Karsticles
Member
Is this a joke? Blizzard game quality has taken a nosedive after the Vivendi acquisition.
Ubisoft might not have a lot to lose there, though.
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Ubisoft CEO stresses creative independence as Vivendi takeover threat looms
- Thread starter Spring Drive
- Start date
Ubisoft might not have a lot to lose there, though.
darkinstinct
...lacks reading comprehension.
I don't think either one of those would be interested in releasing games on the other platform. And if you make them all exclusive you're essentially killing Ubisoft.
EdwardTeach
Member
From a gaming point of view this will definitely not be a good thing. They would be controlled by "suits" with no expertise in the industry and no interest in gaming beyond making a quick buck. Time and again this had been shown to be a recipe for disaster. Like them or loath them 30yrs is a great achievement and it would be a shame to see it end.
For those confused by the terminology, hostile takeover just means a takeover against the wishes of the board. Obviously the brothers no longer own a controlling share or this couldn't happen. The offer from vivendi will be considerably above the current share price. It is likely to happen as most of the shareholders will be straightforward investors who will be delighted to make a profit on their investment.
For those confused by the terminology, hostile takeover just means a takeover against the wishes of the board. Obviously the brothers no longer own a controlling share or this couldn't happen. The offer from vivendi will be considerably above the current share price. It is likely to happen as most of the shareholders will be straightforward investors who will be delighted to make a profit on their investment.
Twist: The CEO of Vivendi is a big PC gamer and this is all part of a larger plan to kill Uplay.
MadJackChurchill
Banned
Especially when Tom Clancy's name is being put on anything, Watch Dogs 2 is a sequel to a bad game, and they haven't announced any more UbiArt games.
Spring Drive
Banned
Here's an answer (warning: wall of text)
Vivendi: Bolloré’s master plan
The media group chairman believes he can compete with global players, but is his strategy right?
Vincent Bolloré thinks Vivendi’s time has come. The French industrialist, entrepreneur and sometime corporate raider has spent the past two years behind the scenes at Vivendi remodelling the Paris-based media group, of which he is chairman, to bring it into focus for the 21st century.
The process has involved a shopping spree of more than €4bn across Europe, made possible thanks to a €35bn assets sale, primarily to reduce debt, before Mr Bolloré became chairman in June 2014. But the acquisitions raise more questions than they answer. Even people in the tightly knit world of French banking, where secrets rarely last long, admit to not understanding what the 64-year-old billionaire is up to.
Mr Bolloré concedes that Vivendi’s recent investments in the telecoms and video-gaming industry — precisely the areas it exited before he became chairman — may look confusing. “It’s like a painter,” he tells the Financial Times. “You may not know why there’s a blob of blue and a dash of brown but in the end you will see that we are painting something that is relevant.”
For Mr Bolloré, “relevant” means establishing Vivendi as a southern European powerhouse able to compete for audiences with some of the world’s biggest media and content groups — in one breath, he mentions Walt Disney, Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch.
(...)
Yet Mr Bolloré’s vision of turning Vivendi into a global media force has its detractors. Analysts point to the relatively small size of southern Europe’s audiovisual market compared with that of the US. They also question prospects for growth in a region whose economies, with perhaps the exception of Spain, have been stagnant for years.
More generally, they argue that Vivendi’s desire to achieve synergies across music, film and television plus video-gaming has proved an elusive goal. Across the Atlantic most media companies have moved away from the idea that there are such savings to be found. Even Walt Disney, perhaps the world’s most recognisable media brand with a vast library of intellectual property, has shifted strategy lately, closing down its video games division and moving to a licensing model instead.
“There is no evidence that there are synergies,” says one person in the financial community who has followed Vivendi for years. “Can you take a movie and ensure that it only uses material from your music company? Yes, but is it worth owning a music company to do that?”
The same person also questions Mr Bolloré’s strategy at a time when the shift to digital has created new competitors — Apple, Amazon, Google — capable of threatening groups far bigger than Vivendi. “You’re starting as a minnow in a pond with big fish but even bigger fish are coming along,” he says. “The plan looks extremely vague.”
Mr Bolloré is unfazed. He points to Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, by far the world’s largest recorded music company with revenues last year of €5.1bn. Canal Plus, the Vivendi-owned network, stretching from pay-TV channels to Studio Canal, its film production and distribution unit, generated revenues of €5.8bn last year. A third strand of the new Vivendi — video gaming — is also taking shape, says Mr Bolloré.
