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Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft after Bobby Kotick forces them all to merge. Facebook will bungle up a

• eunos 6y ago
  Don't forget Tencent.
  • actuator 6y ago
    Epic is partly owned by Tencent but yeah, they are a very big fish, specially with their interests in mobile gaming.
  • gertrunde 6y ago
    And not just Tencent - there are also other companies, like NetEase, which while smaller than Tencent at about 1/6th of the size, still takes more annual revenue than EA. (Going by figures on Wikipedia).
    • eunos 6y ago
      And also Bilibili might also join the industry with Fall Guys mobile https://twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/1297205586350747648 https://twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/1297205586350747648
• SSLy 6y ago
  Nintendo is self-sustainable, Apple is exerting a lot of influence among smaller studios with Arcade. Like Annapurna Interactive (which is nota bene funded by Oracle).
  • actuator 6y ago
    I would never want it to happen because of how much I love Nintendo. But I have always thought if there is any gaming property Apple can really benefit from buying, it is Nintendo.
    • gambiting 6y ago
      If I'm doing the maths correctly - Nintendo's current worth is somewhere around $40BN? Like, that's a lot of money, even for Apple, and then I'm not sure Nintendo would want to sell?
      • masklinn 6y ago
        > I'm not sure Nintendo would want to sell? Nintendo definitely wouldn't want to sell but it's publicly traded so a hostile takeover is always in the cards
        • yulaow 6y ago
          Japan government would for sure exercise their golden power if someone tries an hostile takeover on any big national corporation like Nintendo.
  • gregjw 6y ago
    I mean, one of the founders (Megan Ellison) is Larry Ellison's daughter, I'm sure he helped it get started, but does Oracle as a company have any official activity with Annapurna?
  • Andrex 6y ago
    Nintendo is just two bad generations of hardware from being vulnerable enough to sell itself (IMO.) They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax. I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I don't think that's ever been the case. Edit- The people downvoting me have apparently already forgotten about the Wii U. Imagine if they had two such systems in a row, without the DS/3DS line as a profitable fallback. Such are the possibilities of the future. When Nintendo's doing well, they're doing great, and everyone seems to forget the bad times. The GameCube era wasn't much better, but at least the GameCube and GBA were profitable/break even from their launches, as opposed to the Wii U and especially 3DS post-Ambassador price cut. Would be interested in a discussion or any kind of rebuttal from others who are actually familiar with Nintendo's financial history. To be clear: Nintendo as a company operated a loss from 2012-2015. An incompetent CEO could easily exacerbate that into a death spiral. Don't take Nintendo for granted, is all I'm saying.
• LanceH 6y ago
  I was expecting you to finish with valve pivoting to hats.
  • akhilcacharya 6y ago
    I mean, the joke is funny but realistically it's clear that Valve is getting back in the game, so to speak, and we're probably going to see some VR followup to Alyx in the next year or two.
    • me_me_me 6y ago
      I dunno about this. The current consensus of community is that Dota 2 is dying and valve couldn't be bothered doing anything about it. Just cashing in while they can. And Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.
      • bootloop 6y ago
        I would say since it was made free to play CS:GO (also Valve) surpassed Dota 2 and it is still rising.
      • nindalf 6y ago
        > Dota 2 is dying I'm old enough that I remember people saying this in 2014. Actual data on active users - https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All. This indicates that it's far from it's peak of 1.2M active players but 700k active is still respectable. > Dota 2 is by far their biggest game. Not by players. That would be CS:GO (https://steamcharts.com/app/730 https://steamcharts.com/app/730) with 900k active players.
        • pbhjpbhj 6y ago
          900k active presumably includes the 50% of Deathmatch players that are zombies? It's interesting to see there seems to be some evolutionary pressures at play as a couple of new routines are being used, not just 'rotate on the spot', one or two shoot now (yes, I got shot by an XP farming zombie) and one does epicycles which makes them surprisingly hard to shoot.
• weregiraffe 6y ago
  >Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft And, you know, all the other independent developers. Of which there are a legion.
• doomlaser 6y ago
  Unity just had its IPO, and the technology is powering a huge fraction of games across all platforms, from recent hit Fall Guys to Pokemon Go, to thousands of indie efforts, not to mention wide adoption in both the AR software industry and as a platform for many AI research projects. I don't know what its financial future will be as the company has been focusing on growth over profit, but it's a significant player. Tangentially, open-source game engine Godot keeps getting better and better, and it's just a matter of time before a significant game is made using its tools: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    According to Switch data, Unity powers about 50% of its games. It is also the tier1 engine sponsored by Google and Microsoft for their 3D offerings, Godot needs to grow a bit more to reach that level of relevance for game studios, AR/VR companies and Hollywood now looking at Unity.
    • logicOnly 6y ago
      Nintendo isn't really helpful to understand the greater market. Most developers don't work with them, and their customers represent a tiny less "gaming educated" population. It's like using cellphone games as a gauge on the greater market.
