Ubisoft is a name modern gamers associate with open-world games littered with side missions and towers, gameplay trailers that look better than the final product, and gross misuse of the word “iconic.” Later this year, gamers might have to add “Vivendi” that list.
According to Reuters, Vivendi plans to buy more shares of Ubisoft. As of right now, Vivendi only owns twenty-five percent of the company, but Chairman Vincent Bollore wants to move on to a “second phase.” Ubisoft’s owners and creators, the Guillemot family, are doing everything they can to keep their company, but their resistance might do more harm than good, as Vivendi might simply present an unsolicited full takeover bid.
According to an unnamed source cited by Reuters, Vivendi’s most logical course of action would simply be to outright buy Ubisoft, even though, according to the that source, Bollore does not intend to buy the company. Whether or not he buys the company, since Vivendi is based in France, French laws dictate that once a company owns 30% of another company’s shares, an offer has to be made regarding ownership. Since Vivendi already owns 25% of Ubisoft, Vivendi will have to make an offer if it buys more stock.
Ubisoft is not Vivendi’s first foray into video games. From 2001 to 2008, Vivendi Games, also known as Vivendi Universal Games, was a subsidiary of Vivendi that partnered with several game companies. Among the more notable games Vivendi Games published were F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. In 2008, Activision Blizzard — yes, that one — merged with Vivendi Games, effectively ending its existence as a subsidiary of Vivendi. However, that was not the end of Vivendi’s relationship with video games. Last year, Vivendi acquired ownership of Gameloft, a developer mostly associated with mobile games such as Order & Chaos Online, Spider-Man Unlimited, and N.O.V.A. Legacy. Interestingly, Gameloft was also created by the Guillemot family.
While we do not know if Vivendi will actually try to acquire Ubisoft, the more important question will be: what happens if it owns Ubisoft? Will Vivendi take the company in a new direction or will it mostly be left to its own devices? Will Vivendi’s ownership improve the quality of games? Given Ubisoft’s recent games, I honestly do not know whether or not I want to find out the answers to these questions.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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