Assassin's Creed Officially Moves From Ubisoft For New Home

The majority of Ubisoft’s biggest franchises have now officially moved to a brand new home, including Rainbow Six, Far Cry, and, yes, even Assassin’s Creed.

Earlier this year, you may have heard that Tencent, the Chinese megaconglomerate that owns stakes in some of the biggest video game studios in existence, successfully purchased a 25% share (valued at roughly $1.25 billion) of Ubisoft.

The response to the news was pretty dire. Tencent already owns a mixture of majority and minority stakes in dozens of huge video game devs and publishers, including Riot Games, Epic Games, FromSoftware, Techland, Bloober Team, and Remedy Entertainment, and their unending expansion across the market has been concerning gamers for years.

After a relatively dismal run on Ubisoft's behalf, following several high-profile cancellations and flops, Tencent swooped in back in March and nabbed a large stake in the publisher.

This was only possible due to the stock valuations reaching “historic lows”, likely in part due to the dismal performance of Ubisoft’s “first AAAA game” (as dubbed by CEO Charlie Guillemot) Skull and Bones, which supposedly cost the publisher $850 million to develop.

Well, the time has finally come for Tencent to make good on its investment, because (as spotted by IGN’s Tom Phillips), Ubisoft has just announced that the two have formed a “new creative” house to oversee their biggest IPs, dubbed “Vantage Studios”.

As explained in an official post on Ubisoft’s website, Vantage is “now responsible for some of Ubisoft's largest franchises”, which includes, but seemingly is not limited to, Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six, and Far Cry.

The new studio is being run under Ubisoft's latest subsidiary, which was formed shortly after Tencent's investment, and will be "led" by co-CEOs Charlie Guillemot and Christophe Derennes. The creative house will be formed of Ubisoft's existing studios based in "Montréal, Quebec, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Barcelona, and Sofia".

The rest of the statement is a bunch of corporate waffle, about how Vantage Studios' goal is to "facilitate stronger and deeper connections between developers and players" and allow for a "shorter pathway between gathering and implementing player feedback", but in reality the new studio is simply designed with Tencent’s influence in mind.

So does this spell doom for Ubisoft’s biggest franchises? No, probably not.

I’m not the biggest fan of Tencent either, but it’s honestly hard to see them making Ubisoft any worse than it already is. We’ll have to wait and see what big announcements Vantage Studios has lined-up before we can truly speculate on how Tencent’s investment has altered publisher, so check back in a couple of years to see what they’ve got planned.