And for Microsoft, to get a back catalogue to ensure your subscription service remains attractive.

not always true, they clearly bought zenimax to make exclusive xbox games.

Obligatory.

collapsed inline media

We probably wouldn't have expedition 33 if Ubisoft gave people a reason to stay

i don't believe the next video game collapse is going to be very pretty for anyone. also, most independent studios and developers make little to no money at all

I wish that was true, but funding has dried up across the entire sector and that affects the viability of smaller studios more than it does the mega corps with bottomless warchests.

Personally I agree. I've seen way more startups kicking off with these waves of layoffs. It's a silver lining, not much more, but I'm happy to see people finally realizing they don't want the big tech solutions anymore.

I mean sure but just like with movies, the rights dont change hands very often, even if they're not being actively used or the rights holder goes out of business. This means a ton of promising franchises either suffer by getting terrible sequels or no sequels at all.

I still kinda want Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard, but not for altruistic reasons.

Bizarre Creations had the misfortune of being owned by both of them before being shut down.

It really shows that something is fucked up in businessland that they're so bad at managing studios, when managing studios is literally all they fucking do.

Same with EA. It's just a wasteland of dead companies. The list of studios they've closed is bigger than the list of ones they still own.

Microsoft owns taco bell?

Don't forget they also murdered Rare.

Arkane Studios for me.

I couldn't believe it when they shut down the studio that did Hi-Fi Rush. They put out a great game that received universal praise, then shut them down like a few months later. Infuriating.

To be fair, Age of Empires III was bad, and the last project Ensemble was working on before they got shuttered was a Halo MMO.

Also, Robot Entertainment (the studio that rose from the ashes of Ensemble) were the initial developers of Age of Empires Online, which was P2W slop that 90% of players couldn't run because Games For Windows LIVE was a buggy crock of shit. And since then they've released nothing but Orcs Must Die games.

And in that environment, everyone who actually understands how things work quits or gets quit. It's my understanding that there are large sections of code bases that MS just doesn't touch, because everyone who understood how they function is gone. Continuity of institutional knowledge is difficult in the best cases and impossible under leaders that discourage dissenting perspectives.
/gestures about wildly

So true. All those suck ups are at the top and the bosses overestimate themselves. What we need more smaller studios.

RIP halo, my favorite competitive shooter ever 😭 infinite is such an absolute botch.

From Crosspoint I heard that they even cancelled and shut down the studio making a game (forget the name off the top of my head) that Phil Spencer himself was said to have liked so much, they had to force him to quit playing their demo in a meeting about it. Not to mention the absolute waste of time and money on nearly finished projects that were probably going to sell well.

Quarterly profits.

Smaller studios have been consistently putting out good games as of late anyway. Indy and AA studios have the freedom to make fun things instead of having to check every box on a spreadsheet.