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WOW! EA Buys 20% of UbiSoft
- Thread starter mcdonnell
- Start date
If there ever were another crash then EA would be the first to feel it. The bigger they are-the harder they fall. They own so many development studios they'd downsize in a hurry.
Theyre living very dangerously,all this spending could hurt them if things slow down in the industry.
Theyre living very dangerously,all this spending could hurt them if things slow down in the industry.
michael000
Banned
another shrewd move by EA, it's only 20% though.
ManDudeChild
Member
etiolate said:
PAL version.
Yeah, but is the good stuff selling? No, it's not -- and that's the danger.impirius said:
Gaming is cornering itself -- the industry has just a few points of failure in the form of mega franchises. Again, look at November: Halo 2 sold tons of copies due to hype, yet turned out extremely generic (sorry, I don't care for it, and I'm not alone); and yeah, GTASA is probably a great game (haven't played it), no problem there with this incarnation of the series; MGS3? Meh, it's bombed. It might be a sleeper hit pretty soon, but no one bothered to hype it enough to get around H2 and GTA.
So, what happens if the next GTA bombs? There go Take Two and Rockstar -- two instant fatalities. Now suppose that there might be many good games released -- which of those would have significant mindshare with the public to get them to buy it? What if there isn't another big title that year to take up the slack? Retailers lose, which leads to less orders for everything -- they still have to find a way to recoup their losses and dump all of that excess GTA inventory. The original titles don't sell because no one knows about them, which leads to further discouragement of original concepts in the next dev cycle. The publishers only want to pay for something that they know will sell, so we get more generic stuff that probably won't, since the public does eventually get tired of generic crap.
Call me crazy if you want, but is a scenario like this so hard to imagine? I don't think it will happen for a while -- past the middle of next gen at the earliest. I don't see how we can avoid it if we keep going down this path, though.
20% gives them the biggest share of the company. Even the Guillemot brothers who created Ubi only have 15%.michael000 said:
EA now has a seat at the "conseil d'administration" with veto power, which gives them about as much power on Ubi as if they actually owned the whole company.
deadhorse32
Bad Art
Koshiro said:
A company with money buying other companies is not illegal.
michael000
Banned
Koshiro said:
Nope, but i'm also not overly concerned about it either though. Empires are empires they come and go and life continues heh. My money is still my money and i'll spend it on what i want; if EA is part of a good game i'll buy it, if it's bad i won't lol.
michael000
Banned
Blimblim said:
I'm well aware of how stocks work. If in fact 19.9% gives them a majority share then it's an even smarter move by EA heh. Control of another company without sinking a ton of money.
F
Folder
Unconfirmed Member
Reality check:
This doesn't matter.
You will never see a difference.
It's not as though Ubi is the bastion of credible game releases.
EA, arguably, has more decent offerings.
This doesn't matter.
You will never see a difference.
It's not as though Ubi is the bastion of credible game releases.
EA, arguably, has more decent offerings.
F
Folder
Unconfirmed Member
Blimblim said:
You got a link for this mate?
I couldn't agree less. I'm not a big fan of Ubi (especially how they treat the sites here in France) but until now Ubi's big releases have been much better than EA's.Folder said:
But I also think they were already going the EA way, with this awful (imho of course) POPWW , and a quite bad looking Rainbow Six 4 in the works. But they still have some BIG games coming like SCCT who looks to be a much better game than anything I see listed in EA's planning.
This one is outdated, but it's the only thing I have from an official source :Folder said:You got a link for this mate?
http://www.ubisoftgroup.com/InvestorCenter/shareholders
Edit : more complete breakdown (still not up to date since Talpa Beheer sold 19.9% of the shares to EA) :
Guillemot 16.4 %
Talpa Beheer 10.5 %
Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations 5.77 %
Crédit Lyonnais 5.42 %
Société Générale Asset Management 4.64 %
Oppenheimer Funds 2.49 %
CIC Gestion 2.05 %
Crédit Agricole 1.74 %
Etoile Gestion 1.65 %
Company-owned shares 0.23 %
Crédit Agricole Indosuez Cheuvreux 0.17 %
The Bookerman
Member
wow... that explains a lot.
F
Folder
Unconfirmed Member
Cheers mate.Blimblim said:
This is simply to get EA games on French shelves.
Ubi Soft is a powerful brand in France and a household name. Its sales staff run riot with French retail, seeing massive shelf space allocations the kind of allocation usually reserved for Electronic Arts.
EA gets as much if not more shelf space as Ubisoft in the gaming shops I go to here in France. It's sad but EA is as much important in France as in the rest of the world.Folder said:
And France is not a big enough market to justify such a big investment for shelf space anyway.
deadhorse32
Bad Art
France has been a EA whore for awhile
F
Folder
Unconfirmed Member
I always noticed (experience in hypermarches usually) that Ubi/Vivendi/Wannadoo got a shitload more exposure in France than anywhere else. I was chatting to one of the sales guys at Konami Europe and he said that the French publishers' sales teams have it well sewn up in France. Is this not the case or are hypermarches not representative of the market in general?Blimblim said:
I don't usually go to the videogames section of our "hypermarchés", just to the food stuffFolder said:
When I go to micromania (our local ebgames) I almost always see either a Sony or EA games being heavily promoted. I have some very nice quotes from MS people about when they first met the Micromania people about Xbox, fun stuff 
Late Stage Marxist
Member
20 percent? Cheapskates!
Baron Aloha
A Shining Example
Excellent news!
Better EA than Microsoft or someone like that. At least this will ensure their games are still multi-platform.
Better EA than Microsoft or someone like that. At least this will ensure their games are still multi-platform.
MrPing1000
Member
No Good can come of this
Duckhuntdog
Member
Think that is why you see Take-Two trying to buy things like crazy at this time. They know they have a one trick pony and when GTA has to go to the glue factory, they want to have back-ups. Or atleast try to have back-ups.
the only sure thing in this industry is that Nintendo will always be doomed.
the only sure thing in this industry is that Nintendo will always be doomed.
Luscious LeftFoot
Member
All this doom and gloom is hilarious...
radioheadrule83
Banned
I don't really think this is bad news. They know how strong Ubi is, and how much stronger it can get.. investing is really gonna help them acheive that. If Ubi can someday be considered a part of EA too, then EA has that much more quality under its belt. Everybody wins...
I'd much rather this than anyone else taking them over being that the people who could afford it would probably make them console exclusive.
I'd much rather this than anyone else taking them over being that the people who could afford it would probably make them console exclusive.