Vivendi will finish selling its Ubisoft shares next year

A few months ago we reported that Ubisoft had managed to avoid a corporate takeover by Vivendi, the media conglomerate whose ownings include the Universal Music Group and mobile game publisher Gameloft (who were created by Ubisoft co-founder Michel Guillemot). As Vivendi backed off, new investment came from the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and Chinese gaming giant Tencent. In typically hands-off fashion, Tencent didn't take a seat on Ubisoft's board of directors and agreed not to transfer its shares or seek to increase its stake in the company.

In a recent press release, Vivendi confirmed its commitment to sell off the remaining Ubisoft shares it owns while extending the final deadline for that sale to March 7, 2019. "In addition, Vivendi maintains its March 2018 commitment to refrain from purchasing Ubisoft shares for a period of five years", the press release states.

(That screenshot at the top is from Ubisoft's Valiant Hearts: The Great War, which isn't super relevant but is an under-rated game.)

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.