Author: sick skills

On Friday Ubisoft hosted its annual shareholders meeting without incident, getting shareholder approval for the expansion of its board of directors and reconfirming a number of boardmembers’ positions.

After the shareholders meeting, Vivendi chief operating officer Stephane Roussel reportedly told Bloomberg that the French conglomerate (which owns a roughly 26 percent stake in Ubisoft) hasn’t yet decided whether it will attempt a Ubisoft takeover or simply sell off its stock in the company.

This is important because Ubisoft has long been under threat of hostile takeover by Vivendi, which could take advantage of the annual shareholders meeting by, say, calling for a shareholder vote to give itself a seat on the board.

According to Roussel, Vivendi has previously requested a seat on the board but was rejected by Ubisoft management. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot further told Bloomberg that he did not believe Vivendi would be successful if it did try to get itself onto the board via shareholder vote, because “our shareholders don’t want creeping control.” 

However, things may come to a head later this year, as Bloomberg reports that Vivendi will see its stake in Ubisoft increase automatically this November due to a provision for double voting rights (which, in an effort to encourage shareholder loyalty, typically allows shareholders to exercise double voting rights for shares they have registered and held for a certain amount of time.) 

That increase will reportedly bring Vivendi very close to owning 30 percent of Ubisoft. French accounting law requires Vivendi to make a takeover bid once it owns more than a 30 percent stake, which is exactly how it wound up (successfully) initiating a mandatory takeover of French game company Gameloft last year. 

Nearly a year after the U.S. screen actors guild SAG-AFTRA declared a strike against a number of video game companies in the name of signing a better contract, both sides have announced they’ve reached a strike-ending agreement.

This is a big deal because the strike has affected the game industry significantly, bringing hundreds of protestors to picket outside of game companies and fouling up voice acting arrangements for games like Life Is Strange: Before the Storm. 

Perhaps more importantly, it revived important questions about whether or not game industry workers should receive bonus payments based on how well the games they work on sell. 

When the union called the strike last October, one of its chief sticking points was secondary compensation: specifically, the union wanted the video game companies to agree to a contract that would see union talent paid a “reasonable performance bonus” for every 2 million copies a game they worked on sold, up to a maximum of 4 payments if the game sold 8 million or more. 

“What if actors get royalties and the programmers don’t? You can imagine what that could trigger,” video game composer Tommy Tallarico said in February, after some members of the game industry publicly voiced support or disdain for the notion of game dev workers getting royalty-like payments. “The reality is that it should.”

According to statements made by both the union and the 11 video game companies (including Activision, Insomniac, and Electronic Arts) targeted in the strike, the new deal they reached on Saturday does not include any such payments. Rather, it contains “a new bonus structure” which will see union workers receiving bonus payments based on how many sessions they work on a given game, starting at $75 for one session and capping out at $2,100 for ten sessions.

The union also made some progress on its other big complaints, specifically that voice actors deserve more information about what games they’re working on and more consideration about the health risks of their work, especially during demanding or high-frequency recording sessions.

SAG-AFTRA chief contracts officer Ray Rodriguez stated in a press release that the new deal will require video game companies “to disclose the code name of project, its genre, whether the game is based on previously published intellectual property and whether the performer is reprising a prior role.” It will also require that union members be told whether their role will touch on content “of a sexual or violent nature” or require racial slurs, profanity, “unusual terminology”, or stunts.

The video game companies also agreed to “continue working” with SAG-AFTRA to deal with the threat of vocal stress caused by voice recording sessions. 

“We want to thank our counterparts at SAG-AFTRA for their efforts to conclude this labor dispute and reach a deal that will bring SAG-AFTRA members back to work on upcoming videogame projects,” stated Scott Witlin, who served as chief negotatior on behalf of the video game companies targeted by the strike.

The union is a bit more hesitant about the whole deal, calling it “tentative” and stating that the new contract will need to be reviewed by the SAG-AFTRA National Board at its meeting next month.