Well, Ubi is piece of shit nowadays, so it wouldn’t be such a loss in this regard. But hell, no more monopoly pls, tencent is huge enough already…
Taking it private just means taking it off the stock market (the news of it possibly going private has already cause the share price to spike).
Honestly, public trading of games companies sucks anyway and is what drives all the shit you see from the likes of EA, Take Two, Roblox etc.
Under private control, and less drive to bleed every drop of value out of every property might mean we can get classics like Beyond Good and Evil again.
Well, technically yes, but not under Tencent. These guys will squeeze Ubisofts balls even harder than shareholders do. All stuff that went under Tencent got worse or at least that’s what I remember.
My personal experience with buyouts from private equity investors is that they will milk every single cent out of the company as they crush its soul. They’re looking to make a huge profit, relatively quickly. Yes, the stock market is also looking to profit, and big share-holders have a lot of sway, but publicly traded companies don’t have to answer to a small number of ultra wealthy puppeteers in quite the same way private equity held companies do. Also, there are certain employee protections, particularly around layoffs, that apply to publicly traded companies but don’t apply to privately held companies. This seems to be one of the key strategies in the PE playbook:
- Buy the company / take it private
- Slash costs everywhere, including yearly layoffs.
- Push the remaining employees to adopt a “lean” or “customer first” mindset, which really means “do more work, faster, for less reward”.
- Profit?
As much as I dislike Ubisoft, I don’t dislike anyone enough to wish that process upon them.
Ding ding ding. People hear “going private” and think “mom 'n pop shop”. But PE firms are vultures. Actually no, that’s mean to vultures.
It always amuses me when a certain type of person hears “private company” and thinks that means “better than public”
Like the concentration of wealth makes it more moral or intelligent.
Well “Going private” doesn’t mean anything. It can mean PE. It can mean “traditional” personal/family ownership (e.g. Musk with Twitter). It can also mean moving to a co-op model (theoretically I don’t think anything stops a bankrupt publicly-traded company being bought by its workers). “Private” doesn’t sit anywhere on the political spectrum; even Marxists can generally agree that co-operatives are in principle better than publicly-traded companies.
Unfortunately PE firms are usually the ones who win the bid when a company “goes private” because the PE business model is driven by speculation and leveraged buyouts, and (at least in the US) supported by advantageous tax rates. Even from a purely capitalist perspective it’s an objective failure that harms the macro-economy. It’s not even capitalism anymore; it’s oligarchic.
For anyone not following this - they’re getting cased by venture capital. Some billionaire assholes are trying to use EU laws about minority shareholder rights to fire enough executives that they can just buy the entire company and fire half the employees. Tencent’s investment came with the agreement they could not fuck with existing leadership. They are, somehow, the good guys.
It’s three separate groups of greedy assholes, each awful in their own way, and honestly the least-shitty outcome of this slapfight is if very little changes.
