The Real Reason Your Favourite Game Studios Are Getting Closed Instead Of Sold

Summary

Microsoft's decision to close down Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin and other game studios is largely motivated by the desire to keep IPs.
Shutting down studios ensures those studios can't work for Microsoft's competition.
I apologise in advance for the extended metaphor about golden geese and the evil of corporate capitalism.

When Microsoft 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:announced it was closing Tango Gameworks, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Arkane Austin, and more, I kept seeing the same question being asked: why?

We all know that studio closures and layoffs are financially motivated and mostly carried out to make bottom lines look better, even if the company is already one of the highest val𒉰ued in the world, but wouldn’t it be more prudent to sell the studio off instead? That way, the studio doesn’t have to close down, employees hopefully get to keep their jobs, and the company selling the studio gets to make more money back than they would if they’d j💃ust closed it down entirely.

It's All About The IP

This is a perfectly rational question, and one that has a very upsetting answer. A lot of these studios’ value is tied to the intellectual properties that they’ve developed, which Xbox wouldn’t want to sell. Des🅠pite all its blubbering about wanting to diversify the kinds of games getting released and support studios doing cool stuff, Microsoft would rather kill the studio that made a successful IP than let it get purchased by a competitor.

By shutting down a studio instead of selling it off or even letting it buy itself out, Microsoft ensures that no studio it has ever owned can become viable competition. Who cares about a diverse 🎐industry when you can keep all the IPs developed under your umbrella and shelve them for decades, instead of letting t𓄧he studios that made them go on to work on their creative visions?

The obvious follow-up question, then, is why don’t they just sell the studios and keep the IPs? The studios would sell for less, yes, but at least Microsoft could still make a little money, save themselves the PR nightmare of having to say that it’s fired hundreds of developers for no reason, and still get to keep the IPs it so desperately wants to retain and leave 🔜stagnant for years.

Looking ༺Bac🧔k On Prey After The Closure Of Arkane Austin

Arkane Austin may be gone,𒆙 but it left behind a brilliant work of sci-fi storytelling and immers🥂ive sim design.

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: ꦇ

Again, the answer is simple and depressing: it makes more strategic sense for the company to dissolve a studio and force its employees to disband, than it does to allow a competitor to snatch them up wholesale. These studios have years of experience working together, and if they’ve created one successful IP they can create another – ꧟it’s safer for Microsoft’s interests to shut the whole thing down completely. It creates artificial scarcity. It’s pretty evil, and it isn’t just Microsoft doing this, it’s every company.

Microsoft Isn't Trying To Grow, It's Trying To Starve Everyone Else Out

When it comes down to it, Microsoft’s strategy here isn’t actually to let go of studios that aren’t serving the company’s vision – while Arkane Austin’s latest game was quite the flop, everybody🧜 was shocked to hear that Tango 🧸Gameworks, who created , the most interesting and critically adored Xbox exclusive of 2023, was being shut down.

If its studios are golden geese, laying golden eg♛gs that bolster its reputation as a company that cares about lifting up smaller studios and diversifying the market, this is the equivalent of culling those geese. In a year, maybe less, Microsoft will be saying that the lack of eggs isn’t because it killed its geese, and don’t worry, they’re saving loads of money on feeding them, and they can always buy more

Maybe they’ll feed the remaining geese they do have and hope they’ll lay more eggs faster, even though that isn’t how eggs work. The geese had to die, they couldn’t be sold to their neighbours or allowed to run free, beca❀use then other people could get golden eggs too and they wouldn’t be as valuable. It’s Xbox’s eggs or nobody’s eggs, never mind that the geese have to die.

Don’t get the impression that I’m picking on Microsoft here, because unfortunately😼, these practices are so widespread as to simply be the norm in this industry. The real reason your favourite game studios are getting shut down isn’t any one CEO, but the environment that enables and encourages them to do these terrible things in the name of exponential growth and profit. The real culprit is, surprise, late stage capitalism and unbridled greed. Who would've guessed?