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Vivendi have been slowly making moves on Ubisoft since early 2015. In an interview with PCGN, the French publisher’s VP of live operations Anne Blondel-Jouin has said that Ubisoft’s success has largely been derived from being "very autonomous" and "super independent", and that if Vivendi succeeded in their takeover, it would be bad news for the company.
“The thought I have is that I have been with Ubisoft, for 20 years, and I know what made us so successful for 30 years, is being super independent, being very autonomous,” she explains in the interview with PCGN. “Sometimes we take a lot of risk, you think about The Crew, that was a risk. People would look at that like, ‘maybe it’s not going to work, another racing game, what are you thinking?’ Child of Light, Valiant Hearts, all those kinds of titles."
Vivendi currently has a 24.06 stake in Ubisoft, and has been slowly grabbing further chunks of Ubisoft over the last year, something Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot described as "unsolicited and unwelcome" in an internal email late last year.
Blondel-Jouin described Ubisoft’s independance as one of its biggest strengths: “I think that’s what makes Ubisoft so different, and personally speaking, I think this is what we are. This is what we want to remain, it’s what has made us successful and been able to deliver the type of games we’ve been delivering for 30 years."
You can see more from the interview on the PCGamesN website.
