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The big three 3rd party publishers (EA, Activision and Ubisoft) are still in relatively good condition and have money in the bank to spare. Even if they get hit massively, they will still have enough margain to recuperate and reform.

Out of the three, I'd say Ubisoft is the one in the best position, since it's the one that has partaken in excessive practices the least (compared to the other two, at least). They are not going anywhere anytime soon.

EA have been making a fool of themselves lately, and with the Star Wars deal slowly but surely sinking, DICE and Battlefield series offering deminishing returns and the lootbox regulations everywhere in the world threatening to cut FIFA's profits severely, it looks like it's in very bad shape. They won't dissapear, though, since their sports deals bring monumental profits even without the lootboxes, and the license owners don't care about gambling in videogames (FIFA and the NFL are spotty at best and dangerously shady at worst), so they are going to keep licensing their brands to EA. The only things that could hurt EA is either a massive lawsuit about their lootboxes or a investers' panic throwing their shares into garbage value.

Activision is having similar problems, only with CoD instead of FIFA. They have more control over that brand than EA has over the sports ones, but with Bungie going their own way and Blizzard seemingly cutting corners everywhere they can, it doesn't seem like they are in good shape either. Maybe the insider trading investigation uncovers something really shady from them, and that could potentially hurt them badly.

Also, Bethesda is in no real danger. They could just stop developing their game, and just publish and license their properties to others, and that would probably improve their performance, so it would be a win/win for them.

If anyone of them fall (they won't, but it's interesting to speculate) the shedding of dozens, if not thousands of IPs, many of them unused for years, would be the talk of the year. So many possibilities for other companies to get hot properties for cheap...



You know it deserves the GOTY.

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