Tencent Might Be Buying Ubisoft

Both the Chinese video game giant Tencent and the Guillemot family, majority owners of Ubisoft, are reportedly considering options, including the possibility of acquiring the French video game developer. This comes soon after the disappointing sales of Star Wars Outlaws, which resulted in a massive share price drop for the studio, resulting in Ubisoft’s lowest point in the last decade.

In terms of overall market value, Ubisoft has lost half of its net worth within the last six months alone. This huge drop resulted in a reduction in investor confidence. In the recent earnings call, Ubisoft stated that Star Wars Outlaws performed well below expectations, and swiftly decided to delay the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows to February 2025 to ensure its quality was up to the level fans expected.

The plummeting stock value of Ubisoft has resulted in both Guillemot Brothers Ltd. and Tencent discussing the possibility of working together to restore its value. One of the proposed solutions is teaming up and making the company private, another is a complete buyout of Ubisoft by Tencent.

Ubisoft is trying very hard to recover the lost goodwill regarding Star Wars Outlaws, which the company claimed was its first AAAA game. But the technical issues alone were enough for most gamers to lose interest in it fairly quickly. The company has promised to fix up the game with a new roadmap, ending in the game’s eventual release on Steam.

If Star Wars Outlaws can recover its lost goodwill, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows can live up to its lofty promises, Ubisoft should hopefully be able to recover from this slump. But according to the last earnings call, Ubisoft is concerned about Ghost of Yotei, and believes its announcement makes the Fudal Japan setting more competitive than expected. Making matters even worse, the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows is confoundingly placed in February, which is a packed month with some big releases like Monster Hunter Wilds, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and Avowed.