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Tencent reportedly want a bigger piece of the Ubisoft pieThe Chinese company met with the Guillemots in May about buying more shares
The Chinese company met with the Guillemots in May about buying more shares
Chinese gaming and social media giants Tencent have approached Ubisoft’s founders, the Guillemot family, in an effort to expand their stake in the AAA publisher, Reutersreport. Tencent acquired a 5% stake in Ubisoft in 2018 and now multiple anonymous sources are now saying that Tencent intends to become the single largest shareholder in the publisher, a companyvaluedat almost $6 billion (£4.9 billion).
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Share prices were up for both Ubisoft and the Guillemots’ holding company after the Reuters report was published earlier today. Tencent are looking to expand outside of their home country after beingeffectively frozenin the Chinese gaming market, the world’s largest, since the government there stopped granting new monetisation licences last summer. Licences started being issued again this April, but have yet to include Tencent.
Tencent have been investing in studios outside China for a number of years,acquiringLeague Of Legends developers Riot Games in 2015. I could go into just how many studios they’ve been buying majority and minority stakes in but, crikey, there’s a lot. Here’s just a few beyond Riot: Epic Games, Platinum Games, OtherSide Entertainment, Sumo Digital… Oh wait, Imogen alreadycompiled a round-uplast summer. It’s nothing that other large organisations haven’t done – hi,Embracer Group– but Ubisoft is one of the biggest publishers going, so there’s that.
Earlier this week, Tencentannouncedthey were teaming with Logitech to produce a cloud gaming handheld. The device is intended to support more than one cloud service, and they’re already working with Xbox Cloud Gaming and NVIDIA GeForce Now. Ubisoft games have been increasinglyfinding their wayonto Microsoft’s Game Pass for PC and console, while Ubisoft’srebranded Ubisoft+subscription service has been available via cloud on Google Stadia and Amazon Luna since late 2020.
So far, Ubisoft have declined to comment on any deal with Tencent. It seems, though, that theconsolidation of the games industrycontinues. How would you feel about Tencent grabbing a larger slice of Ubisoft?
