Google discussed teaming up with Tencent to buy Epic Games

[Gamernyc78]

Google discussed teaming up with Tencent to buy Epic Games

New info from the Epic v Google trial shows that in 2018, Google had floated the idea of teaming up with Tencent to buy full 100% ownership of Epic Games.

www.tweaktown.com

New info from the Epic v Google trial shows that in 2018, Google had floated the idea of teaming up with Tencent to buy full 100% ownership of Epic Games.

Driven primarily by Stadia, Google once had a roaring flame of ambition to break into video games. The search giant made a big splash in gaming throughout 2018 with its now-defunct game streaming platform-and-storefront Stadia, and to help fortify its billion-dollar disruption, Google planned to invest more into content infrastructure. Google had originally eyed some high-profile deals for Stadia before eventually settling on opening its own first-party labels and entreating third-party publishers.

According to new findings in the Epic v Google trial, ex-Stadia lead Phil Harrison had proposed an interesting idea: What if Google could ally with Tencent and completely buy Epic Games' shares? This would help supercharge Google's position with co-ownership of Fortnite, which was practically the biggest game in the world in 2018 thanks to the battle royale's astronomically-high $5.5 billion in revenues.

Failing that, Google was exploring a potential 20% stake purchase in Epic for the sum of $2 billion.

As per The Verge, the court case revealed email testimony between Google executives that laid out preliminary ideas and plans for the gaming platform.

In July 2018, Phil Harrison wrote the following regarding a potential Epic acquisition or stake purchase:

I've taken a stab at a high-level strategic rationale for an investment in Epic.

Fortnite is (or can be) the leading business driver for Google across:

• YouTube (already 100M+increase in game watch time MAU)
• GCP (to shift 130M+players from AWS and build an anchor tenant in games

Dav Sobota, who served as director of corporate development at Google from 2008 - 2018, replied with the following message that discussed potential plans to team up with Tencent in some way:

As a potential alternative, Phil is proposing we consider approaching Tencent to either

(a) buy Epic shares form Tencent to get more control over Epic (unclear how that helps us without a majority share) or
(b) join up with Tencent to buy 100% of Epic (and then of course we do a lot of deep commercial things with Epic).

Chinese tech giant Tencent currently owns about 40% of Epic Games, with Sony Corp. also having invested to acquire a ~5% stake in the company. Epic has been valued at over $31 billion.

 

[Snes nes]

as If epic wasn’t bad enough. Hopefully that doesn’t go through it’d be bad seeing all These game companies get bought up.

 

[Kokoloko]

Yikes. Big Tech is really trying to buy them all.
Nintendo and Sony need to at least protect there interests in Japanese publishers. Buy some shares If your not gonna buy them outright. Sony especially

 

[voke]

Protect capcom, square, sega. everyone else can do whatever tbh

 

[flaccidsnake]

it's funny if google bought epic they would've shat them out a year later just like epic did with bandcamp.

 

[Snes nes]

Yikes. Big Tech is really trying to buy them all.
Nintendo and Sony need to at least protect there interests in Japanese publishers. Buy some shares If you not they are not gonna buy them outright. Sony especially

i heard somewhere on the net that nintendos got a lot of bandai Namco stock to the point where if they were to be bought then they’d go to nintendo. I wonder though if Sonys got stock in square though.

 

[Muddasar]

Wonder what the valuation is now for Epic.

Sony does own 5% of them.

Wonder how much they get if there’s a buyout.

 

[Yurinka]

Wonder what the valuation is now for Epic.

Sony does own 5% of them.

Wonder how much they get if there’s a buyout.

Epic is a private company, so in that case Sony would decide if they want to sell or not the shares they own. And if they decide to sell them, they'd decide the price.

Same goes with Tim Sweney, Tencent and the other ones who own shares.

And well, obviously before all this they'd make due diligence to analyze the value.

 

[Yurinka]

i heard somewhere on the net that nintendos got a lot of bandai Namco stock to the point where if they were to be bought then they’d go to nintendo. I wonder though if Sonys got stock in square though.

Not true. Nintendo only has 1.732 % of Bandai Namco. Kadokawa has 1.093 % and Toei has 1.063 %.

Bandai Namco owns 2.16% of Kadokawa.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/BANDAI-NAMCO-HOLDINGS-INC-6497993/company/

 

[Zzero]

Not true. Nintendo only has 1.732 % of Bandai Namco. Kadokawa has 1.093 % and Toei has 1.063 %.

Bandai Namco owns 2.16% of Kadokawa.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/BANDAI-NAMCO-HOLDINGS-INC-6497993/company/

You're right, and Nintendo also has similar small shareholdings of a number of othwr JP game companies. Its sort of just how businesses are run over there.

 

[Say1nMan]

That man, Phil Harrison really is the grim reaper everywhere he goes. US politicians would have had a field day with this.

 

[Yurinka]

You're right, and Nintendo also has similar small shareholdings of a number of othwr JP game companies. Its sort of just how businesses are run over there.

Yes. As an example, Kadokawa made a deal with Sony and CyGames to bring their Kadokawa games and anime IPs to new markets and in exchange Kadokawa gave around 2% of the Kadokawa shares to Sony and to CyGames.

 

[BroodCorp]

Yikes. Big Tech is really trying to buy them all.
Nintendo and Sony need to at least protect there interests in Japanese publishers. Buy some shares If you not they are not gonna buy them outright. Sony especially

What interest does Sony have in Japanese publishers currently?

 

[Zzero]

Shat interest does Sony have in Japanese publishers currently?

Off the top of my head, in addition to the "normal ones" they own parts of Kadokawa and Fromsoft, and (non-Japanese) Epic and Devolver, as well as all of Lancresse (sp?) through their music or anime division. They also own a semiconductor company, Discord and some other "gaming adjacent" stuff.

They have way more tv/film investments though.

 

[Kokoloko]

Protect capcom, square, sega. everyone else can do whatever tbh

Also Konami IP, Tecmo, Nihon Falcon and Namco.
Capcom, Square, Sega and Konami IP are top priority lol