Tencent Is Seeking A Bigger Stake In 'Mario + Rabbids' Publisher Ubisoft

Gross. Governments need to watch these moves by the PRC the same way they watch TikTok. It is all about surveillance by the CCP.

Nothing alarming about a CCP-backed company buying out all other companies. Nothing alarming at all.

Rather them than Microsoft, atleast their games will stay multiplatform.

So yeah hopefully this should keep them away

I hate hearing news like this, I really do.

Great. Another move toward only having five companies in the world and having governments own them all.

There needs to be some sort of international anti-trust laws enacted against some of these company acquisition moves

Honestly? Ubisoft seem to be just... lumping along with no direction. I wouln't be surprised if the family that are the biggest owners of Ubisoft just sell out and leave to avoid having to face the reality that they f*** up in a lot of ways in the recent years.

@UltimateOtaku91 Nah i would rather MS over Tencent, Tencent is nothing but trouble.

Seriously now, dont bring politics into this. Tencent is as good as any western company. And i dont think Tik Tok is tracking us any different than Facebook.
And Ubisoft sucks now anyway Tencent may help them get out of irrelevance.

@dimi Free Hong Kong.

It's strange, the Guillemots seem to have fought for decades now to keep Ubisoft independent and fend off outside takeovers. It seems that perhaps they've given up the fight somewhat...

@dimi let's not bring politics into this government acquisition?

So Tencent wants a Tenpercent?

Sorry, I had to

@WallyWest but under Microsoft there would be no more Mario and Rabbids games

@UltimateOtaku91 Maybe. Quite possibly maybe not, also. Nobody would have expected Banjo and Steve in Smash or Cuphead and the Ori games on Switch, but here we are.

Makes me even less likely to buy Ubisoft games, despite being a fan of Assassin's Creed and recently having enjoyed Mario + Rabbits.

Saudi Arabia owning a big stake in Nintendo also feels bad, and will affect purchasing decisions in the future.
Note, I'm also a Nintendo shareholder.

I really wish they would just completely ban gaming over there and leave it to humanity to enjoy.

Not that they make much I care about these days, but Ubisoft spending years fending off Vivendi only to end up under Tencent's thumb would be tragically ironic.

@dimi tencent is owned by chinese so yes this is a big problem their trying to silence studios they either bought out or have a huge stake in the studios business from ever speaking out against wat goes on in china we saw that with blizzard/activision incident a year back.

@dimi Don't worry. Most of us hate Facebook too, along with Google, Amazon, and all the other aspiring Big Brothers out there.

Yikes hope this doesn't happen. I am fearful for Ubisoft. Besides Siege and AC it's been pretty rough lately for them.

@retroman64 Go read anything about the Hong Kong protests. The number of people that got disappeared and/or suspiciously suicided is terrifying. China gaining more influence over a place is almost universally bad for that place.

@retroman64

You’re kidding right?

Seriously people, separate Government problems from Video games, we (or, at least, Me), don't need see sadness in video games, is entertainment, no drama or problems, please.

@uptownsoul @UltimateOtaku91 Are you guys serious? Are you actually prioritizing the console wars over an economic invasion by a hostile totalitarian government? Do you have zero perspective outside of your own immediate interests?

Hope this deal falls through. Last thing we want is the Chinese Communist Party spying on us through Mario & Rabbids. The less China involvement in western companies and life, the better off we all will be.

@Anachronism
Economy invasion? It's all about?
Thanks to those ****** economies ideologics we have a sad world with environment problems, society problems and a long etc.
And before that anyone tell me that I don't know nothing, I, I know some of all this, but, I prefer, at least, in this "video games and entertainment" web page, talk about video games and entertainment .

I don't want talk more about of problems, I want a moment of enjoyment.

@Anachronism i don't see what that has to do with gaming though.

According to Wikipedia, Tencent's largest shareholder is Prosus (majority owned by Naspers), which owns 30.86% of all shares and hence is the controlling shareholder. However, Ma Huateng, co-founder of Tencent, still owns a significant stake (8.42%).

Naspers Limited is a South African multinational internet, technology and multimedia holding company headquartered in Cape Town, with interests in online retail, publishing and venture capital investment.

Prosus, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate company that is the international Internet assets division of South African multinational Naspers.

Despite being headquartered in China, it's not exactly a chinese company anymore.

I would still prefer Vivendi over them...

@Anachronism wow you seriously saying tencent increasing their stake in ubisoft is the Chinese government making an economic invasion?

Tencent own so many studios and have stakes in epic games and capcom yet I'm yet to see any problems.

People are worrying about things that are just rumours, you don't think our governments would of done something by now if all these tencent rumours were true?