Since October, the group has built a 17.7 per cent stake in Ubisoft , the French games developer; in February, it launched a tender offer for Gameloft, another French producer. On Wednesday it said preliminary results of the offer had left it in control of 61.7 per cent of the group.
“We have got Universal Music, we are getting into video games and we are investing in movies, series and shorts,” says Mr Bolloré. “The idea is to deliver the content through a galaxy of relationships with telcos.”
At home in France, he would like to strike a deal either with Orange, the biggest mobile provider, or Free, the low-cost operator controlled by entrepreneur Xavier Niel.
(...)
[About Telecom Italia:] “We don’t want to be an operator. We don’t want, industrially speaking, to manage a telecoms company. We manage content . . . We don’t manage Telecom Italia and we will never manage it.”
That said, Vivendi managed to replace the chief executive in March after securing four seats on Telecom Italia’s 18-member board in December.
Mr Bolloré has a reputation as a long-term empire-builder but he is also infamous as an opportunistic investor. In 1997, he bought a 12.5 per cent stake in Bouygues with a view to gaining board seats and a grip on the French construction and telecoms conglomerate.
A year later, after a punishing fight with the controlling family, he gave up — but not before notching up a reported $210m profit. More recently, he pulled off a similar manoeuvre at UK-based Aegis, walking away with a reported €450m.
(...)
His most immediate challenge is Canal Plus’s French pay-TV business, which, unlike the rest of the unit, is losing money — an estimated €400m this year — as it wrestles with falling subscriptions and competition from rival platforms plus the escalating cost of securing exclusive sports rights.
In what has become something of a pattern, Mr Bolloré stepped in to become chairman of Canal Plus and fired some senior managers. The move last year created a storm in France — not least because it was seen as meddling with the network’s irreverent image.
Mr Bolloré insists it was necessary. “You can’t say that the house is OK just because the fire is in the basement when you are on the first floor,” he says. “When you have a problem, the important thing is to talk about it.”
(...)
He argues that [former Chairman Jean-Marie] Messier’s vision for Vivendi was correct. “Jean-Marie was right in terms of the merger of content and the distribution network,” he says. “Everyone is doing that now.”
The big difference, he argues, is that Mr Messier was not a leading Vivendi investor. In recent years, Mr Bolloré has used his fortune — Forbes ranks him the 11th richest person in France with a net worth of $5.3bn — to gain a 14.3 per cent stake in Vivendi, becoming its biggest shareholder, for a cost, he says, of €4bn.
The French media mogul’s approach to corporate governance makes Rupert Murdoch look like a saint
France’s so-called Florange law, which grants long-term shareholders double-voting rights, has made his position even more dominant. In the case of Vivendi, which has a market capitalisation of €24.2bn, that has left him holding 25 per cent of the voting rights.
Over his career, Mr Bolloré has made an art form of using minority shareholdings to gain control in a company. In 2004, in one of the most prominent examples, he bought 5 per cent of French advertising group Havas — the same size as his original holding in Vivendi four years ago. Within months he took seats on the board, removed the president and gained control.
At Ubisoft, the founding Guillemot family is worried about suffering a similar fate. In February, Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft’s chief executive, said: “We want shareholders to have the right information about where we are going and how we will get there, and to understand how dangerous creeping control could be”.
As chairman and minority shareholder at Vivendi, Mr Bolloré has attracted scrutiny over issues of corporate governance. Activist shareholders have openly questioned his style with one branding the Bolloré group’s purchase of Vivendi shares “opportunistic”.
The appointment to the Vivendi board last month of Yannick Bolloré, his son and chairman and chief executive of the Bolloré family’s majority-owned Havas, turned heads. Bolloré senior says he fails to understand why. “It should not be a negative,” he says. “I don’t understand. It’s normal when you invest somewhere to have shareholders around the table. I would love to know why it’s a problem.”
(...)
Mr Bolloré insists that his presence has given the group the time it needed to devise a strategy. He dismisses suggestions that he controls everything and says that he takes a back seat. However, when he overhauled Canal Plus last summer, the FT reported that Mr Bolloré even suggested a joke for Les Guignols, a satirical TV show starring latex puppets. “It is not true,” he says. “I am very involved because I am the chairman of the supervisory board but I have a team . . . I am not active.”
