Dropping from 12 billion to 3.X billion is much different than dropping from 43 to 32.
That said, all this shows is that market cap is not the metric that’s behind used. Ubisoft is still the same company it was then, with the same output and the same employees. Does their stock dropping somehow change their impact on the gaming industry?
I wouldnt say Tencent is obviously one of the biggest publisher, the big gaming studio they own is Riot, much of their gaming income comes from partial ownership of other companies like Epic (40%)
You were literally arguing when debating acquisition how many games Ubisoft produces and how impactful are their IPs and how big it is If we remove market cap out of equation - ABK, EA, T2 and Ubisoft are the biggest western publishers if not the biggest gaming publishers there.
Nobody considers Tencent a regular gaming publisher - it is a chinese tech giant. Basically chinese Microsoft. Google, Apple are not even in the same category as gaming publishers. And NetEase actually is not that big and. comparable to EA maybe but again just like Tencent is more a tech company, rather than a game publisher.
If Epic is one of the biggest game publishers and Tencent own 40% of it, in addition to Riot which makes the biggest games (LoL and Valorant) it would be no?
And didn’t I state unless they are going by volumes of games above? Which Ubisoft obviously does output more than most! My main point was about the amount of IP’s and the regular output for so little cost (compared to the other publishers)!
If anything I believe you were arguing that they weren’t impactful which clearly they are.
Market cap, revenue, profit are irrelevant when talking about the impact on the market there. Ubisoft is no doubt is one of the well known and biggest western publishers despite having 3.5b market cap. Ask people around and Ubisoft will be one of the well known entities there despite being so much smaller.
I was arguing that their market cap represents their value - with 20k people they have a fraction of what EA, T2 or ABK make despite being 2x times bigger. ABK is hiring like crazy while generating 8b in revenue. Even if they are cheap, 20k people is a huge liability. But that’s beside the topic.
At least it is officially established that the big 4 are EA, ABK, T2 and Ubisoft. Microsoft certified
No, it just means they get the financial benefit of partial ownership of a major publisher. They are not playing the role of publisher and they do not make publisher decisions. By that logic you could say Warren Buffet’s company is one of the top publishers because of their stake in ABK.
I hope it’s not due to what seems to be countless streaming. While it’s his choice, I can’t help but feel guilty. Whatever it is, I do wish and pray for the best.
It depends what you’re talking about. If you’re disregarding the Chinese market, where Tencent is the absolute king, then maybe you can make a case that they’re somehow not deserving of mention as 3 or 4 years ago before their overseas divisions had multiplied to the extent they have now.
But as of 2022, I don’t think you can really make that case anymore. They have 100% ownership of:
Funcom (MMO developers)
Leyou (Who in turn owns Digital Extremes and Warframe, the remnants of Telltale, and Splash Damage)
The entire Sumo group, which represents thousands of developers including multiple subordinate studios
Turtle Rock
Riot Games (arguably their crown jewel, who is on their own a multi billion dollar concern with one of the largest games on earth in LoL and multiple other huge games, plus more in development)
Plus majority stakes in:
Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile is quite big!)
Fatshark (Darktide)
Super Cell (one of the world’s largest mobile companies, owner of the Clash franchise)
This isn’t a comprehensive list, I left off some of the smaller and less important ones, but literally just Riot Games on their own would be a company that you could speak of in the same breath as Ubisoft, Capcom, Square Enix. In 2018, Riot had more employees than Zenimax did, and they’ve continued to hire explosively since then (their linkedin is at 6,500 - not an accurate measure but even if they had only 4500 that’s a metric assload). They earn >1.5 billion in revenue annually. And Super Cell! Clash of Clans! They are enormous.
What is different about Tencent, for now at least, is that they have not asserted powerful central control over their foreign divisions. There’s the China side of the company, and then there’s everything else running vaguely autonomously. More so even than Microsoft’s acquired companies. We don’t get any kind of annual conference or promise of games all being on Gamepass, not even that level. It’s closer to the Embracer model. Nevertheless, if you were talking about market power, ownership of content and so on, it’s an absuridty to not think about them, even if you didn’t care about minority stakes.
Beat me to it, I was going to say something similar.
They are huge now, in terms of gaming revenue they are bigger than Sony, Microsoft, Apple or Google.
I think it’s fair to say they are atleast one of the biggest gaming publishers, if not the biggest if you go by revenue.
Even if you go by employee size (in just their gaming division) they are massive.
As you mentioned Riot Games on its own has more employees than Epic Games (which they also own 40% off).
They have more employees than T2 and quite possibly ABK.
I think the thing with Tencent is that they don’t really have the presence of a publisher, at least in the west (like you mention). They own publishers as opposed to being a publisher, if that makes any sense. It’s probably kind of arbitrary, but their publishers seem very independent with no strategic involvement from their parent company.
Anyway, suppose we’ve ventured off topic for this thread.
If we remove market cap out of equation - ABK, EA, T2 and Ubisoft are the biggest western publishers if not the biggest gaming publishers there.
