Ubisoft Shares Spike By 10% After Tencent Invests $1 Billion Into New Subsidiary

Last night, Ubisoft announced a "new chapter in its history" with the reveal that Tencent is investing $1.16 billion into a new subsidiary, and the company's shares have reportedly spiked by over 10% as a result of the news.

To break down all the complicated jargon, this is based around Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six games, and Tencent now holds a "minority stake" of 25% in the subsidiary. In addition to helping "reinforce the balance sheet" and allowing Ubisoft "to become a more agile organization", it's said the games themselves will benefit too:

It highlights the strong value of Ubisoft’s IPs, significantly reinforces its balance sheet, and enables the company to continue its efforts to become a more agile organization, unleash the full creative potential of its teams and better align its resources with the constantly evolving expectations of players.

This new subsidiary will focus on building game ecosystems designed to become truly evergreen and multi-platform. Backed by greater investment and boosted creative capacities, it will drive further increases in quality of narrative solo experiences, expand multiplayer offerings with increased frequency of content release, introduce free-to-play touchpoints, and integrate more social features.

As reported by Reuters, shares rose by just over 10% on Friday morning following the announcement.

The Paris-listed stock was up 10.5% to 14.3 euros by 0833 GMT, for a total market capitalisation of 1.9 billion euros.

This seemingly puts to bed the idea that Xbox could take on a major Ubisoft IP in the near future, which probably wasn't a great idea anyway - original Xbox creator Seamus Blackley suggested as such in a recent interview.

It'll be interesting to see how things develop with these Ubisoft games in the coming years, and whether this new subsidiary ends up resulting in even greater experiences for players on Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and beyond.

What do you make of this Ubisoft news? Let us know down in the comments section below.

[source staticctf.ubisoft.com, via reuters.com.]