Yesterday, an article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Vivendi, the French parent company of video game mega-publisher Activision-Blizzard, is interested in streamlining its business. As such, it’s considering unloading some or all of its 60 percent stake in the game publisher—possibly even to the publisher itself.

The article cites “people familiar with the matter” as saying that Activision-Blizzard’s board of directors has “long been interested in buying out some of Vivendi’s roughly 60% stake.” The reason for Vivendi’s interest in selling, apparently, is the French phone company it also owns, SFR, which has been a source of “continued weakness.”

A Polygon post on the story also reminds readers that last year Vivendi looked into selling its stake in Activision-Blizzard, but failed to find a buyer. While Activision-Blizzard is one of Vivendi’s consistently successful properties, the publisher experienced a profit loss this year, a larger part of the trend that saw its perennial winner World of Warcraft lose 1.3 million subscribers in three months.

It would be interesting if Activision-Blizzard were able to buy out Vivendi’s stake and own itself. It seems doubtful that Vivendi has much—if any—real interference in the day-to-day operations of the publisher. But even still, companies generally enjoy the autonomy that’s gained from more independence. I’m not sure what effects A-B’s separation from Vivendi would have on its game-making business, but I sure would be interested to see what happens…

[WSJ via Polygon]

Over the last few weeks, the rivalry between Sony and Microsoft has taken a new twist, focusing now on “who do the developers like more.” First, we had Team Meat blasting Microsoft for being difficult to work with, while Sony’s Rob Dyer piled on the Micro-hate, accusing them of ham-stringing the development community because of “the Xbox 360’s technologically inferior level.”

Soon after, the guys at Zen Studios came to Microsoft’s defense, saying that they were much easier to work with than Sony. Now a former Vivendi employee has joined the fray, under the cloak of anonymity, claiming to Industry Gamers that Sony was much more of a hassle to work with than Microsoft ever was. From his stint in Vivendi’s QA department over three years ago, the source had this to say:

“”I’d say any comment by Sony that they have better developer relations or fewer insane hurdles is laughable. The TRC/TCRs [technical requirements checklist or technical certification requirements] for the PS2 and PS3 were so much worse than anything needed for the Xbox 360 — the cases themselves were written confusingly, but the real clincher was that they weren’t even consistent between SoJ, SoE, and SoA.”

The source also explained that Sony’s dev tools were not very developer-friendly at launch:

“…I heard a lot of horror stories about the PS3 dev tools, and our launch-title devs got absolutely no support from Sony itself when they needed it – up to and including Sony calling one of our developers liars when we said their networking code wasn’t working for our game, and it was a problem with their system (note: without any changes on our end, it suddenly started to work great after one of their pre-launch updates — though they still didn’t acknowledge that it had ever been their fault).”

The source added that the tools cost around $10,000 each, meaning that indie developers weren’t quite welcomed with open arms because of the steep cost of entry. He also said that, by contrast, the experiences with Microsoft were much more forgiving and rewarding.

Looks like it’s 2-2. Who will come forward and break the tie?

Via Industry Gamers