I mean, isn’t “winding down” and having fun a main reason a lot of people play video games to start with?
There’s few things more satisfying than a well tossed stick of dynamite landing in a KKK meeting in RDR2, then cleaning up the leftovers with a shotgun.
That was a shitty website. I don’t even remember why I clicked the link. The page jump around while you scroll down. I thought I was at the bottom PF the page at least 3 time.
If EA weren’t already so bloated and full of suits, I might imagine this would allow them to pump the brakes on their scummy moneymaking policies like the other publicly traded corps.
On one hand this is big news, on the other hand, I don’t really see how this matters.
The last EA game that I bought was SimCity (2013) and that was comically bad. Just my experience, but it’s not like fans of their sports games will be looking for alternatives (irrespective of what EA does).
The Saudi part matters a lot, as they’ve been grabbing lots of the gaming industry in their diversification efforts.
It also moves what their incentives and goals are. They’ll still try to make money, which means Ultimate Team isn’t going away without legislation, but when they’re private, they can probably afford to burn through some war chest searching for new franchises to replace their defunct franchises, and perhaps public investors wouldn’t be interested in losing that money in the short term.
I don’t really see why public or private status matters in the picture. It will be still be the same culture (and leadership?). They try something new, but if will still be the same old IMO.
I could be wrong though, I don’t really have much interests in AAA outside of a few exceptions.
Truthfully, you’ll likely see very little change in the next few years, but they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t see an advantage to it. The article outlines some of them.
Being publicly traded means you don’t follow any sort of ethics, mission statement, or even actual business metrics anymore, you chase incredibly toxic and self destructive short term profit over all else. Being private means they might be and to recover from their bullshit, especially since a death spiral for a corpo is centuries long apparently.
Platform lock-in sucks, and it would be nice if a ruling on one of these became legal precedent so that console players also got a choice on their digital purchases.
What are the odds this would let them make better games?
Is it worse to be owned by vultures? Or to be a publicly traded company that’s legally compelled to maximize short term profit at the expense of long term viability?
Every company starts out privately owned. Being publically owned means you are legally required to put shareholders’ interests first and thus essentially be purely profit and growth driven, leanding to an unsustainable cycle of infinite growth which is a major cause of the enshitification of everything as we know it today.
Private companies can at least set their own goals and do things other than chase profit. Typically, that’s either “chase profit so the owners can cash out” or “focus on providing an actually good service/product so that profit/growth will follow”.
Private Equity is probably what you’re thinking about, where a PE firm purchases a company that’s either already private or they make it private again. There are many PE firms with many different management styles and goals, but the overwhelming majority have a goal of squeezing every last penny out of a company using any means necessary and fucking over the employees as much as possible before divesting it and moving to the next one.
How is Embracer group a decentralized studio model? When ever I look them up I don’t get much information. I just hear them buying studios then shutting them down.
Each publisher operates independently. So far, to my knowledge, they've shut down studios that were spun up to work that $2B deal that fell through; and Volition, who haven't made a hit game in a decade.
This is actually new. They very rarely shut down studios until last month.
When THQ fell apart a about a decade ago, they bought the trademark and were doing business as THQ Nordic for quite a while.
Changed their name to Embracer a few years ago for clarity because, confusingly, one of their publishing arms is THQ Nordic GmbH.
As THQ Nordic (and later Embracer), they’ve been buying up studios (and IPs) for years. Being a holding company meant they were relatively hands off when it comes to development.
Being bought by them actually majorly increased job security, because they tended to just let studios do their shit, and kind of “understood” that a lot of their studios focus on relatively niche audiences, so they didn’t mind taking a financial hit here and there.
All that really mattered was whether or not the IP in general was profitable.
Then they had some sort of deal fall through or something earlier this year and that’s when things got a little shaky. Basically, they lost a couple billion dollars and now need to make “cost-saving measures”.
Now the commercial failures and lack of interest in certain IPs means less job security than it did about a year ago.
This makes me worried about Eidos Montréal and Crystal Dynamics. Particularly Deus Ex, since it was looking like Eidos might eventually get to finish its Human Revolution/Mankind Divided trilogy.
Their strategy was always diversifying in ways that other big publishers stopped diversifying, buying old neglected and mismanaged IPs for pennies on the dollar. If this strategy doesn't work, then I weep for what video games could have been, because this lack of diversification is why I can't get a decent racing game or first person shooter anymore.
Yeah, I was really happy when they got Eidos and Crystal Dynamics out of Square’s hands. Deus Ex continuation finally looked like a possibility.
Losing Eidos would be especially bad for those of us who are fans of immersive sims.
And with Deep Silver, they excelled in giving us the great Eurojank RPGs we know and love (I’ll still die on the hill that Risen is an entertaining trilogy, probably because of the major tone shift after the first game).
I always treat Wikipedia as a first stop for a general overview under the caveat that not all information may be accurate or complete. From there, I typically use google to look up more info on specific events and such, or sometimes check the referenced sources if they’re available.
reuters.com
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