The 39-year-old Chinese businessman has led Yoozoo, which, for example, has created Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming, a strategy game.

According to the Shanghai police’s statement, one of the colleagues, identified with his surname (Xu), is the key suspect behind Lin Qi‘s death. He was believed to have a net worth of nearly a billion GBP, according to the Hurun China Rich List. Many current and former employees of Yoozoo gathered outside the company’s office on Friday to mourn his death.

The businessman founded Yoozoo in 2009, and despite a shift towards mobile gaming in the industry, he managed to keep the company in a healthy standing, even with a foray into film production. Yoozoo has published a statement on Sina Weibo (which is essentially the Twitter equivalent in China): „Goodbye youth. We will be together, continue to be kind, continue to believe in goodness, and continue the fight against all that is bad.” This post got thousands of comments, as well as more than 290 million views. Many tributes included calligraphy, as the businessman, also nicknamed as Titan Lin, was a poetry enthusiast and an avid calligrapher.

Not many details are public about Mr Lin’s death, but he was possibly poisoned, based on the police’s statements, which go against what Yoozoo claimed (he had admitted himself to hospital after feeling unwell but was in a stable condition, but he suddenly passed away by Friday). The local media reports that the person in custody could be Xu Yao, who leads Yoozoo’s movie production arm and the poisoning might have happened via aged pu’er tea, a fermented Chinese drink.

Yoozoo was also the co-publisher of Brawl Stars by Supercell (their partner here was Tencent Holdings – someone who need no introduction…). They also hold the rights to Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem’s film adaptation (it’s the first sci-fi novel in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past), and Yoozoo planned to make six films out of it but the plans never took off. This is how Netflix got the rights to adapt it, and even Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg praised the novel.

The gaming industry in China has lost a key person.

Source: BBC