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The fourth largest publisher and developer in the world is committed to growing and staying independent but does not exclude future buyout offers.

In an interview with French business newspaper Les Echos, Ubisoft founder and president Yves Guillemot said that the company he proudly runs is definitely going to speed up the development process, in order to avoid a hostile bid from EA, which already has 25% of voting rights. The Guillemot family has only 13% voting rights in Ubisoft.

"The desire of EA to buy Take Two pushes us to go faster, to accelerate internal growth but also to look at acquisition opportunities," the business daily quoted Yves Guillemot as saying. Those opportunities are definitely not emanating from EA, whose bid for Take Two is likely to scale down the budget at Redwood City with around $2 billion. But there are other fish in the pond willing to spend their fortunes on a company that has an annual revenue of more than $771 EUR and a recent history in which shares have climbed with no less than 71 percent. Time Warner is one of them, and with $1.5 billion in cash, buying Ubisoft would be a piece of cake. The French company has a market capitalization of only EUR2.7 billion itself.Yves Guillemot however is convinced that the company will evolve better if it concentrates on acquiring new franchises for games, rather than focusing on buying its smaller rivals. There have been rumors in the past that Ubisoft was interested in grabbing at least a portion of American publisher THQ (valued at about $600 million), but nothingrock solid has surfaced until now. Shares for THQ, Atari and Midway have all risen after EA's hostile bid, announced at the beginning of this week.