Buying something and shutting it down shouldn’t be possible. You don’t want to own it anymore? Great, they’re independent, good luck have fun. But you didn’t do anything, to say it stopped existing. It is a purely theoretical act. No factory was torn down, no warehouse was liquidated. A video game studio is just a bunch of folks who come in to work on the same thing every weekday. Games are made of labor. If the money stops flowing, that’s a problem, but it shouldn’t be a light-switch existential termination.
No no, xbox buying these companies is going to be good for gaming! It’s going to increase game production because it’s so efficient!
Every capitalist wank last year talking about how all the mergers were wonderful.
The stupid thing is it totally could have made things better. Facilitated knowledge share, floated work between studios if one needed help, heck, just combining HR and publishing tools could have freed up some costs that could feed back into development. Something.
But yeah, saw it coming
What happens to the talent at these studios?
Are all these buyouts just a way to force hire workers.
