Ubisoft / Tencent rumors

[Pete Dero]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-15/tencent-guillemot-family-are-said-to-mull-ubisoft-asset-venture

Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Ubisoft Entertainment SA's founding Guillemot family are considering creating a new venture that would include certain Ubisoft assets as they seek to boost the French video-game company's value, people familiar with the situation said.

The Chinese technology firm and the Guillemot family are evaluating which assets to include in a new entity and their valuation, the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. A potential deal would allow Tencent to own a stake in the venture and gain more control over some of Ubisoft's intellectual properties, while boosting its video game business outside of China.

[JasonPratt]

Tencent of course is under increasingly heavy scrutiny for piggybacking backdoor access and information piped to the CCP government.

[Redwolf]

Tencent of course is under increasingly heavy scrutiny for piggybacking backdoor access and information piped to the CCP government.

That's one reason why I have a dedicated gaming PC that does nothing important, ever.

It's not that there can be high confidence into the security of Western games.

[Uberhaus]

Not that I support Tencent and more specifically the CCP in any manner, but how easy would it be to get code for exploits past their mostly foreign programming studios?  Can it be done when vigilance is not poor?  Surely (hopefully?!!), they'd notice if they were ordered to add malevolent code or instructions that could later access and download such code?

[JasonPratt]

I think it could go either way, or even both ways: Tencent's owners could be on board with this happening (which would be in the CCP's advantage if they could arrange who's owning/managing a semi-corporation under CCP government.) Or they might be ignorant of it, or even against it, and yet the CCP gets it done anyway. And again the various creators downstream might be ignorant or against it to any degree, yet the owners and/or agents of the CCP get it done anyway by various means.

Certainly there's plenty of evidence the CCP gets it done, a lot, by hook or by crook. Tencent is a poison chalice at best, and the more successful a Chinese business is, the more motivation the CCP will be to exploit them for full spectrum warfare purposes -- keeping in mind that (much like the USSR) they regard themselves as being in actual warfare at all times against all non-true-communists, i.e. everyone not under their direct public control.

To be fair, I have no idea how many of the games I play are spiked by the CCP. I don't go out of my way to check, though the Tencent situation reminds me I really should. Maybe we need a separate thread for wider research on that...