It’s no secret that Ubisoft is worried about a hostile takeover by Vivendi. The French publisher has gone public with its worries in the past, and now they’ve given several reasons why they don’t want it to happen. One of the key reasons being that they feel like their creativity would be stifled.
Here’s what Ubisoft’s Vice President of Live Operations Anne Blondel had to say about the company’s success and how that would change under Vivendi when talking to PCGamesN:
The thought I have is that I have been [here], with Ubisoft, for 20 years, and I know what made us so successful for 30 years, is being super independent, being very autonomous. 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. 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.
The most powerful quote came at the end where Blondel said that “if you take away the way we like taking risk and inventing new stuff, it’s not going to be the same Ubisoft.” While it’s very easy to play devil’s advocate here due to Ubisoft’s penchant of formulaic design, they do in fact take some risks. Games like Grow Home and Valiant Hearts are not what one would expect from such a huge company. Plus, they did give the go ahead on Trials of the Blood Dragon, which may not have been as good as folks wanted it to be, but was certainly a risk.
