Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: ubisoft, vivendi

Vivendi's Conquest Of Ubisoft Probably Coming To A Head This Year

Published Tue, 25 Apr 2017 19:45:26 -0500

This morning, Reuters ran a story that got passed over by many in the business end of media but made a lot of people in the game world sit upright and take notice, as it appears that Ubisoft will end up having new owners before the end of 2017.

Vivendi is a French mass media conglomerate who produce content in movies, television, music, video games, and other media areas. Think of them as a European version of NBC Universal or Time Warner. Lately, shareholders have been losing faith in the company's leadership after their shares have been consistently dropping over the past few years. Without getting into a long-winded explanation, when you piss off the shareholders, bad things happen, including higher-ups losing their jobs. So in order to appease some of the shareholders and smooth over relations with them, Vivendi is kicking up their timeline to acquire Ubisoft and become their new parent company. Right now, they own just over 25% of the company, which is enough to have a say but not enough to have control. According to Reuters, people within Vivendi are saying the plan is to buy out the rest of the shares within the next six months, meaning they'd own the company before the end of October. If the plan fails, however, Plan-B is to look into acquiring companies in China to further expand their reach as a global competitor. We'll keep you updated as we hear more about it.

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