Let's talk about the acquisitions.

     Hey friends, I'm Jonathan, your friendly neighborhood Self-Proclaimed Dreamer, and today I'll be talking about a trend that seems to be taking the games industry by storm. It's not really good for competition for the industry to be working this way, but it certainly makes more money for one company or another. For those of you unaware of what's going on, acquisitions are being made all over the place right now. Game developers are being bought by bigger players, and though it certainly wasn't unheard of before the last two years or so, things seem to be moving really fast. In January 2022 alone, we received word of at least two pretty big (one much bigger than the other) purchases, and it continued to show the pretty wild trend of the big players buying exclusivity rights, though not in every case. This is a complicated topic, and while I don't claim to have all the answers about everything, I have read and heard many different things from different journalists and analysts who know much more about the industry than I do. Therefore, I'll try my best to give the information as I understand it, though please feel free to look into it on your own, there are tons of videos and articles about this topic and I believe you'll be able to get more information there. With that being said, I'll do my best today to summarize this situation up in a simple way, and I hope you'll come join me.

Old Acquisitions!

    The first acquisition that I remember hearing about was back in the day whenever Microsoft purchased Rare for $375 million back in 2002. Before this point, of course, Rare was known for being one of the strongest 3rd party developers for the Super Nintendo with titles like Donkey Kong Country, and then Nintendo 64 with such titles as Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye 007, and Diddy Kong Racing. As a kid, I didn't have a Nintendo 64 or a Super Nintendo, so this didn't mean much to me, but as I've gotten older and actually played some of these masterpiece titles, It sunk in exactly what was lost whenever they became a first-party studio. In the first few years after the acquisition, Rare put out Grabbed By the Ghoulies and Conker: Live and Reloaded, which was a remaster of the N64 title, Conker's Bad Fur Day for the original Xbox. The games were okay, but it was clearly a far cry from the amazing titles that they made for the older system. Going forward, they would make several Viva Pinata games, Kameo, Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts (which everyone despised), and then beginning with the Kinect's release, the legendary studio was just pretty much put in charge of the Kinect Sports titles for a while. Some of these were decent enough games, but it was clear to everyone that the golden days of this studio seemed to end as soon as Microsoft got their hands on it. Is this entirely the fault of Microsoft, and being caused by them overreaching and telling Rare what to make? It's unclear, but it does seem that way. On the plus side, it seems like Microsoft has learned a lot from the past few years, and Rare recently made Sea of Thieves, which is a good game from what I understand, even though it got off to a rocky start. The next game from this studio is going to be called Everwild, and not much is known about it yet, but the first trailer looks interesting to say the least, so we can hope that something good will come from Rare's next title. This corporate buyout really made me upset about the whole state of gaming when I was younger, but it's clear that for the most part, the studio that made the original Banjo-Kazooie has been dead for quite a while. I bring this up to show an example of how these acquisitions can be done in a way that doesn't pay off well for studios. Let's fast forward a bit to the past few years.

Same old story, but different results (so far)!

    A few years ago at E3, Microsoft announced a bunch of new studios that they bought, including Ninja Theory, Obsidian Interactive, and Double Fine. This was a pretty big shock to people, especially as Double Fine had been a beloved little indie-ish studio all along, creators of Psychonauts, Candy Quest, and many others, and Ninja Theory is another one, which was best known for making Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and Enslaved: Journey to the West (which is a game that I'm almost convinced that only I remember). This wasn't a good or bad thing, but along with the buyouts came a lot of talk about how much money Microsoft had compared to the other two main game companies, Sony and Nintendo. It was clear that Microsoft had majorly deep pockets, as they also talked about several new developments that same year at E3, discussing the new console (eventually called the Xbox Series X) which certainly didn't sound cheap to make, just from boasting about the specs of the technology involved, and also talking about X Cloud, a game streaming service that should be able to work on just about any piece of technology with a screen that you had. These acquisitions got many people talking about not only the titles that this could allow Microsoft to put on Xbox Games Pass, but also moving forward, would the games be exclusive to only one console? We know now that yes, that is the plan going forward for a lot of these studios, but Psychonauts 2 came out this past year for Xbox One, PS4, and PC because the game was made partially through a kickstarter campaign. Rumor has it, however, that if you play the game on PS4, the loading screens are way longer than they are on the Xbox version, seemingly for no reason except Double Fine is a Microsoft second party studio now. Will Double Fine games be exclusive to Xbox in the future? Only time will tell, but it sounds likely. Now, you may have forgotten about some of these smaller acquisitions from a few years ago, but I can almost guarantee that there are two that you haven't forgotten about.

The Big Boys get bought out!

    Last year, Microsoft made a huge power play when they bought the entirety of Zenimax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, for the low, low price of $7.5 billion. To the few people in the audience who haven't heard of Bethesda, they are the developers and publishers behind huge series such as Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, Prey, etc. Bethesda is a massive game studio, and people have been waiting with bated breath since Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim came out back in 2011 for more information on Elder Scrolls 6, and now it appears likely that that massive game will be an exclusive for Xbox's consoles as well as PCs. This isn't a done deal, it would make Microsoft much more money if they allowed the game to also sell on PS5 whenever it comes out, but it would certainly be a huge incentive for a lot of people to get the Xbox Series X instead of Sony's competition. This would have been the biggest story in gaming news last year, but there were dark times ahead for one of the largest third party developers out there. 

