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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s a Harvard Law paper on it.
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.