Troika Games for me - made by folks who created original Fallout, then went on to give CRPG community cult classics such as Arcanum and Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines... CRPGs thrive in A/AA space, AAA is creative death for them.

Media Molecule

oh wait...

Cing.
Want more of that Hotel Dusk art style damn it.

Westwood Studios for me, the Lands of Lore games were the shit back in the day, the third one was experimental and not the strongest installment, but it did a few things that late RPGs would follow. And the Command & Conquer series speaks for itself.

Really though, it's beyond saddening to see a collection of legends like that in one picture, while seeing the stuff that studios pump out today and sell to children. There was certainly poor fare presented even in the 90s and early 2000s, but I dare say that the average game today is much weaker than the average game back then, relatively speaking it has become much easier and accessible to make games, and with the breadth of demographics and the sheer size of the industry, there's too much room for hacks and peddlers of poorly made slop.  

Oh yeah, right. That is also a tragic story, basically Reggie killed Cing. The reason is: they had some minor success with Another Code (called Two memories in the US) and Hotel Dusk. They made sequels for both, with moderate budget basically planned around the games selling like their predecessors. They did - in Japan and Europe. But half of the sales of the original games came from the US, and even though Nintendo of Europe had already made the localization to english, Nintendo of America denied publishing of Another Code R and Secret Window. As this meant it fell short of the sales expectations that had included american sales. Cing went into debt, a ridiculously low amount for a company 256 million yen (less than 3 million dollar). So yeah, NoA killed Cing because they didn't want to publish niche games (not only from Cing, that included also Monoliths Disaster: Day of Crisis and Xenoblade Chronicles, Mistwalkers Last Story and Ganbarions glorious game Pandora's Tower).

I'm not sure how much of an impact this will have but was always a fan of Studio Liverpool, aka Psygnosis, output. Especially in the 90s. The reason I don't think the impact will be felt is because what is left of Psynosis is Sony's XDev and the newly formed and then purchase FireSprite. Psynosis made some great games in the late 90s era and would love to see them in new forms, G-Police and Colony Wars would be great VR games. And Destruction Derby would be a good candidate for a revival. Sony needs a food arcade racer on their system.

Gametrailers. This one isn't a game studio, but if I were to go back, I would advise them to publish Indie games to keep their business running.

This crap is why I don't get why people fawned over Reggie. He spent an awful lot of time telling Americans what they wanted instead of asking them what they wanted. 

I've never heard of Cing before, but it doesn't look like Nintendo ever owned them.  Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, anyone could have bought them.

It's not about owning, but Nintendo published their games on the DS and the Wii. That's what their relationship was here and as a result they got games fitting extremely well to the unique features of Nintendos consoles. But NoA decided they were too niche, even though the games made profit before. Finding a different publisher is very difficult, especially for a japanese game studio in america. If the games would've been published, they would've been again a moderate success, resulting in moderate profits. Reggie only wanted the Wii Sports and Mario Karts, not smaller but unique games. Which is a pity, as these unique games define the diversity of a library of a system. I cherish my copy of Another Code R, as I think it is one of the best games of the Wii. Cings demise stings doubly, as a few years later an adventure renessaince happened, something Cing would've fit very well.