Jason Schreier had still seen right. On January 15, 2025, the Bloomberg journalist announced that Ubisoft and the Chinese giant Tencent were studying the possibility of creating a new company. A A procedure which would therefore have the aim of relieving Ubisoft from its enormous wage load, since the group hires no less than 18,000 employees to date. Schreier’s investigation had not made it possible to go further than this strategic group analysis, but it was clear that Tencent was going to play a decisive role in this story. It was therefore necessary to wait until March 27, 2025 and a press release to learn that the creation of this entity is now official and very real.
Valored 4 billion euros, this new structure will be owned at around 25% per Tencent, which has put the tidy sum of 1.16 billion euros of fresh money on the table, in order to recover the three most beautiful Ubisoft licenses, namely Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six. This announcement, which comes a week after the successful launch of the Assassin’s Creed Shadows game, on which part of the future of Ubisoft depended, is accompanied by several conditions. To start, Ubisoft will not be able to lose its majority in the new entity created for two years and Tencent will not be able to increase its participation for five years, unless its partner loses his majority.
This is obviously a new chapter for Ubisoft, which has known many years for several years. Yves Guillemot also recognizes a difficult year 2024, enamelled with disappointing launches and a stock market tumble. With this subsidiary, which must be finalized before the end of the year and whose name is not yet known, Ubisoft intends to strengthen its assessment so as not to end up in a catastrophic financial situation, but which allows Chinese tence to assert its position a little more within the French company. The rapprochement of the two companies had started in 2022, when Yves Guillemot had opened in Tencent a stake in the capital of the holding Guillemot Brothers, up to 49.9%. And if we believe Frédérick Duguet, the financial director, “Ubisoft has received multiple expressions of interest that have resulted in several non -engaging offers on different options”. Proof once again that Tencent takes advantage of a privileged position in dialogue with French Ubisoft.
Ubisoft took the opportunity to reveal that the success of Assassin’s Creed Shadows continues to grow, now with 3 million players worldwide since its release on March 20. These are also the greatest number of copies sold in the history of the franchise for the day of its release after Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, while the game has already recorded more than 40 million hours of play in total. This unusual communication raises many questions, especially from its detractors who believe that the success of Assassin’s Creed Shadows is rigged. It is true that from the start, Ubisoft has communicated on the number of players and not on real sales, and that for some, this is a way of drowning fish.
According to some estimates, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has a 73% ratio of sales on consoles, compared to 27% on PC. On Steam, moreover, the game would have sold approximately 480,000 copies in the world, while in France, the number of copies sold in physical version amounts to 120,000. We are now waiting for Ubisoft deign to reveal the sales figures now, not the number of players.
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