Reuters has reported that an Elden Ring mobile game is in development at multinational tech giant, Tencent, the same company that owns the likes of League of Legends developer Riot Games and Call of Duty: Mobile developer TiMi Studio.
While the company hasn’t made a formal announcement of the project, multiple sources have disclosed to Reuters that Tencent has been working to adapt the game to a free-to-play title with in-app purchases, with comparisons made to miHoYo’s Genshin Impact – a game that heavily relies on “gacha” mechanics to dole out new characters and rewards.
The news comes after Tencent reportedly cancelled an in-development mobile game based on the NieR franchise after it was unable to find a suitable monetisation model that would balance out the high cost of development and franchise rights, so it’ll be interesting to see how it approaches Elden Ring – or if it ends up pursuing it as a final product at all.
China's Tencent has been working to adapt acclaimed action role-playing console game ‘Elden Ring’ into a mobile version, three people familiar with the matter said, as it searches for a new hit to refresh its ageing stock of games https://t.co/a6hbo29Bt1
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 6, 2024
For a hot minute, Elden Rings fans were hopeful that we might see a February release for the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, after a “leak” originating at controller manufacturer Thrustmaster and an errant pitch deck uploaded to a retailer website referenced a February release for a special Elden Ring-themed version of the Thrustmaster eSwap controller to tie in to the launch of Shadow of the Erdtree.
Soon after, an update to the game’s backend on Steam which showed a new “Unknown App” added to the Downloadable Content section of the page had added fuel to that fire. FromSoftware’s parent company Kadokawa has thrown a bit of water on that bonfire though, recently referencing the DLC in a financial report where it simply said, “We are currently working hard on the development of DLC for Elden Ring but we have not announced a release date at this time.”
