I feel quite certain that this was the plan all along.
Shit like this should cause the purchased entity to revert to prior ownership without refund to the purchaser.
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And that’s basically it!
I feel quite certain that this was the plan all along.
Shit like this should cause the purchased entity to revert to prior ownership without refund to the purchaser.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Welcome to Microsoft.
Yep, was here to say roughly the same thing.
Buy up studios, Claim their IPs, shut them down to reduce the existing number of studios, and more importantly..properties, and thus competition.
buy competitors and kill them. sounds good nice job
*pretends
Let them be free
Didn't Spencer say they weren't gonna lay anyone off or did I smoke way too much crack?
I don't know but if he did say that and believed it, he might have smoked too much crack. This is capitalism.
ah, yes, the highest market cap in history ($3T) doesn't have the resources
Well, you see, they don't have cash on hand because they spent it on stock buybacks to boost that market cap
The subscription model is, in my opinion, dumb. If they need it to work, maybe they should buy games instead of studios. I can't work out exactly how long term patching would work though, unless they kicked back a maintenance fee from sales and gamepass usage to the studio.
I don’t know how the contracts look but games on Apple Arcade get support years after release. It does work somehow.
It must work like the music streaming model where Apple kicks back a fee to the devs based on monthly installs or usage to the dev. It probably works better than Microsoft's model of buying a developer, not committing resources to run them, then closing the studio.
Back in the day, devs used to not release games until they were done. Patches were bascially unheard of.
It would be a bad look and there were anologue standards at play then. Digital releases and the capacity of storage mediums really pushed releasing unfinished games over the edge.
I will say, these days it's more or less impossible to release a game that'll run perfectly on every system and it's a good thing we're able to fix crashes and patch issues as they come up. This has naturally had its downsides as publishers squeeze devs for tighter releases, but outside of that it's a very good thing for devs and players.
What are you gonna do, mail out another set of floppies to everyone? Outrageous.
This exact method is how Microsoft became a giant in the first place. They've been doing it for longer than I live and they'll likely outlive me doing it.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.