Comment by speeder
2 days 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
I don't think MS considered any of this. For example there were situations were they had a meeting giving green light one day, and cancelled the next.
Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.
> 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.