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Ubisoft eyes 5bn players following Tencent deal

Ubisoft eyes 5bn players following Tencent deal

In the take of its brand new partnership with Chinese tech and entertainment giant Tencent, French publishing firm Ubisoft says it wants to reach a whopping five billion players in the next decade.

As reported by AFP, CEO Yves Guillemot said that his aim is to expand the company's current 500m-strong audience by ten times in the next decade.

While this sounds like a wild ambition, a combination of the increasingly important Chinese market as well as games being available across a wider array of devices, it might actually be far more manageable than anticipated.

As well as China, Ubisoft has also opened up a second studio in India, another incredibly important marketplace right now.

"Ten years on, Ubisoft wants to touch 5 billion players", ten times more than the 500 million players of the publisher with its current games," the exec said - via Google Translate as the original interview is in French.

"First of all thanks to the technology, which will evolve very very quickly. In ten years, all terminals will be much more powerful", with a smartphone competing in performance with a classic console.

"Thanks to cloud gaming (games in the cloud without download), games will be streamed + on different devices, including TV, mobile, or the screen of autonomous cars. This will allow our games to be available on the majority of screens, so our brands will reach a larger population."

"What will count is to create games that will be adapted to these new technologies, on themes that speak to everyone."

Ubisoft and Tencent came to work together after the latter bought a five per cent stake in the former. This was part of a strategy to ditch French media giant Vivendi, who was snapping up higher percentages of Ubisoft but totally, definitely, really had no intention of definitely, really buying Ubisoft.

Part of the deal with Tencent sees the firm having the publishing rights to the French publisher's games in China.


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PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.