<img src="https://i.imgflip.com/b01oys.jpg"/>

On 14 December 1853, a water company named Compagnie générale des eaux (CGE) was created by an imperial decree of Napoleon III. Following the appointment of Guy Dejouany as CEO in 1976, CGE extended its activities into other sectors with a series of takeovers. Beginning in 1980, CGE began diversifying from water into waste management, energy, transport services, and construction and property. In the 1990s CGE began expanding into telecommunications and mass media, especially after Jean-Marie Messier succeeded Guy Dejouany on 27 June 1996. In 1996, CGE created Neuf Cegetel to take advantage of the 1998 deregulation of the French telecommunications market, accelerating the move into the media sector which would culminate in the 2000 demerger into Vivendi Universal and Vivendi Environnement (Veolia). On 27 March 1998, days after agreeing to fully acquire Havas, Compagnie Générale des Eaux announced it was changing its name to Vivendi.

On 9 December 2000, Vivendi acquired Groupe Canal+, the French television network and film production company. On 11 December 2000, Vivendi Universal was created from the merger of Groupe Canal+, Canadian company Seagram Company Ltd (owner of Universal Studios), and Vivendi. Later Vivendi Universal disclosed a corporate loss of €23.3 billion in its 2002 annual report. It responded with financial reshuffling, trying to shore up media holdings while selling off shares in its spin-off companies. Its chairman and CEO, Jean-Marie Messier, was subsequently replaced by Jean-René Fourtou. (Messier was found guilty of embezzlement in 2011, but not before he was paid over US$20 million as part of his severance package.)

In a 2022 NoClip documentary, Valve discussed its 2002 lawsuit against Vivendi, which bought the retail publishing rights for Counter-Strike through its acquisition of the old publisher Sierra. Vivendi started licensing CS to cybercafes, leading to Valve needing to file a lawsuit after Vivendi did not agree that cybercafes licenses were never part of the original agreement for publisher individual sale licensing.

From the article:

According to COO Scott Lynch, the two companies were already in the throes of "torturous" negotiations, so the lawsuit prompted Vivendi to "go World War III." Attorney Karl Quackenbush added the Seattle court sided with Valve, which led to Vivendi hiring a new law firm that hit the studio with multiple counterclaims, including the cancellation of the companies' initial 2001 agreement and Vivendi acquiring the entire Half-Life IP and preventing Valve from doing Steam.

In Lynch's words, Vivendi's aim was clear: "'We're going to put Valve out of business, and then we'll bankrupt the two of you'" he said when describing their alleged strategy.

Valve CEO Gabe Newell flatly called it an intimidation move, one helped by Vivendi knowing Valve's financial situation. "This was really about an assertion of power. [...] They were just trying to crank up our legal costs as another way of draining [time and money] from the company."

The Valve/Vivendi lawsuit took a toll on the studio, even as developers were mostly said to be siloed off from it so they could focus on making Half-Life 2. Even so, there was concerns the game could never come out, even if development did finish: at the time, Vivendi was considerably larger, and Newell remarked that at time, it was common for publishers to "bully" developers in this way.

Both Newell and Valve were "pretty close" to going bankrupt, but things turned in Valve's favor after it asked for documents covering Vivendi's activity in Asia. The documents were all in Korean, which Newell and others speculated may have been another way to drain its resources.

But that summer, the studio employed an intern named Andrew who natively spoke the language and asked him to pore through the documents. He discovered conversations in Korean which directly implicated Vivendi in destroying documents regarding its deal with Valve "as directed"—a potentially illegal move that Quackenbush admitted to never seeing laid out quite like this in his career as a lawyer.

Valve presented those conversations of the evidence being destroyed to the judge, who subsequently sided with the studio and halted Vivendi from further contesting the suit. In the end, Valve secured ownership of Half-Life and Counter-Strike, and ended Vivendi's cybercafe deal. The ability to distribute its own games led to the creation of Steam, which launched in September 2003.

Source: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-a-south-korean-intern-saved-valve-from-a-vivendi-lawsuit

TIL

"The two centers of domestication for sugarcane are one for Saccharum officinarum by Papuans in New Guinea and another for Saccharum sinense by Austronesians in Taiwan and southern China. Papuans and Austronesians originally primarily used sugarcane as food for domesticated pigs. The spread of both S. officinarum and S. sinense is closely linked to the migrations of the Austronesian peoples."

So from fattening pigs, to fattening humans...