a competitive online action role-playing game and directs readers to the game's own site, pathofexile.com, for detail. Grinding Gear Games says its founders had experience in online role-playing games and wanted to build an action role-playing game with visceral combat and a complex item economy.

Path of Exile

Path of Exile is a free-to-play action role-playing game. Its Steam store page lists Grinding Gear Games as both developer and publisher and gives a release date of October 23, 2013, with the game categorised as action, adventure, indie, massively multiplayer and role-playing. The store listing notes in-game purchases and online interactivity, and carries a 2013 PC Game of the Year citation among its review quotes.

Grinding Gear Games runs the game's news, forums and announcements through pathofexile.com rather than through a separate corporate site. The studio runs the game's public information itself. News posts, patch notes, forum threads and announcements all appear on pathofexile.com, which the company's own site names as the place for further information about the project. The Steam listing for the game repeats Grinding Gear Games as developer and publisher and shows in-game purchases, online interactivity and in-game chat among its features.

Ownership

In May 2018 Grinding Gear Games announced on the Path of Exile forum that Tencent, described there as the game's Chinese publisher, had acquired a majority stake in the studio. The announcement stated that Grinding Gear Games would remain an independent company in New Zealand, that its developers would continue to work for Grinding Gear Games rather than becoming Tencent employees, and that the founders were still running the company. The same post addressed monetisation directly, saying that no changes would be made to the game's monetisation on its international servers and that the Chinese version would not be prioritised ahead of the international version.

It also stated that the studio retained full control of the game's design. The 2018 announcement also set out what the studio expected to keep doing, saying it was committed to its schedule of four releases per year at that point and that it had already started development of a major new expansion targeted at a later beta. The post noted that the company would take on financial reporting obligations to Tencent while saying this would have minimal impact on its operations.

Voice and structure

The Tencent post is written in the first person plural and signed by the studio as a whole, and it names the founders only by their first names, Chris, Jonathan and Erik, saying they were still running the company. It also described the studio as committed to a schedule of four releases per year at the time of writing. Grinding Gear Games did not publish figures such as an employee count or revenue alongside the announcement. The information the studio does share about itself is limited to its founding, its location, its founding members' backgrounds and the games it is developing, which keeps the public corporate record short.

Games

• Path of Exile
• Path of Exile Mobile

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