A few weeks ago, Ubisoft suffered a historic plunge on the stock market, with the title even falling below €10 at the end of September, its lowest level. A few days later, the latter suddenly rose to €14, helped by a rumor of a buyout from a certain Tencent. Since 1998, the Chinese group (more or less) discreetly invaded many markets, notably messaging, video games, mobility and even online advertising.
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Chinese company Tencent takes over sudoku, crosswords and other puzzles on mobiles
Today, the Chinese group is further strengthening its presence on the mobile video game market, by offering itself, through its subsidiary Miniclip, the Easybrain group. A transaction (in cash) which amounts to 1.2 billion dollars, and which therefore allows Tencent to get its hands on this mobile game publisher.
In the Easybrain catalog, we find very simple games, but also very (very) popular, such as Killer Sudoku, Nonogram, Pixel Art, Art Puzzle, Differences, Groovepad… In short, titles which offer crosswords, coded words , sudokus, puzzles… and which are downloaded on hundreds of millions of iOS and Android smartphones around the world. The firm thus claims 16 million players per day and no less than 2 billion applications downloaded in total.
“As Easybrain’s market transforms, Miniclip is the ideal strategic buyer to keep the company at the forefront of the ad-driven mobile games industry“, announced Embracer CEO and founder Lars Wingefors. Let us remember that this same Lars Wingefors had paid 650 million dollars to afford this same EasyBrain.
Remember that after having acquired a large number of studios and other very renowned video game licenses, Embracer announced a little before the summer its split into three units starting in 2025. The first will be dedicated to board games (notably with Asmodee), the second for limited budget video games and the third for the most emblematic licenses.
On this subject, let us recall that the Embracer group notably acquired Middle-Earth Enterprises, a company which owns Tolkien Enterprises, allowing it to have the rights to adapt the entire Tolkien universe, whether in film or in derivative products (video games, series, etc.). With the acquisition of Eidos Montreal, Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix Montreal, Embracer also got its hands on cult video game licenses like Tomb Raider. Added to this are THQ, Aspyr, Deep Silver Volition, Milestone, Tripwire…
