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A Chinese tycoon was poisoned on Christmas Day, according to Shanghai police. Lin Qi, 39, was the chairman and CEO of game developer Yoozoo, best known for an online strategy game based on the Game of Thrones series, according to the BBC.
A statement from the Shanghai police showed one of Lin’s colleagues, who was identified only by his last name Xu, as the main suspect.
Lin would have a net worth of almost 6.8 billion yuan (1.3 billion US dollars), according to Hurun’s list of the richest people in China.
Many former and current employees gathered in front of Yoozoo’s offices on Friday to mourn his death.
Lin Qi was a star in the profitable gaming market. He also tried film production.
He founded Yoozoo in 2009 and successfully ran the company during a period when the gaming industry made major changes to mobile games.
The company released an emotional statement on its official Weibo microblog.
“Goodbye youth. We will be together, we will continue to be good, we will continue to believe in good and we will continue to fight against everything that is bad,” the statement shows.
The post attracted thousands of comments while the topic was viewed more than 290 million times on Weibo.
Although details are few, Lin was allegedly poisoned, according to police statements.
Yoozoo released his own statement, saying that Lin had been hospitalized after feeling unwell, but that he was stable.
Things took a dramatic turn on Friday, when the company announced that its founder had died.
According to local media reports, the detainee could be Xu Yao, who heads Yoozoo’s film production division.
There has been speculation in the press that Lin was poisoned with pu’er tea, a Chinese fermented drink.
Yoozoo produced the strategy game Game of Thrones and also worked on the game Brawl Stars, along with Tencent Holdings.
The company is also known for its connection to the science fiction novel “The Three-Body Problem,” which owns the rights to the film adaptation.
But its expansion into the film industry has not been as successful as the company would have liked and the project to adapt the book to six Yoozoo Pictures films has not started.
In September, it granted the US platform Netflix the right to adapt the science fiction novel for television.
The book is the first of the trilogy “Memories of the Earth’s Past” written by Liu Cixin, being highly appreciated. Former US President Barack Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are among fans of the book.
Editing: Alexandru Costea
