Vivendi to sell all shares in Ubisoft by March 7, 2019 - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.vivendi.com/en/press/press-releases/extension-of-the-ubisoft-forward-share-sale-deadline/ As announced on March 20, 2018, Vivendi has sold forward its remaining interest in Ubisoft (i.e. 7,590,909 shares representing 6.7% of the share capital) for an amount of approximately €500 million, corresponding to a price of €66 per share. This 6.7% interest will be sold by Vivendi to two financial institutions as follows: approximately 0.91% on October 1, 2018 as planned, and 5.74% deferred to March 5, 2019. Vivendi has given an undertaking to Ubisoft to sell all the shares it owns by March 7, 2019 (settlement date). In addition, Vivendi maintains its March 2018 commitment to refrain from purchasing Ubisoft shares for a period of five years.

yay

6.7% was pretty minor anyway, right?

What the fucks a Vivendi and is this good or bad

Vivendi is a big conglomerate that was trying to take over Ubisoft, it's good.

It's a french media conglomerate that tried and has failed to acquire Ubisoft.

The evil is defeated.

I get that monoplies are bad, its why I don't like Disney, but would this made Ubisoft worse than it already is? I mean, they aren't EA or Take Two levels yet, but still.

People where bitching pretty hard when they bought in. So maybe. Unless it's Facebook or tencent.

So vivendi owns, gameloft, interesting

Ubisoft in general is a pretty solid developer though. There's obviously a level of beurocracy that comes with AAAA studios but overall they're pretty down to earth and try to maintain their products.

they wanted to do a hostile takeover a while ago

Ubisoft is far from perfect but they're far from being as shitty as EA and T2. Ubisoft actually cares about releasing quality games and they learn from their mistakes. If they were EA, we would have already seen GVMERS release a video on "The Rise and Fall of Rainbow Six." If they were T2, Siege games would be won by whoever dropped the most money on the game and they wouldn't even try to fix the balance

shoo vivendi, I might not have high praise of ubisoft but I know they're better off independent and not under vivendi.

Ubisoft is far from the company they once were. Almost all of their games released recently have been great and even less successful titles like For Honor and Wildlands are still seeing updates.

Ubisoft is the only one of the big three third parties (them, EA, ActiBlizz) who I actually unequivocally like. They're not immune to some of the AAA BS out there, but their games are more consistently good than the other two and they're the least overall sleazy of the three, whereas EA and AB seem to wrestle for the sleaziness crown every year. Plus they have IPs actually worth caring about and with true pedigree, like Rayman or the various Tom Clancy series.

fyi Activision-Blizzard split a while back

While I have some issues with Ubisoft, particularly in regards to their insane number of special editions per game, I respect that they have completely avoided the trend of P2W microtransactions in AAA games, and they are willing to invest multiple years of post-launch support into their titles instead of farming out yearly sequels. Also, canceling Assasin's Creed for a whole year and going back to the drawing board was the best thing that happened to the franchise in nearly a decade, and more companies could stand to learn from that decision.

no? activision and blizz are separate companies, but they're still owned by activision blizzard

Oh, you're right. I'm thinking of the split with Vivendi. My bad.

Yeah, the only experience I have with modern Ubisoft is Siege, and I thought that was the exception, heard nothing about bad things for things like For Honor and Crew 2

I gained a ton of faith in Ubisoft products after what EA pulled. They're hardworking people who dedicate their time to implementing the latest tech, I wish more AAA studios were into that. Course its a huge guilty pleasure of mine to play their games, especially for the Single-Player experiences. I'm glad Vivendi pulled out, they need to create their own studio and need to stop trying to cash in to successful ones.

To add to this, one of the more recent GVMERS about Driver really paints a good light on Ubisoft too. Driver: San Francisco was conceived because Ubisoft were like to the devs 'alright guys we're giving you all the time and resources needed to make the best Driver game you'll be able to pull off). https://youtu.be/oBRqVZObvu0?t=23m 23:00 It's a far cry (heh) from Reflection's previous publisher who kept pushing them to bring out Driv3r as soon as possible, resulting in a half-finished buggy mess of a game with sprinkles of what could had it been. The former devs are all now happily working withing Ubisoft being able to tackle any projects they want, and whenever they feel like it, Ubisoft is even cool enough to green-light another Driver game whenever the devs feel like doing another one again.

Can you really call SCE a AAA dev? I thought they were sort of in their own category along with Microsoft Game Studios and Nintendo EAD, being platform holders as well.

did I miss something with Vivendi? I always thought they had a really good reputation from the late 90s-early 00s through their publishing deals for a lot of really popular games.

idk if it's anything wrong with Vivendi so much as it is the Guillebros not wanting to be held to what majority shareholders want, which is what they felt Vivendi was attempting to do. They wanted to maintain control over their studios and losing their position as majority shareholders would mean Vivendi would effectively own Ubisoft and all it's assets

Back in '02, Valve sued Vivendi over claims that they were illegally distributing Valve games to cybercafes and withholding royalties. Vivendi countersued with a frivolous lawsuit for breach of contract over Valve distributing their games on Steam by this point, and actually demanded the court hand over the intellectual property rights for the Half Life franchise. Valve won. So yea, Vivendi will forever be on my shitlist for being the kind of corporate criminals that steal from their partners and then try to use the court system to steal from them further when they get caught.

oooooooh you know I had totally forgotten that it was Vivendi that Valve had a row with back then. now that you've written that, I totally remember why people dislike Vivendi now. I'm not sure what company I was confusing them with

Vivendi operated under Sierra Entertainment at the time, so you may be thinking of that brand name.

They didn't fail completely, they did a hostile takeover of Ubisoft's mobile game company gameloft before going after the main company.