By shutting down a studio instead of selling it off or even letting it buy itself out, Microsoft ensures that no studio it has ever owned can become viable competition. Who cares about a diverse industry when you can keep all the IPs developed under your umbrella and shelve them for decades, instead of letting the studios that made them go on to work on their creative visions?
Article also mentions that it breaks the employees of those studios up so there is less chance of a competitor that makes another successful IP
Ironically if the developers band together and start another studio they would probably have Microsoft knocking on their door with an acquisition offer in a few years.
The trouble is the upfront capital though, but at the same time another publisher would surely bite at the thought of getting a talented studio’s staff in one go?
hello welcome to my new venture capital firm: we specialise in funding game studios where 90% of the staff got fired in an acquisition turned shutdown
The real culprit is, surprise, late stage capitalism and unbridled greed. Who would’ve guessed?
An article that recognize the problem with our current economical system and didn’t circle around the issue? Color me surprised
I know a lot of indy game developers do their thing hoping to get rich from it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And they don’t all do that. Some people just really love coding and creating, and just want to make a cool game. Nothing wrong with that, either.
But for once, I’d love to see some brilliant founder create a game studio that has some kind of poison pill clause that prevents it from ever going public or it’s IP ever being purchased by a large mega-corp. And in my wettest of wet dreams, that idea becomes a meme.
Something tells me that here in the United States of Greed, such a thing is ‘un-possible’, legally speaking. Our whole corrupt system is set up to make half a dozen business bros get wealthier. They won’t tolerate anything that jams a wrench into that machinery.
I mean, Larian is pretty much that. Instead of just doing Baldur’s Gate 4 although Hasbro fired all their contact people and probably would have urged Larian to rush a sequel, they are instead during an IP of their own next and refuse to go public and/or get bought.
Something tells me that here in the United States of Greed, such a thing is ‘un-possible’, legally speaking.
It’s not only possible it happens reasonably often. So often in fact that the “poison pill” idiom was created by companies who were doing just that.
I had heard of this, and I appreciate the link to the paper. It’s one reason I used the term. My understanding of it is that these seldom actually work in practice. It did not help Twitter, for example. I appreciate the counter-argument. I definitely want this to be a thing.
