Ubisoft’s New Far Cry Game Rides on Tencent’s Billions

Ubisoft has canceled one Far Cry shooter and greenlit another, and the studio making both calls just banked a $1.25 billion check from Tencent. The new project, codenamed Kodiak, is an open-world shooter built on the bones of a scrapped extraction game called Maverick. It comes from Vantage Studios, the Ubisoft unit that now runs Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six with the Chinese gaming giant as a minority owner.

That decision was also the first big creative call made public since the investment closed, and the return on it now depends on Ubisoft getting calls like this one right. The studio making them is co-run by the boss’s son.

Kodiak Grows Out of a Canceled Shooter

Insider Gaming, the outlet that first revealed Maverick’s existence in 2023 and later its reboot, reported that Kodiak cleared Ubisoft’s conceptualization stage earlier this month. Sources described it to the outlet as an open-world FPS where “player interactions and player-driven stories take center stage,” built using tools and world design carried over from Maverick rather than started from zero.

People familiar with the project called it “really ambitious,” and it is still, by that same account, several years away from release. That puts Kodiak on a different clock than the two other Far Cry projects already public: Blackbird, the mainline sequel, and the now-dead Maverick it grew out of.

An Alaska Shooter Undone

Maverick started life as a multiplayer mode for the next mainline Far Cry game before splitting off into its own standalone title in early 2023. The pitch was an extraction shooter set in Alaska, where players fought wildlife, AI soldiers and each other to survive long enough to get out.

It never settled. Ubisoft rebooted the project from close to scratch in early 2025 after the team struggled to lock down a final game loop, and by the following year it was still described as unstable. Insider Gaming’s new reporting confirms what that instability pointed toward all along.

1. Early 2023: The Alaska-set extraction shooter splits off from the next Far Cry game to become a standalone project, codenamed Maverick.
2. Early 2025: Ubisoft reboots Maverick after the team can’t lock down a final game loop.
3. December 2025: Developers are pulled off Maverick and reassigned to Blackbird to protect that game’s schedule.
4. July 2026: Kodiak clears conceptualization, built on the tools and world-building Maverick leaves behind as it is canceled.

Tencent’s $1.25 Billion Now Rides on Far Cry

The studio making these calls did not exist eighteen months ago. Vantage Studios, formally the entity Ubisoft Nova SAS, became fully operational on October 1, 2025, built specifically to house Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six under one roof.

On November 21, 2025, Ubisoft closed a 1.16 billion euro cash investment from Tencent, priced against a pre-money enterprise value of 3.8 billion euros for the new unit. That gives Tencent a 26.32% economic stake in Vantage while Ubisoft keeps full control and consolidation. In dollar terms, the check runs to roughly $1.25 billion.

Every decision made inside Vantage since that closing, including which Far Cry project lives and which one dies, now has Tencent’s capital sitting behind it.

Vantage Studios launched as a standalone creative house months before Tencent’s cash landed, but the closing is what turned the arrangement from an internal reorg into a financial one, with an outside shareholder now watching the results.

Blackbird Buys Itself Some Time

Far Cry 7, internally codenamed Blackbird, has its own history of slipped timelines. Ubisoft confirmed during its February 2026 earnings call that the game had moved again, from a Holiday 2026 target to Summer 2027, as part of the wider restructuring around Vantage Studios.

The December 2025 move of Maverick’s developers onto Blackbird appears to have paid off internally. Charlie Guillemot, Vantage’s co-chief executive, called the game “honestly impressive” in an internal interview and described it as “Act One,” language that points to more mainline Far Cry titles built on the same template if Blackbird lands well with players. Blackbird will also carry a multiplayer component letting more than one player move through its world together, a feature Maverick was originally meant to supply before it split off on its own.

Why Is Charlie Guillemot’s Surname an Issue?

Charlie Guillemot is Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot’s son, and his October 2025 promotion to co-chief executive of Vantage Studios, the unit now holding Tencent’s money and Far Cry’s future, drew immediate nepotism accusations that his father has publicly defended rather than brushed off.

Guillemot’s path back to the top of Ubisoft was not a straight line. He joined Ubisoft-owned mobile studio Owlient in 2014, left the company entirely in 2021, and spent the gap years running a startup before returning in 2025.

• Family tie: Charlie Guillemot is the son of Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot.
• Career gap: He left Ubisoft in 2021 to co-found Unagi, an AI-driven web3 gaming venture, before rejoining the company in 2025.
• Internal role: Once back, he sat on Ubisoft’s Transformation Committee, the internal group tasked with reviving the company’s flagship franchises.
• New title: He now co-runs Vantage Studios alongside Christophe Derennes, the pairing now answerable to Tencent for how that money performs.

Yves Guillemot has defended the appointment directly, saying Ubisoft “was created as a family company” when pressed on the decision. Whatever the merits of that defense, it means the executive deciding Maverick’s fate and Kodiak’s greenlight is also the person under the most scrutiny inside Vantage Studios right now, at the exact moment an outside investor is watching the unit’s output most closely.

Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six Carry the Same Bet

Far Cry is only one-third of what Tencent bought into. Assassin’s Creed, the pillar with the deepest release calendar, recently shipped a remaster whose handheld performance splits sharply by price, a reminder that even Vantage’s steadiest franchise has execution questions of its own before Kodiak enters the conversation. Rainbow Six Siege keeps generating recurring revenue without needing a reinvention.

Outside those three protected franchises, revival hopes at Ubisoft move by leak rather than press release, like the Rayman Origins remaster leak that surfaced this year. That contrast is the clearest sign of what Tencent’s money actually bought: focus on three names, at the expense of everything else in Ubisoft’s catalog waiting for its own turn.

Kodiak remains several years from release, by every account gathered so far, long enough for Tencent’s bet on Vantage Studios to be judged well before a single player picks up a controller.