A lot has changed. For example, the gaming industry… The gaming industry has achieved a higher market share than the music and movie industries combined, and has become the world’s largest source of entertainment. When this is the case, every company has started to make plans to consolidate its own place or to take an important place in the game world.
The inevitable end started with these purchases that we hear almost every few weeks. Let’s take a look at the results of these purchases and the impact they have had on players.
What happened that these companies we know started to be sold one by one? We may have to get used to the buying news now.
Riot Games, Supercell, Bethesda, Bungie, Activision Blizzard, Quantic Dream and many more… Each of these popular game companies that we know, love and even grew up with the games of some of them were bought by other big companies.
Big companies wanted to be included in the potential of the game world and started to invest seriously. Companies that have been in this industry for years, such as Sony and Microsoft, wished to further strengthen their positions. In particular, Microsoft fell behind its rival Sony, changed its policies for Xbox and decided to follow a much more user-friendly way.
This process led to the birth of Xbox Game Pass and completely changed the gaming industry. Although Microsoft bought Bethesda to strengthen its own game library, there is a different reason behind a huge acquisition like Activision Blizzard. And that is to act before other huge companies like Apple and Meta.
We can say that Tencent, a China-based company, is currently the highest-paid company in the gaming world. Tencent, which has taken some of the most powerful brands in the gaming industry together with Riot Games and Supercell, also has a large share in Epic Games. Recently, we have started to hear the name of Embracer Group frequently. It seems that we will get used to hearing these names.
It is important to remember that the main purpose of every company is to make money and it will not be good for us to end the competition in the sector.
If you wish, let’s give a small example of the competition between game companies. It was such a beautiful and memorable rivalry that it even split the players for years, and everyone stuck to their favorite game. Yes, we are talking about PES and FIFA. The rivalry between Konami and EA had begun to lose its former flavor in recent years. Despite this, there was a rivalry and we were still trying to preserve that spirit. Afterwards, Konami announced that it could no longer compete with EA’s FIFA and would change the name of PES to a different path.
The competition is completely over and EA’s FIFA is completely unbeatable. EA has become unrivaled in FIFA as in The Sims, and now a person who wants to play football has only one option, not two. While this ended diversity, it also greatly slowed the development of FIFA. Despite all these examples, monopolizing a company in the game world is not as easy as feared. Because new studios will always be established, there will always be independent producers, and companies with hundreds of billions of dollars will not be able to easily buy each other.
Although it has been following a seriously user-friendly policy lately, everyone is afraid of a monopoly on Microsoft.
Xbox is a 20-year-old console and has a lot of experience in the game world. There are many famous game developers and game brands in the company. Despite this, the company, which has largely failed with the Xbox One generation and has taken a serious difference from its rival PlayStation, now attaches great importance to the game world. The biggest purpose behind the purchases made is to strengthen the Xbox Game Pass library with first-party games. Xbox wants to make the Game Pass system the main foundation of the gaming world and wants it to reach hundreds of millions of users.
Although some players criticize a lot why Microsoft “buys ready-made studios” instead of building game studios from scratch, the fact that Microsoft is a trillion-dollar company is forgotten. As one of the three largest companies in the world, Microsoft can foresee the years it will take to build a studio from scratch or make a long-term investment in a small studio. This makes buying an existing company with many successful brands a much more logical option.
While we don’t know what’s going to happen next, we think the worry underlying Microsoft’s monopoly is unnecessary. Xbox is a company that lags behind its rival PlayStation (at least for the moment) in many respects. It takes a very long process for this type of company to monopolize and change people’s habits. In addition, we already know all these companies we mentioned and we know their experience in the gaming industry. But what about when huge tech companies with no experience buy big game studios? Gamers should be afraid of something like this, not Microsoft.
Amazon, Netflix and many other huge companies have started to increase their investments to enter the gaming world. Although it is debatable how successful Netflix and Amazon are, let’s not forget the rumor that “Amazon is buying Electronic Arts!”. Maybe Amazon didn’t buy it, but there are many companies that want to take their place in the game world such as Apple, Meta and Alphabet. We can say that it will be one of the scariest scenarios for companies that are inexperienced and will not understand what the players want, to enter the sector by acquiring huge companies.
These purchases are now a part of our lives, and we will see them more often as the industry continues to grow.
It was inevitable for us to enter such a cycle as the demand for the game world increased. For example, we recently witnessed the sale of Quantic Dream. The studio, which appeared with successful interactive story-type games such as Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, was sold to NetEase Games, a company operating in the mobile games side. Although NetEase Games does not have a very positive record in the game industry, it seems that it will meet the capital needs of Quantic Dream and will not interfere with the operation of the studio.
Companies that continue to actively incorporate game studios at the moment; It looks like Embracer Group, Tencent, Sony, Microsoft and Netflix. It is also rumored that companies such as Apple and Amazon are also interested in some studios from the gaming world. It seems that we will continue to hear these news frequently when the purchases made by mid-size companies such as NetEase are also included.
If the Activision Blizzard purchase is completed, it will be a huge turning point in the gaming world.
Although we want the studios and companies we love to continue on their own, giant game companies such as Ubisoft and EA can sometimes be ridiculous. Activision Blizzard was one of these companies and we can say that it was managed in the worst way possible. Among the allegations were cases of harassment within the company, mistreating employees and not giving studios the value they deserve.
Another thing that made the management of the company bad is that the old Activision we love, which made many brands of our childhood such as Guitar Hero, Blur, Skylanders and Crash, had become a Call of Duty production machine. Even Crash’s dev team is involved as a Call of Duty support studio. More than three studios were working on a single Call of Duty game. This is how Call of Duty, which we come across every year, was produced in series.
We don’t even want to talk about the current situation of Blizzard, where we feel to our bones what a quality job awaits us even when we hear its name. Phil Spencer, president of Xbox, announced that they would bring Activision Blizzard’s old brands back to life and give all studios the value they deserve. It was also said that the company was saved from being a Call of Duty production machine and that Call of Duty would be released at longer intervals.
In addition to all of these, Phil Spencer states that the most popular brands of Activision Blizzard will also be released for PlayStation on the same day for years, and he says that they will bring each one of them, including Call of Duty, to Xbox Game Pass from the first day. In other words, this purchase, which many people fear, will affect the game world in a very positive way, contrary to what is believed. Especially for the tens of thousands of employees within Activision Blizzard. So what do you guys think about all these purchases?
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