Ubisoft reportedly in talks to sell and go private

A few weeks ago in the face of rapidly dropping share prices, an Ubisoft shareholder published an open letter calling on leadership to take the company private. Now, it appears that shareholder may get their wish, as Ubisoft is reportedly in buyout talks. 

According to Bloomberg's sources, Ubisoft's primary stake holder, the Guillemot family, are in talks with Tencent for a buyout. The news follows a rough few years for Ubisoft, during which sales have dropped, leading to high-profile flops like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and more recently, Star Wars Outlaws, which has not come close to recouping its development costs.

Due to the string of poorly received titles, Ubisoft's board of directors ordered a complete review of the company, in which it will aim to find out why the quality of games has taken such a turn.

The weird thing is, Ubisoft has had a bad reputation for almost a decade for creating such similar games across all of its IP. Ubisoft was able to ignore that criticism when its games were still selling, but now that the gaming community has largely given up on Ubisoft, the company has gone into panic mode. In my mind, panic mode should have begun five years ago.

Tencent currently holds a minority stake in Ubisoft, a deal that was struck to avoid a hostile takeover from Vivendi. If Tencent does take over, there may well be a new CEO put in place to lead the company moving forward. Such a move would likely also lead to layoffs as Tencent would be taking on a struggling business that needs to drastically reduce operating costs.

KitGuru Says: Much like Activision has been better off without Kotick, I do think Ubisoft will be far better off outside of the clutches of the Guillemot family. Many have issues with Tencent due to their penchant for mobile titles and microtransactions, but ultimately, a clear out at the top, and a clean slate for the developers would be a much better option. 

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