If you caught the Ubisoft E3 press conference then you will have seen the rather passionate monologue by Yves Guillemot at the end of the show.
“The real innovation happens when our teams and players are free to create, free to innovate, free to express themselves, free to takes risks and have fun,” said Yves. It doesn’t take a genius to work out this message was directed at Vivendi, who are are mounting a hostile take over of the company.
Over the past few months Vivendi have picked up over 20% of Ubisoft shares, and is “is considering acquiring more shares depending on market conditions.” There’s all sorts of legal reasons why this may prove difficult, not least that many Ubisoft shares are held by employees who would be reluctant to see anyone other than Yves in charge.
In the past Vivendi had shares in Activision, during which a number of franchises such as Guitar Hero were milked to death, and we were subjected to rubbish movie tie in video games. After Activision regained control they have considerably reduced their output and focused on quality rather than quantity, and have tried a new approach to licensed properties including a well received Transformers game, and a less well received Turtles title.
Vivendi have already bought a majority share in Gameloft, the sister company to Ubisoft, and also own Universal Music, Studio Canal, See Tickets, and Dailymotion.
Source: Bloomberg
MrYd
As much as some people seem to hate Ubisoft, letting Vivendi control them would be a terrible thing. They seem to buy up loads of companies, kill of anything that might be interesting but not make lots of money, milk anything left for as much as they can get, and then possibly sell off the remains later on.
I’ve just been holding a grudge against them for almost 20 years though. A complicated tale involving one of my favourite bands (The The, named before anyone thought of how hard that would be to Google), Sony (refusing to release an album with the wonderful title of GunSluts), and a whole chain of record companies ending up with Universal and ultimately Vivendi at the top who did such a terrible job of actually bothering to sell the album he eventually gave it away as MP3s (in 1998 no less!) and hasn’t released another album since.
So if Ubisoft ended up owned by Vivendi, those odd little games they’ve done every so often lately? They might happen, if they were well on the way to release, but they’d sneak out with no promotion and never happen again. But we’d probably get 2 Assassin’s Creed games every year instead.
Of course, I scored 1 point in the E3 bingo thing, so it’d probably be the best idea ever, and we’d get all sorts of wonderful new games from Ubisoft, and they’d all come with a free unicorn that farts rainbows. Because obviously I know nothing.
TSBonyman
The The fan here too. I was playing Infected album at work the other day and Mindbomb is one of my all time favourite albums, still sounds fresh with everything that’s going on. I wasn’t aware of the Gunsluts album but i must check it out – If only he had called it ‘Rainbow farts’ ;)
As for Ubisoft, they seem to have only recently cottoned onto the notion of quality over quantity so it would be a shame to see that reversed by Vivendi.
MrYd
GunSluts never got released, thanks to Sony, although there’s an instrumental track called GunSluts that did get released, and some of the album may have made it on to NakedSelf. Which is quite possibly his best album, except when I’m actually listening to any of the others. There’s also talk of a new album, which will probably never get released (along with at least 4 or 5 other albums that never got released!). Sadly he just lost another brother (Andy Dog, who did all those wonderful album covers for him), so that might delay it. Or lead to another song like Love is Stronger than Death.
And yeah, VivendiUbisoft. Boo!
Tuffcub
Glad you could actually comment on the news in the last line :P
MrYd
In my defence, I went on a big rant about Vivendi, with an example of the sort of crap they like to get up to. And then someone else wandered off at a slight tangent.
But if we’re only supposed to comment on the news and not wander off in random directions, I’ll stick to that. And not make sarcastic comments about it when it inevitably happens anyway :P
Whoops. Was that too sarcastic? Am I going to have to join you on the naughty step now? Will I be safe there?
pdannysan13
I will try not to watch Dailymotion videos from now on.
Andrewww
As much as I like gaming, gamers sometimes get overly excited about their hobby. As a consequence, companies like EA get voted something like ‘Worst company in the world’ or similar, which is complete and utter nonsense, next to companies that let people get poisoned or die in the hundreds.
Ubisoft, for equally stupid reasons are ‘hated’ by some gamers.
Thankfully, not by some others. I consider quite a few of their recent games top quality (bugs you find everywhere). And their shows at e3 have been some of the best in the past years in my opinion.
I very much hope Vivendi doesn’t succeed in taking control of Ubisoft.
The Lone Steven
Ah crap.
Vivendi is bad news. I mean, we all remember the years of Activision trashing franchises with godawful games and milking franchises to death. Universal Music are very unpopular due to their “OI! YOU DARE USE THAT!? YOU SHALL NOT HAVE AUDIO EVEN IF IT’S NOT OUR MUSIC!” takedowns and Gameloft? Got a few preinstalled games on my phone. Medicore.
Oh, about Daily Motion. Ddn’t they ban game related videos just because they could?
I hope they don’t take over Vivendi. Sure, Ubisoft only has one game now. ASSCREEDCRYDOGS 90 but it is still good. They are publishing South Park and i can see it being canned if they took over because well, South Park kinda has a bit of a reputation.