Marvelous has voted to end its six-year capital and business alliance with Image Frame Investment, a Hong Kong-based subsidiary of Tencent, after a board meeting on 31 July 2026. The split also kills a mobile Story of Seasons game that Tencent had been developing since 2019 Eurogamer.

Image Frame Investment bought a 20 percent stake in Marvelous in May 2020 for roughly £48 million (US$65 million), making it the Japanese publisher's largest shareholder. Marvelous — best known for the farming series Story of Seasons and the RPG line Rune Factory — had struck a licensing deal with Tencent in March 2019, handing over rights to develop a mobile entry in the Story of Seasons franchise. That project ran for years before Tencent cancelled it, citing the business environment and profitability concerns Siliconera.

The termination came with one immediate boardroom change. Outside Director Shin Joon Oh resigned as a result of the decision, according to Siliconera's reporting on the company statement Siliconera. Tencent officially withdrew from investing in Marvelous following a revision of the publisher's capital allocation policy, as reported by Automaton Automaton.

Rumours of the breakup had circulated a month earlier. In June 2026, reports surfaced that the partnership was winding down, well before Marvelous made the split official Yahoo Finance.

Not everything from the partnership is gone. The underlying 2019 licensing agreement between Marvelous and Tencent survives the split, meaning the rights deal itself remains intact even as the investment and mobile project do not Eurogamer.

For Story of Seasons fans, the mobile cancellation is the concrete loss. The franchise — a farming and life-simulation series that began life as Harvest Moon before Marvelous rebranded it — has a devoted following drawn to its relaxed pace and seasonal cycles. A mobile version had been in the works for roughly seven years. The mainline console and handheld entries, which Marvelous develops and publishes itself, are unaffected by this decision.

The wider backdrop is one of Chinese tech companies recalibrating their overseas gaming investments. Tencent, one of the world's largest game publishers, has taken stakes in dozens of studios worldwide over the past decade. Marvelous's decision to unwind one of those arrangements — and Tencent's willingness to withdraw — adds another data point to a trend of companies re-evaluating where their money and partnerships actually pay off.