Comment by speeder
8 hours ago
The fact you still only got bothered by studio acquisitions show you don't even noticed the studio closures...
MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.
In the profitable cases (and maybe just as open offer), why not just sell them back to their staff/former owner?
There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.
Maybe the offer was made and a bunch didn't take it?
> There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.
Any movie studio that rebooted a franchise after a decade or two of dormancy would beg to differ
> why not just sell them back to their staff/former owner?
Saving corporate face
Dunkey has a great overview of how Microsoft handles studios/IP: https://youtu.be/GWrcUh2GuPQ
For the last decade they acquire studios/IP’s, let them languish, then without warning strip them for parts. Make a successful game? Doesn’t matter, you’re all fired. Y’all want to make a game? Sure! We can even promote it! 12-18mo of no news after an announcement ah dang guys we were so hyped but we’re pulling the plug.
It is baffling how many studios they own and yet they have almost no exclusives/big cross platform hits developed for the Xbox this generation.