this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Insomniac, the dev team behind the wildly successful Spider-Man games just had a leak. In the leak, it's discovered that they were strong-armed by Sony (who owns Insomniac) to downsize staff despite exceeding sales targets and hitting goals. They needed to downsize to help balance Sony's books, who have acquired a slew of failing or underperforming studios.
Sony owns Studio A, and Studio B. Studio B have underperformed for the last few years, whilst Studio A has outperformed their targets. Because of the shortcomings in Studio B, Sony are now out of pocket, even accounting for the earnings of Studio A. Studio A are forced to eliminate staff roles to make up for Studio B's mismanagement. A well oiled and well performing Studio have to butcher their teams to balance their parent entity's books. It's so fucking short sighted and stupid.
This isn't just a Sony/Insomniac issue either, I guarantee this goes on throughout the industry whenever there's a parent company. It's just how it will always be in those circumstances.
This is how any corporate ownership happens. Success is expected and exploited to cover the non successful units. Rather than retool bad units or invest in changes in them, they will squeeze the successful units as much as they can to power the rest of the business.
I have seen it personally in the travel industry. My spouse is seeing it in the food industry.
No one should be happy that Microsoft and others are buying up the game studios.
Correct, and we're seeing the consequences of these buyouts occur now with Embracer imploding. Its worse because the console makers expect their first party titles to move consoles, which indies need to get into homes. When they start to fail to move units due to dwindling quality, the house of cards will collapse for them.
We're watching the 1970s video game crash in slower motion, which occurred due to an excess of lower quality, costlier projects.
Activision Blizzard was a special case for me because they were already shit so new ownership might get them back to a neutral. I hate hating a company whose products I used to love so much.
Think about that for more than a half second.
You know ownership results in degradation of better teams.
Why would you think buying a liability will be good for the performing teams? Do you like seeing good teams suffer?
Blizzard should be dissolved. Let the IP die and talent can move onto other teams.
I mean, when you've already given up entirely on those teams, either they improve or remain irrelevant. I'm not holding my breath for them or anything as I've already got enough games in my library to never touch a Blizzard game again while still remaining as entrained as video games can keep me.
Corporations shouldn't be able to own other corporations.
That's quite radical. But I agree, speculation is a big problem and dysfunctional.
Having a brain is quite radical these days. Not wanting to pay for breathing is also quite radical.
Everyone is so happy now that Activision is part of Microsoft. That's going to change the moment Microsoft starts the layoffs. And they will happen.
I only warned you all for the past two years while this deal was allowed to go through.
Nah, nobody is going to cry if the C-suite of Blizzard gets sacked. There absolutely should be more layoffs, in order to fully eradicate the bro culture that enabled Kotick to be as rotten as he was.
ActiBlizz has some fat to trim. People will only be upset if the cuts focus on current developers, which seems very unlikely.
With the state that Activision Blizzard was in before the acquisition, the company being gutted was one of the reasons I supported the acquisition. Sucks for the low level employees that will be caught in the fire, but the leadership absolutely needs to go for multiple reasons.
You warned us and we didn't listen and we failed to stop the transaction from happening. We are a bunch of fools.
Warn? None of us bought the company there buddy
Who tf is happy about that?