Tencent Quietly Acquires Stake in Game Principality (Mecharashi Dev) — Players Unleash Years of Dirt on 'Fat Tiger': Stealth Nerfs, Pay-to-Win, and JP Favoritism

One screenshot was all it took to send the entire comment section into overdrive. A player on NGA forum recently revealed that Tencent has apparently taken a quiet stake in Game Principality, the studio behind the mobile mech battler Mecharashi (机动战队). Instead of celebrating, veteran players flocked to the thread for one purpose: a collective exposé.

One player dropped a seemingly innocuous but deeply telling detail: "You can log into Mecharashi with WeChat now... I'm pretty sure they've been invested in for a while." For veterans who've watched this game for years, that WeChat login was the smoking gun.

The real fireworks came in the form of a collective reckoning against the dev known only as 'Fat Tiger' (胖虎) — the community's nickname for Game Principality's lead producer. One veteran delivered what can only be described as a textbook-grade teardown: "This game is the textbook example of a dev going full coast-and-cash-grab mode." The core hook is a genuinely novel 'vertical-screen cricket fighting' mechanic (a portrait-mode auto-battle loop), and after that one innovation, the devs essentially checked out — resorting to aggressive monetization and stealth changes.

The most jaw-dropping detail? In the early days, players could literally wire money directly to Fat Tiger's personal account, and he'd manually add mechs to your game. This 'hand-to-hand transaction' approach in a 2024 mobile game is borderline surreal. On top of that, Fat Tiger is infamous for making grand promises — an open-world mode, a new mech fighting game — none of which ever materialized.

The current business model has been summarized by players as 'buying expired Japanese robot IP licenses for collab cash grabs,' though the game does have a fair share of original mech designs. Art quality is a total lottery — it depends entirely on which artist happened to draw that particular character, resulting in wildly inconsistent quality.

The JP-vs-CN server favoritism is another sore spot. Players accuse Fat Tiger of being a die-hard weeb (哈日, "worshipping Japan") who gives the Japanese server significantly better rewards and treatment. His reputation is described as "absolute trash," and stealth nerfs are "nothing new" for this game. He's also known for dropping inflammatory takes in community channels, but since the game is so niche, the drama rarely blows up.

The PvP scene has its own horror stories. One player alleged that a guild dominating the arena leaderboard was 'suspected of being an official dev-rigged team specifically created to grief players.' Others mentioned Fat Tiger's long-promised guild war overhaul — donating expendable mechs, guild ships, etc. — which he'd then undermine by tweaking reward structures to force previously peaceful guilds into fighting each other.

The monetization experience is arguably the worst part. One veteran raged: "You'd whale a couple thousand yuan to pull a mech, and within a month or two it's already power-crept out of relevance." Nerfing premium mechs and pilots is routine. 'PY mechs' (backdoor-obtained overpowered units) sold for over ¥1,000 each, and you'd need three copies of the same mech to unlock weapon animations. Non-mech characters were useless in PvP, aircraft squads got nuked by a single patch, and a pilot with action-sealing abilities got its entire mechanic axed after players found success with it.

Of course, a few voices offered milder takes. One casual player noted that 'the game is actually generous with premium currency — if you log in daily, you can basically grab every shop skin without spending a dime.' Another player, a VTuber fan, said they'd 'go easy on the game' because the studio once collabed with their favorite streamer. But the prevailing sentiment was summed up perfectly: "After seeing all the insane gacha drama and price inflation across the industry, it's honestly diluted my anger toward Fat Tiger" — in other words, other games have been so much worse that this dev almost looks reasonable by comparison.

One commenter's darkly humorous take captured the mood: "Now that they've got investment money, they'll probably go even lazier. Give it a few months and they'll blow the cash on an AI model just to squeeze more money out of players." Some even pointed out that the studio already released a ¥980 figure of a mech designed by legendary mecha artist Masami Obari — "only people with more money than sense would buy that."

In the end, Tencent's involvement has dragged this once-obscure niche game into the spotlight. For the veterans, it's neither good news nor bad — they've been hardened by years of Fat Tiger's antics, and at this point, they're essentially immune.