He adds: “I don’t do much at Vivendi. I create the atmosphere, I take part in the nomination of people but it’s those people who are doing everything.”
Publicly, Mr Bolloré avoids setting targets. He talks instead of the importance of a long-term vision.
“For the past 30 years, we have built a worldwide organisation, step by step,” he says of his own Bolloré Group. “With Vivendi, it’s the same. We have a plan. You can say it’s a stupid plan. But it is our plan.”
Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c4866724-28a0-11e6-8b18-91555f2f4fde.html
These are the games Blizzard released while property of Vivendi:
StarCraft
StarCraft: Brood War
Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition
Diablo II
Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
I'm not a PC gamer but I remember people liking these games.
So
StarCraft + Expansion
Warcraft 3 Expansions (and rerelease of WC2)
Diablo 2 + Expansion
World of Warcraft + Expansions
Is that right?
I wonder how many games were released by any other comparable sized publisher over the same time period
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos is the actual Warcraft III. So in ten years this developer made four major games including an MMO and major expansions for them. That is very good for a developer. And it is very hard to argue about their quality when before the Vivendi buyout they made games like the Mac port of MicroLeague Baseball and Rock n' Roll Racing. It says nothing about how Ubisoft will be under the new Vivendi, but it would be retconning history to claim Blizzard wasn't anything but great in that period.
Sarcasm?
Most of you don't know Vivendi as it is known in France. They would replace every important executive by accountants who'll only care about numbers and "synergies" with the other Vivendi brands. Problem is they have no expertise whatsoever in the gaming industry and only want to grow big, while not carrying about their own people or their consumers. In the recent year they broke the French TV Canal+ by firing every senior executive, killing the best shows and creating an atmosphere that let its known stars to go to other channels, while losing subscribers. That means that Ubisoft will probably lose lots of talented developers, will focus on 2-3 big brands and won't release smaller games or new IPs because, yeah, it needs a particular policy that promotes creativity to create them (there is an editorial team based in France that is in charge of controlling the quality of every game, test new IPs). Vivendi probably believes video games can be made like electrical cares or toothbrush.
Grow Up ? It's a sequel but it was here.
Steep was a pleasant surprise too, and a risked bet for Ubisoft
Spring Drive
Banned
Would another studio have made Steep, Watch Dogs 2, South Park or Trials of the Blood Dragon?
WaterAstro
Member
Uuuuuh What?
Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft was made in that time.
Nosedive is when Activision came into ownership.
Those two sold well.
Of course sequels were on the pipeline.
Agent_4Seven
Tears of Nintendo
You know what guys, if Vivendi had plans to takeover CDRP for example then I would be extremely unhappy and extremely disappointed. But Ubisoft...? I could care less about them and about their games in general along with their creative impotence which they're so trying to protect and defend like they really have something significant / really important to protect and defend.
This company only has good concepts and ABSOLUTE ZERO well implemented games in recent history (with very few exceptions and really well done games I care about such as Blacklist, Siege, recent major Rayman games and South Park - which they simply bought from THQ btw). Oh, and don't get me started on AC games.
All I care about from them right now is the new South Park game and maybe future SC game, the rest of their half done games / the same games with different numbers / concepts can go to hell. I realize that there's a lot of fans around the world who likes their games, but personaly I just don't give a flying F about Ubisoft... for the most part... with a very few exceptions and selected games / franchises I care about.
This company only has good concepts and ABSOLUTE ZERO well implemented games in recent history (with very few exceptions and really well done games I care about such as Blacklist, Siege, recent major Rayman games and South Park - which they simply bought from THQ btw). Oh, and don't get me started on AC games.
All I care about from them right now is the new South Park game and maybe future SC game, the rest of their half done games / the same games with different numbers / concepts can go to hell. I realize that there's a lot of fans around the world who likes their games, but personaly I just don't give a flying F about Ubisoft... for the most part... with a very few exceptions and selected games / franchises I care about.
Spring Drive
Banned
Gameblog Editor-in-chief posted a vlog about the Vivendi/Ubisoft situation: http://www.gameblog.fr/news/59792-j-ai-quelque-chose-a-vous-dire-sur-yves-guillemot-et-la-libe
I don't have time to watch right now, could someone transcript/translate?
I don't have time to watch right now, could someone transcript/translate?