A Bloomberg report says struggling publisher Ubisoft is looking for investors for a new business venture that will take control of some of its most valuable gaming properties, including Assassin's Creed. The report says Ubisoft has contacted potential investors including Tencent about acquiring a minority share in the new venture.
Nothing is finalized at this point, according to the report, but sources told the site Ubisoft has asked interested investors to make preliminary bids by the end of the month. Ubisoft may seek a higher valuation for the new entity than that of Ubisoft itself.
This is presumably the next step in a strategy that was first reported in January: Bloomberg said at the time that Ubisoft and Tencent were looking at creating a new venture that would take on some of Ubisoft's assets, which could in turn enable Tencent to have a more direct hand in how they're controlled. Tencent is Ubisoft's second-largest shareholder but has limited influence over the company, which is still more or less entirely under the control of the founding Guillemot family—and the Guillemots want to keep it that way.
Trouble for them is, Ubisoft is not doing well. The company's struggles are well publicized, its share price is a fraction of what it was just five years ago, and its recent high-profile games, most notably Star Wars: Outlaws and XDefiant, have not lived up to expectations. Ubisoft hasn't done itself any favors on the PR front, either. The delisting of The Crew in 2024 was a major self-inflicted wound, the Assassin's Creed: Shadows pre-release period has been marked by stumbles, and no, we still don't know where The Sands of Time is.
Reports of a possible buyout of Ubisoft first surfaced in October 2024, and when Assassin's Creed Shadows was delayed for a second time in January 2025 the company said it was "taking decisive steps to reshape" its business, and had "appointed leading advisors to review and pursue various transformational strategic and capitalistic options to extract the best value for stakeholders."
How that might take shape is anyone's guess but it seems clear that big moves are required: Just weeks after that announcement, Ubisoft closed its Leamington studio and made layoffs at the Düsseldorf, Stockholm, and Ubisoft Reflections studios; all of that happened little more than a month after the shutdown of Ubisoft's San Francisco and Osaka studios.
Ubisoft said in its third-quarter financial report in February that the review of its "strategic and capitalistic options" was ongoing, and referred back to that report in a statement provided to PC Gamer.
"As we mentioned during our Q3 sales, the review of various transformational strategic and capital-raising options is ongoing," a representative said. "The Board has established an ad-hoc independent Committee to oversee this formal and competitive process, so as to extract the best value from Ubisoft’s assets and franchises for all stakeholders. Ubisoft will inform the market in accordance with applicable regulations if and once a transaction materializes."
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