GamesBeat Boss interview: China’s Leyou moves from chicken meat to triple-A game publishing

A few years ago, gamers had a good laugh when they learned that a Chinese chicken meat company bought Digital Extremes, the maker of Triple-A games such as The Darkness 2 and Warframe. Then, when the company bought Splash Damage in 2016, people did a double take again.

Alex Xu, the CEO of Leyou, was the guy behind that. He was the chief business officer at Perfect World, a Chinese role-playing game maker that acquired Cryptic Studios and publishes titles, such as Neverwinter. To do more deals, he left Perfect World and acquired control of a shell company in Hong Kong. It so happened the shell company was a chicken meat supplier, and Xu planned to use it as way to buy more companies. He exited the chicken business, and he is fully focused on publishing triple-A games. Xu will be a speaker at our upcoming GamesBeat 2017 event in San Francisco on October 5 and 6.