The purchase of studios by giant companies such as Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo is not something that has appeared in recent years. If we travel back decades, we can see how Xbox took over Bungie (and at the same time, with the Halo IP) or with RARE, a studio that was closely linked to Nintendo. The difference with what is happening is very simple: everything is being magnified, and more so with the billion dollar purchases of the big companies.
Xbox has been acquiring many well-known studios and IPs in order to have them under the “Xbox Game Studios” label, achieving a level of quality that, to be honest, is very difficult to match right now. In case you are reading this text, and you don’t know where the shots are going, you have to know that Xbox right now has studios like Infinity Ward, Blizzard, Arkane Studios and Bethesda Game Studios under its command, along with their respective IPs (Call of Duty, Diablo, Dishonored and The Elder Scrolls).
And after these huge studio purchases, PlayStation has not stood still, taking over Bungie, Housemarque and Bluepoint Games, among others. By this we mean that the future of the video game industry is increasingly similar to the football transfer market.
A lot of power concentrated in a few
These last few weeks have been a nest of debates and discussions on social networks about whether what is happening lately in the industry is a good thing, or on the other hand, is it something that in the future will lead us down paths that will not benefit us. Little or nothing we can know for sure about the future that awaits us, but right now we can be clear that the movement of taking over studios, instead of creating new ones, is something that works much better for large companies.
The problem that many users see in this practice of buying studios is that, in the end, there are a few companies (such as Xbox or Sony) that keep the majority of studios, and this can lead to a “monopoly” in the industrysomething that in the end would not benefit anyone other than the one who controlled all that power.
The purchase of Bethesda by Xbox in 2020 was the one that started this type of debate about whether it is okay for a company to have so much power, but without a doubt, the purchase of Activision/Blizzard has been the one that has caused a real uproar in the industry, as it is the most expensive purchase in the history of the video game industry, valued at about 68.7 billion dollars (Xbox bought Bethesda for 7.5 billion dollars). And now, with Sony’s move to buy Bungie, we can deduce that this…
It’s just the beginning
After these purchases, both Sony and Xbox have already clarified that they have future plans to continue expanding their number of first-party studios, so it’s time to wait for anything, since one day the news could arrive that studios like CD Projekt RED, From Software or Kojima Productions, to give some other example, have been acquired by these big companiesalong with their respective IPs, making “independent” studios disappear from the map.
But there are not only studios in the purchase plans, since companies such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft or even Take-Two Interactive could end up being acquired, something that would never have been seen in the industry. Recently, a representative of Electronic Arts confirmed that there have already been internal meetings about the possibility of ending up acquiring some other studioso it seems that this “battle” to see who gets more studios/IPs will expand even more.
Only time will tell whether or not the industry chooses to go down this path.
Right now, we’re at the tipping point, where the bigger companies will have to decide whether to go ahead and make more plans about buying studios and IPs so they’ll have more, or stop right here, and carry on as they’ve always done. The truth is that it is very likely that companies like Xbox, Sony and even EA or Ubisoft decide to keep buying more and moreso that the few giants of the industry monopolize all the power, something that does not sound entirely good, but that as users, we can do little or nothing.
What we do hope is that the creation of new studies will not be neglected (such as The Initiative, current developers of Perfect Dark), or new original IPs, since always falling back on the same thing would come to abhor an industry that, in many aspects, exudes originality and charisma. Although it is something that is too early to talk about, we can all see that this “study market” resembles more and more the transfer market in football, reaching insanely high figures, and that, hopefully, does not explode in any moment, since the magnitude could be enormous.