I feel for these studios getting treated like crap. With these shutdowns from corps like MS and Embracer, I can only hope that indie devs learn the hard lessons taught here that conglomerates can never be trusted to operate in the interest of their subsidiaries. All buyouts are to these corps is the addition of “assets” to their spreadsheet, to be ditched the moment it’s more convenient than keeping them around.
Embracer at least had the excuse of fucking up their capital and shitting the bed in terms of having money on hand.
They were forced to shutter and sell things because they legitimately couldn’t fund their operation.
It was still their fault, because they stupidly bought up developers thinking big investor money was coming, which then just didn’t.
Microsoft has no such excuse. MS leadership has been asked multiple times why they did it, and they literally haven’t said a single fucking word that makes sense.
That’s just sad when you make something great and the trillion dollar monopoly just doesn’t care because it’s trying to save money and this isn’t a live service garbage or a big AAA ip.
Mind you, this game had literally 0 advertising before releasing and was a game pass day one title, it never had any chance of reaching high sales figures. They sabotaged it before it was even out
I mean, presumably he wasn’t wrong. Just… not at Microsoft.
Hi-Fi Rush still has some of the best animation in gaming this generation. I genuinely don’t know where they pulled that from, because it sure wasn’t from Resi or The Evil Within.
With how wearily often this seems to happen nowadays, I feel like if I was working somewhere like this I’d be looking at new work immediately as soon as I knew it was getting taken over.
Ideally, there should be some kind of way to prevent this happening in the first place.
But it’s easy for me to say this kind of thing from my pedestal. The only opinions that matter are from those who are involved. There’s nothing more depressing and scary than to know you could be jobless at a moment’s notice.
Imo work hours should result in equity and a say in how the company is run. Maybe a split like half the votes come from shareholders and half comes from the workers. And if the company does share buybacks, the worker share increases.
Or unionize and make it known that if the company is purchased, the union will walk out or start their own.
A union wouldn’t actually help in this case since MS laid everyone off anyway. They only cared about keeping the IP and wouldn’t have really cared about striking workers. Antitrust laws are supposed to stop industry consolidation due to a large competitor buying a smaller one, but courts have been doing their best to make them unenforceable.
