Funcom is the Oslo-headquartered game developer behind Conan Exiles and Dune: Awakening, wholly owned by China’s Tencent since 2020. Its Lisbon studio — the former Zona Paradoxal (ZPX), in which Funcom took a 50.1% stake in January 2019 — is a core node in the group’s cross-studio production network alongside Oslo, North Carolina and Bucharest.
Funcom’s relationship with Lisbon began as an outsourcing arrangement: from 2017, local game-services studio Zona Paradoxal (ZPX) produced animation work for Conan Exiles, Funcom’s open-world survival hit. On 8 January 2019 the Norwegian group converted the relationship into ownership, acquiring 50.1% of Zona Paradoxal, Lda and turning the Lisbon team into a permanent studio inside the group.
Today the Lisbon studio provides engineering and support across Funcom’s largest productions under a cross-studio model in which Oslo, Durham (North Carolina), Lisbon and Bucharest contribute to shared projects — most prominently Dune: Awakening, the group’s flagship open-world survival MMO. Group headcount stood at roughly 446 in May 2026, with Tencent as sole owner since completing its buyout in July 2020.
Funcom is one of the few Nordic gaming groups with a production studio in Portugal, and its Lisbon operation shows a repeatable corridor pattern: a services relationship (outsourced animation) converted into equity and then into a permanent engineering hub. For Portugal’s growing game-development cluster, a Norwegian-rooted, Tencent-backed studio anchored in Lisbon is a meaningful credential.
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