Vivendi

Vivendi SE is a French mass media conglomerate headquartered in Paris. The company has activities in music, television, film, video games, book publishing, telecommunications, tickets and video hosting service.

Originally founded under the name Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE) by the royal decree of Napoleon III as a water supply company. Vivendi restructured themselves into a media company in 1998, since then, Vivendi has attempted to invest in the gaming industry as a part of their expansion plan, first with the acquisition of Sierra Entertainment and Blizzard Entertainment in 1998, then Activision in 2008 in which they merged them with Vivendi Games (Blizzard's parent company) to form Activision Blizzard, Gameloft in 2016, and is involved in a failed attempt to take over Ubisoft in 2018.

This article will be focused on Vivendi's involvement in the gaming industry.

Why They Suck

 * 1) Similar to how they handled their subsidiaries in other industries, Vivendi primarily focused on making as much profit as possible. They often meddled with their subsidiaries to achieve the result. Such as having Activision (later known as Activision Blizzard) milked Call of Duty franchise as much as possible.
 * 2) * This practice would have carried over by Activision Blizzard after they bought themselves out in 2013.
 * 3) After selling away Activision Blizzard in 2013, they were desperate to find a new "cash cow" to replace them, which resulted in a hostile takeover of Gameloft and a failed attempt on Ubisoft in 2018.
 * 4) They are responsible for rampant pay-to-win microtransactions scheme in Gameloft's titles since 2016 due to their executive meddling mentioned earlier.
 * 5) They folded and killed several gaming divisions in order to form Activision Blizzard, such as Sierra Entertainment and Blizzard North.
 * 6) Just like Universal Interactive, they treated the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon franchise like garbage, for example, they canceled Crash Twinsanity ideas multiple times resulting in a very unfinished game, Ignoring or bringing in mediocre, average or terrible Crash and Spyro games and treating developers like slaves. Definitely an infamous example of Franchise milking.