Vivendi Games is a game development company based in Paris, the capital city of France. Extremely popular franchises like StarCraft, Warcraft, Diablo and Empire Earth are owned by the company. 1996 was the year when the company was founded with the motto of becoming one of the best game development firms in the world.
It all started in the month of February 1996 when an established mail order and subscription company, CUC International showed interest in acquiring Sierra On-Line, an entertainment and software development company. At that point in time, Sierra was a very famous developer and publisher of video games and had made a name for itself in the gaming market courtesy of games like Space Quest, King’s Quest, Gabriel Knight and Leisure Suit Larry, which went on to become smash hits. Sierra was a publicly listed company having around 1000 employees. CUC purchased the majority of stock and thus Sierra became a subsidiary of CUC.
Similarly, Davidson and Associates who owned the Warcraft and Diablo franchises were also approached by CUC and taken over. After the purchase of these two companies, Vivendi merged them into one unit and made them a part of the CUC organization, an integral part of the firm which was completely dedicated to the gaming sector.
Vivendi sold off Knowledge Adventure in 2004, one of its divisions to some private investors. There are many sub divisions of the company like Blizzard Entertainment known for the Warcraft series and which is headquartered in California, Sierra Entertainment which publishes handheld gaming devices and console software and finally Sierra Online, which publishes casual online games for gaming platforms like the Playstation, PC, and Xbox. Some popular PSP games developed by the publisher include Eragon (PSP), MACH, and Miami Vice.
The company posted record revenues of 641 million euros and a net income of 41 million euros in the previous fiscal. Vivendi Games Mobile is another by-product of the company which concentrates on publishing and distributing games via portals and mobile carriers.
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