Ubisoft’s protracted financial battle with French media company Vivendi ended on Tuesday with a surprise announcement: effective immediately, Vivendi is out of Ubisoft’s financial picture. In order to retain its corporate structure, Vivendi’s shares in the company have been bought up—and one of the biggest buyers, as it turns out, is major Chinese gaming publisher Tencent.
The other buyers involved include Ubisoft itself, which has bought up the majority of Vivendi’s former shares, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Vivendi, which formerly owned a whopping 27.3 percent stake in Ubisoft, has additionally pledged not to buy any Ubisoft stock for the next five years.
Tuesday’s news ends a 2.5-year attempt by Vivendi to brute-force its way to owning a majority of Ubisoft through stock acquisition. That hostile takeover attempt, in part, forced Ubisoft co-founder Michel Guillemot to resign from Ubisoft-affiliated mobile-game publisher Gameloft in 2016.
Tencent’s placement in the deal is minor from a company-control perspective, with its new five-percent stake in Ubisoft likely not disrupting decisions on a board-of-directors basis. However, the deal does not include any provisions about Tencent’s future as a Ubisoft investor or controller.
That oversight is curious, as Tencent has been nothing but bullish in recent years about investments in Western game studios. Tencent is perhaps best known in the United States for owning a majority stake in two huge gaming companies: Riot Games, the makers of League of Legends, and Epic Games, the makers of Unreal Engine 4 and game series like Fortnite. (And as the owner and operator of PUBG Corp, Tencent has a stake in both leading entries in the “battle royale” gaming genre.)
The Chinese publisher also has a majority stake in Supercell, the Finnish developer of smartphone megahits Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, and it already owns a significant number of shares in the Activision-Blizzard family, which it purchased when Vivendi dumped its share in that company in 2013. This is all nothing compared to the billions-of-users empire Tencent operates via the QQ platform.
All of this means that Tencent is the company to watch right now for anybody interested in where money is moving in the world’s triple-A gaming space. Ubisoft’s statement about its Tencent agreement revolves largely around how the French games publisher will “accelerate its development in China,” which could mean getting more of its current series (Assassin’s Creed, Rayman, The Crew) in front of Chinese players or hiring more developers in that burgeoning game-development economy. It’s hard to imagine Ubisoft’s game development pipeline not changing as a result to at least some extent—especially to capitalize on a largely free-to-play gaming economy in China.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1279021