Ubisoft details plans of the new subsidiary with Tencent

The most recent financial report from Ubisoft, released in May 2025, brought new details about the subsidiary created in partnership with Tencent, aimed at expanding the company's main franchises. The project, previously announced without much explanation, now begins to reveal its strategic and operational intentions — and raises questions about its practical viability.

According to the document, the main focus of the new subsidiary will be the “building of brand ecosystems capable of becoming billion-euro franchises in the long term”. To achieve this goal, four operational pillars have been defined:

Improvement of the quality of solo narrative experiences, focusing on storytelling and refined gameplay.

Expansion of games as a service, with advanced multiplayer, more frequent content updates, and extended support.

Enhancement of content production, using Ubisoft's internal set of tools and technologies, such as the Snowdrop engine and the Ubisoft Scalar procedural system.

Penetration into underexplored markets, especially the mobile and Chinese sectors, with direct support from Tencent in distribution and localization.

The choice of Tencent as a strategic partner has a clear justification: the Chinese giant has enough infrastructure and market knowledge to facilitate Ubisoft's access to the competitive gaming landscape in Asia, especially in the mobile segment, where titles like Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile dominate.

The report also mentions that this new structure will operate under a “reformulated operational model”, guided by consumer behavior data and based on more agile development cycles. According to the company, this will allow for a “more effective response to community expectations”.

However, Ubisoft's plans come at a time when the company's credibility is still under scrutiny. Titles like Skull and Bones and the troubled development cycle of Beyond Good and Evil 2 have raised doubts about the publisher's ability to fulfill ambitious promises. The proposal to transform existing franchises into multimedia and multi-platform ecosystems — a concept already explored in Assassin’s Creed Infinity — seems to be another attempt to diversify financial risks in the face of saturation of traditional models.

Still without a public name or specific release schedule for the first projects, the subsidiary will operate semi-autonomously, but with direct support from Ubisoft's central divisions and the technological infrastructure shared with Tencent.

For a company that has struggled in recent years to balance innovation with solid execution, the proposal sounds ambitious — and will depend directly on the reception of players and the consistency of future releases. The new arm of Ubisoft has potential, but as always in the industry, talk is cheap; delivering something that works is the real challenge.