Vivendi's hostile takeover of Gameloft and Ubisoft

Mass media company Vivendi has been acquiring shares of Ubisoft and Gameloft, the latter of which it is now the new owner of. The Guillemot brothers, who have founded both companies, view the move as unwelcome and believe it restricts the freedom the company had as an independent developer.

Background
Vivendi first started video game publishing after its acquisition of Sierra Entertainment in 1998. After its acquisition of Universal in 2000, the latter's video game division, Universal Interactive, was consolidated along with other studios Vivendi had purchased such as Blizzard Entertainment into Vivendi Universal Games and later Vivendi Games, which became the new publishing division of games. Throughout its history, Vivendi Games published several notable franchises such as Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro.

In December 2007, Vivendi Games announced it would merge with Activision to form Activision Blizzard, which went active in July 2008. On July 25, 2013, Activision Blizzard has bought its stake from Vivendi and became independent, and along with it went its video game publishing unit.

Overview
After losing their gaming division in 2013, Vivendi attempted to return to the gaming once again two years later. In October 2015, Vivendi purchased a 6% stake in Ubisoft, a move which was considered hostile and unwarranted by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. In February 2016, Vivendi acquired 30% of Gameloft, by which point they also increased their stake in Ubisoft to 15%. By June 2016, Vivendi held a 61.7% stake in Gameloft. Despite the Guillemots' efforts to fight off the takeover, Gameloft CEO Michel Guillemot resigned on June 29, 2016, and the founders begrudgingly sold their 21.7% stake in Gameloft to Vivendi, giving them almost complete ownership. As of July 2016, Vivendi now owns 96.9% of Gameloft, and their replacement the company's management to reflect their ownership.

As for Ubisoft, Vivendi managed to raise the stake to 30% in September 2016, in which they can now make a tender offer to allowing the shareholders to bid for their takeover. Sawing a potential threat, Yves Guillemot has invested 3.5% of the share to raise his own stake to 12.5% and raising capital from within the family and investors as well as lobbying shareholder to prevent them selling their shares to Vivendi. In March 20, 2018, Vivendi has finally given up their attempt to take over Ubisoft and sold of its share in Ubisoft, some of them were later purchased by a Chinese conglomerate company Tencent.