The ill-fated System Shock 3 could have run into a spot of good fortune. According to research carried out by VGC, Chinese conglomerate Tencent has acquired the websites SystemShock3.com and SystemShock4.com. Neither of these domains is actually live yet.
VGC says this transfer happened last week. Before the transfer, both domains were registered to Paul Neurath, the director of System Shock 3 developer OtherSide Entertainment. It's possible that the transfer means Tencent has acquired the rights to publish System Shock 3, as well as a potential sequel should the game perform well enough to warrant one.
A Brief History of System Shock 3
System Shock 3 has had a troubled development history. It was originally announced back in December 2015. A year and a half after that announcement, Starbreeze AB announced that they'd picked up the game's publishing rights. Following restructuring operations, Starbreeze sold the publishing rights for System Shock 3 back to OtherSide in February 2019. Legendary industry developer Warren Spector told VGC in 2017 that OtherSide was looking for a publishing and funding partner. Spector also said the developer was "flush enough" to fund itself for a while as it looked for a publisher. The abysmal performance of OtherSide's Underworld Ascendant likely didn't help the developer when it came to looking for new funding. If Tencent has decided to fund System Shock 3, it's evidently been able to look past that particular failure.
Of course, without an official announcement, this information should be taken with a small pinch of salt. Still, it's a little odd to find Tencent's name on the domains if they're not planning to do anything with the property. Tencent is an absolutely huge company with a lot of fingers in a lot of gaming pies, so it wouldn't be a surprise to find its name on System Shock as well. We'll have to wait and see what OtherSide announces in the near future. Until then, if you're a System Shock fan, it looks like you just might have a fresh reason to hope the third game isn't stuck in development (or rather publishing) hell any longer.
Are you hoping to get your hands on System Shock 3 soon? Let us know in the comments below!