They own riot games, makers of league of legends and valorant with a huge player base, no ones bat's an eyelid, they own 40% of epic, the makers of the most used game engine and fortnite, no one bat's an eyelid, yet a 15% stake in ubisoft and people turn into politicians

@retroman64 I mean, besides all the actual human rights violations, China also banned game consoles up until pretty recently and still restricts the number of hours kids are allowed to play.

@UltimateOtaku91 Do you not remember Blitzchung? Also just Riot Games and Activision Blizzard in general.

@SakuraHaruka Most people are a victim of capitalism to some degree, but that doesn't mean you get to ignore the billions of people worse off than us whose abuse makes all our cheap, mass-produced toys economically feasible.

@Anachronism
For that, I said: "I know some" of these topics, but, seriously, "still" is needed worry "all the time" for this?

@RubyCarbuncle
Don't worry, for me, it's good no involved in this kind of topics, at least, no in this "video games" webpage, here is for fun, no for more worries...

I hate Tencent and will try to never buy a game from them.

Hmm, if the Saudi government’s investment in Liv Golf is called "sportswashing," could you call all these aggressive acquisitions by Tencent and other Chinese corporations "gamewashing?"

Good luck to Ubisoft's PR team should a Chinese company gain a controlling share of their stocks. Also to their HR team, because I imagine there will mass resignations.

@uptownsoul Yes, let me just throw out my games, and my phone, and computer, and car, clothes, childhood toys, gifts from dead friends and family. I'll just go build a log hut in the middle of nowhere and live guilt-free while the rest of the world continues to decay. The worst part of all this is that we're born and indoctrinated into it before we even have a chance to realize how wrong it is, and then we're too dependent on it to do anything. Between the options of completely isolating myself and changing nothing or staying in the world, continuing to talk about these issues, and having a slim chance of reaching someone who might eventually be able to put some tiny dent in them, I'll take the latter.

Other than just wanting to own whatever they can, this seems misguided. Ubisoft has been in freefall for years, so unless a controlling stake is up for grabs, this is a poor investment.

That really sucks. I don't want China to own them

At this point if Ten cent wanted to enter the console market they definitely have enough IPs to make quite a few exclusives for it. Who knows? That might be their plan...with a heavily regulated marketplace to boot.

@SakuraHaruka I'd agree that a video game news site is usually not the best place for politics, but given the subject of the article, I think it's both relevant and important to talk about this kind of thing here. Entertainment has a bigger influence on public opinion than just about anything these days. No one trusts politicians or news stations anymore, but people still grow up using celebrities and fictional characters as their role models. Sometimes that leads to positive lessons like valuing friendships and accepting people's differences. Sometimes it leads to idiots who think they're the main character of the universe or are mindlessly devoted to some stranger who will never know their name. Either way, the influence of a major entertainment company cannot be overstated, and the lessons they teach people and ideologies they promote can't be dismissed just because they're delivered through a medium that's supposed to be just for fun.

@uptownsoul Fair enough. I'm a rando rambling on a video game news site. But the fact that we're still talking about it means you've already thought about it longer than you would have if I'd said nothing, which is about as much as I can hope to accomplish.

@raftos It’s because they fact it’s a Chinese company that matters. There are laws stating that public companies have to be 100% transparent with all its user info. Something like tik tok, can track you through other devices that are connected to your app’s IP address device. The US government and Facebook do not have to share info the same way. The US government is trying real hard to become like the CCP.
I do not have social media since learning of these stuff years ago. I will not let tic tok on any of our kids devices.

Purchase like this are only bad for us everyday people.
I am not a criminal, but to not think that any government should ever be able to track everyday citizens or ever another countries government. Read the fine print, even Joe Rogan did a video a couple weeks ago about this. Probably 2 billion downloads too late.

If you don't want to talk about politics then don't get involved in the comments. People aren't going to stop talking about things they think are important because you're not having fun

Every five or ten years someone tries to “hostile takeover” UbiSoft. They should of let EA buy them years ago.

Just sell the company to China already. That way we can give more money to the fascists.

If Tencent owns the majority of Ubisoft I won’t be buying any more of their games.

To add some levity, I don't know what's funnier, a large investor named Tencent or a wealthy rapper named 50 Cent.

@Waka_the_Prophet
When I said Ignore the problem?
I said separate topics, because there is enough of that in the world, I see it on TV and Internet news, in the newspaper, even in WhatsApp group messages, it is necessary to increase the drama for this in some calm and entertainment like video games?

And note, I am NOT ignoring the issues because I know them, I know them to death, my mind does not forget that there are so many problems on the planet and still here, they continue to show them to me, in a video game forum...

I'm not going to close my browser to see video game topics just because there is news of this kind, I've been on the Internet for years and my friend, this is nothing, Nothing.

If someone tell me I'm dramatic, look at their comments, they beat me and by a lot but well, continue with your frustration about what China and Tencent are doing.