    Week after week, we got more information about horrible conditions and disgusting treatment to female employees at Activision Blizzard last year. This is the massive studio behind franchises such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, and World of Warcraft, as well as current rights holders to Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Tony Hawk: Pro Skater, and the list goes on and on yet again for this company. Every week, we would get horrible new bits of information, how programmers would get drunk and crawl under desks of their female employees, or that the CEO threatened to kill an assistant over a phone call, just horrible behavior which went all the way up to the top of the company with CEO Bobby Kotick. Stocks plummeted as did employee morale week after week, until a few weeks ago when Microsoft announced that they would be purchasing Activision Blizzard for (drum roll, please) a whopping $68.7 billion. This is a ridiculously high price for this company, but it's clear that this is almost certainly a smaller price than it would have been at the height of the company's popularity. They have a fan convention every year called BlizzCon where fans of Blizzard games would get together and hear news about the newest titles. There won't be one this year as the company continues to burn and collapse in on itself, but at least Microsoft will be cleaning shop almost certainly. The big question that people have been tossing around is, "How long will it be before all of the third party developers are bought by one of the bigger players?" I never dreamed that Activision Blizzard could possibly be purchased, but here we are. Apparently the purchase is going to have to be reviewed by the FTC to make sure it doesn't break any antitrust laws, but I would be somewhat surprised if the FTC blocked this Activision acquisition (say that five times fast). This announcement was met with a lot of confusion and worry, and one of the bigger issues that I saw talked about was if Crash Bandicoot and Spyro were going to be Xbox exclusives now, after being first seen on the Playstation as unofficial mascots. It is a wild time for sure, but we will just have to see where these purchases take us. Speaking of Playstation, they've also made a few acquisitions over the years.

Sony Strikes Back!

    That title is a bit of a misnomer, I don't think a lot of Sony's acquisitions are really done in spite of what Xbox is doing, they already have a ton of second party studios that pretty much only make games for their systems, so many of these purchases were almost treated as formalities as far as I can tell. They bought Insomniac fairly recently, the makers of Ratchet and Clank, and the most recent Spider-Man games for PS4. Previously they've bought Sucker Punch Productions, which most recently made Ghost of Tsushima, though they made the Infamous and Sly Cooper franchises in the past. Naughty Dog, the studio behind Jak and Daxter, Uncharted, and The Last of Us, has been owned by Playstation since 2001, so that's certainly not a recent move. In the past year, they bought Housemarque, which created Returnal for PS5, in June, shortly after that game came out, and they also announced intent to purchase Bluepoint Games as of September 2021, best known for remaking many of Sony's older titles, such as Shadow of the Colossus,  and Demon's Souls. As of Monday of this week, January 31, Sony announced it's intention to buy Bungie, the studio that created the first several Halo games for Xbox, up until Halo: Reach, and in the past few years, has made Destiny and Destiny 2, along with numerous expansions to them. The word on the street is that this purchase is more for help with Live Service games created by Sony's studios, as Bungie has now had a good bit of experience with games of that sort, which the Destiny games certainly are. In the announcement on the Playstation Blog, Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment said, "...Bungie will remain an independent and multi-platform studio and publisher," (Ryan, January 31, 2022). He goes on, talking about how they will work alongside Playstation and help create different experiences that will draw in players from all around the world. Playstation doesn't seem to be looking for exclusivity here, they have some of the most interesting single player stories in the entire industry with Sony Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, and Insomniac, they really need more help with the multiplayer aspects of their games. It's a unique partnership, and I hope some extraordinary titles will be able to benefit because of it.

    This is a big topic, friends, and it's hard to talk about it without feeling negative or bitter about the future of gaming, but for now, it's still up in the air how this will all turn out. Of course, Nintendo has made some acquisitions over the years, most recently purchasing Next Level Games, but they really only made games for Nintendo anyways. Nintendo really only seems interested in studios that prove themselves well, and we'll have to see what they have in mind next, though I don't see them making any massive moves like Microsoft has done in the past few years. Who knows if the next Elder Scrolls will be an Xbox exclusive? Starfield, the next Bethesda game, will be, but that's also a new IP, so it could just be that sort of scenario. Acquisitions are hard to talk about because they move so fast, but let's just hope that these companies are all able to do what they want in their own time without the new owners coming in too much and micromanaging them. That goes for all except Activision Blizzard, because boy does Microsoft need to straighten that company out.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends, I know this is a bit of a lengthy one, but I hope I've made it enjoyable enough to understand. Again, I don't have any sort of insider information, as I am just a random guy writing a blog, but this is all just based on what I've read about it. I hope you've all had a good week, and I hope to talk to you again soon. I'm Jonathan, your Self-Proclaimed News Network, signing off until next week!

Ryan, Jim; "Bungie is Joining Playstation,"; January 31, 2022. https://blog.playstation.com/2022/01/31/bungie-is-joining-playstation/