Alice O’Connor at Rock Paper Shotgun:
For reference, Activision Blizzard’s valuation by market cap was $51 billion right before Microsoft announced their plan to buy Actiblizz for $69 billion. On that scale, Ubisoft look tiny with a market cap of $6-7-ish billion. Microsoft could accidentally buy Ubisoft by misclicking on Amazon and not even realise until Yves Guillemot was dumped on their doorstep in a cardboard box.
Being open to buy-outs seems to be the fashionable thing to do nowadays if you’re a game publisher and your company’s rocked by scandals around sexism, racism, misogyny, and toxic work conditions in general. (Paradox, for now, being an exception.)
What it doesn’t do, of course, is help. After the better time of a year, none of the demands from the “A Better Ubisoft” initiative have been met. And with regard to Activision Blizzard, well. Last Tuesday, this absolute gem of an anti-union presentation [slide | slide] popped up from ReedSmith, whose lawyers—you can’t make this up—represent Activision in the NLRB hearing on the publisher’s union-busting activities. (That presentation’s been hastily deleted, of course, but the Wayback Machine has a long memory.)
