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SvennoJ on 14 July 2023
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EpicRandy said:

Let me preface with this: I much enjoy our discussion, always nice to see we can speak reasonably with someone and understand each other, especially with opposing views.

I'm gonna focus on the creativity aspect because the rest I either lack knowledge and so will take too much time to do proper research or I have so much that I would write the equivalent of an academic Essay.

"I'm still of the opinion that consolidation is bad for creativity in general"

It depends but yes with caveats, generally speaking, if we take a look at big actors in the industry and AAA content you'll see a lot of those reusing the same recipe and milking strategy. I'm not sure of all the factors involved in this and how 1 actor can diverge from the norm, it seems it is related to the size of the actors or maybe the diversity and size of the pool of shareholders a CEO as to please (like with more people watching over you deadlines become stiffer and there's higher pressure to guaranteed revenue).

So in a way yes totally agree yet there's another side to this, it creates opportunities for smaller players, indies, and hobbyists to fill the gap left by the bigger player that lost sight of it. Games like Stardew Valley are just pure enjoyment to me or Don't Starve a few years back, masterpieces of creativity, not sure though those would have been that successful if bigger players were as creative and pumped likewise content like there's no tomorrow due to their production capacity they would have on smaller scope title like these.

It also seems to be a part of a vicious cycle, the success of original Ips leads to growth which leads to insecurity vis-a-vis creativity which leads to milking by relying on what's known and more predictable. Though with this, consolidation is not a requirement, but may both act as something that speeds things up or actually leads to the opposite by securing the actors' funding which may help said actor to allow some creative projects (Pentiment comes to mind as a great example).

that said if we look at the current buyout, it does not look like it's even possible to decrease the creativity of ABK even further, A = CoD with all their studio being either development or support studios, can't be much less creative than that. B, the decade-long cycle of the same sequel is still a little more creative than A last original new IP was overwatch in 2016. K don't think the transaction will move the needle either way with them. The optics here is if MS gives them full independence, nothing will change in terms of creativity.

With MS they won't have shareholders monitoring that closely the revenues of ABK and so, the first thing they might do which would help their creativity is put CoD on a 2-year release cycle. We know ABK themselves want this but each time they release a new title and get their payday then suddenly they want to have the same the very next year. Yet a 2-year cycle may actually help the franchise if we remove the short-term vision to please shareholders on an annual basis. This would have the added benefit to free up devs with which doing creative work is a possibility, not a certainty but still better than the status quo. It's also one way MS may help establish the let dev work on what they want to work on they adopted it a few years ago which led to titles like Sea of Thieves, Pentiment, Playground to work on a new Fable, and many others.

Yes consolidation is part of a cycle where new players get a chance to fill the niches left over, which in turn can become big themselves. The one thing consolidation like this diminishes is the big players competing against each other. Bethesda doesn't need to compete with ABK anymore and their releases can be coordinated instead of trying to 'one up' each other.

And true, Activision couldn't sink much lower when it comes to creativity. Sea of Thieves didn't come until Rare was pretty much diminished to nothing, having to work on Kinect etc. And while it looks nice, it held our attention for only 2 days. (But that's more on the part of Rare refusing to have a PvE server next to the game being very obtuse to new comers)

However MS has shareholders as well, and they very much will like to see a return on this recent buying spree. So I'm not so sure the revenues will be less closely monitored and the teams given the go ahead to make something fun. I imagine more will be put to work on the mobile version. So yeah 2 year cycle with the people freed up shifted to mobile titles...