      • the_hoser 6y ago
        That's silly gatekeeping bullshit. By the numbers, mobile gaming is the greater market. It's traditional gaming that's becoming the niche.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • pjmlp 6y ago
        If you so wish, https://developer.android.com/games/develop/build-in-unity https://developer.android.com/games/develop/build-in-unity https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/unity/quickstart-android https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/unity/quickstart-an... https://stadia.dev/blog/unity-production-ready-support-for-stadia-now-available/ https://stadia.dev/blog/unity-production-ready-support-for-s... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/develop/unity/unity-development-overview?tabs=mrtk%2Carr%2Chl2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/devel... Is it mobile enough?
• dragonsh 6y ago
  Probably missing the largest gaming company in the world Tencent here. I believe they will still thrive.
• fendy3002 6y ago
  There are more: - paradox interactive - rockstar, which is strong from gta v online and rdr - cd projeckt red, which also get income from gog and hyped cyberpunk - valve won't exit software devs in short time, their investment in vr is big. I won't be surprised if they release vanity knives with lootbox though IMO Bethesda decided to sell to MS because their recent games cannot generate enough popularity. They can only hoped for skyrim and are struggling with their old engine.
  • ekianjo 6y ago
    If Rockstar ever gets acquired, this will be one of the most expensive deals ever. They routinely sell games in the dozens of millions of units.
    • wtf_is_up 6y ago
      Rockstar is owned by Take Two Interactive. TTWO's entire market cap (including Rockstar and 2K) is about half of EA.
      • Thaxll 6y ago
        EA is much bigger in terms of revenue.
    • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      GTA V, mainly thanks to their online offering, has been the 2nd best selling video game of all time, second only to Minecraft... which Microsoft bought in 2014 for $2.5 billion. Mind you, Minecraft's income comes from a lot of merchandise and spinoffs, whereas GTA is mainly from the game itself. I was curious; RDR 2, also a Rockstar game, is the #14 best selling game of all time apparently; I didn't know it did that good. The other GTA games are also in the top 50. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
      • wasmitnetzen 6y ago
• dijit 6y ago
  FWIW Ubisoft is very hostile to being acquired. I worked there for 6-7 years and the CEO fought off vivendis acquisition. Which was not the first. He has even gone so far as to decentralise the Canadian studios so that if the company was somehow acquired the aquirer could not close down studios without heavy fines from the Canadian government.
  • mcrider 6y ago
    Could you elaborate on that last point or share a source? I don't doubt you but I don't understand the legal basis behind that move (but sounds interesting)!
    • sequoia 6y ago
      I'm guessing here but the Canadian gov't often subsidizes tech & other engineering companies, so the strategy may be "have the company avail itself of as many subsidies as possible" with subsidies that commit the company to continue operating in City X for Y number of years. example tech subsidy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_and_Experimental_Development_Tax_Credit_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_and_Experi...
    • dijit 6y ago
      Standard: I am not a lawyer disclaimer here. The way it was described to me was that there's two major types of fine that the canadian government will levy against large companies that dump lots of workers at once. 1) More than 50 people within a 4week period. Usually this means that the company must continue paying employment benefits on behalf of the company for a period of a year (iirc). 2) More than x% of your company being closed down. You can get around #2 by claiming redundancies or claiming that you've moved the job to another canadian state (or, centralised a position), but once you give the studio its own legal entity and place an MD in charge (who is legally responsible for the studio) you can't do that any longer because the parent company continues to have a legal presence in the country, but operations are considered separate/independent. Thus, if you close down the studio you've effectively terminated 100% of employment there which will garner super heavy fines. Also also: Ubisoft doesn't want to piss of the canadian government either because nearly their entire profit exists in the tax break that montreal gives game companies. .. but, like I said, this was told to me only a few times by a few high level directors and it was when we were talking about Vivendi trying to buy us, and they were also not laywers, so it could be a lot of chinese whispers. But I've spoken to Yves, and while he's a really genuinely nice person... he will salt the earth before he sells the company.
• me_me_me 6y ago
  Ouch! This cuts deep because of how close to actual future it sounds. Especially > Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanity knives using their hardware manufacturing experience.
• apatters 6y ago
  Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one that's on its last legs.
  • logicOnly 6y ago
    This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s. Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever. It's up to you to move on.
    • apatters 6y ago
      Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some nostalgia, too. It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years. Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing wrong with paying him for it.
    • gota 6y ago
      Have you watched Mythic Quest? There's a particular episode touching this, that doesn't really require the rest of the series and is very good. Check it out if you can - it' "Dark Quiet Death" from Season one
    • gabereiser 6y ago
      Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK’s of the same graphics pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who came before you. I know from experience. The “I’ll write my own engine” bug bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we all love and adore. What’s interesting is the non-mention of itch.io I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it will get done. Dev’s are surprisingly open to ideas, it’s the publishers (money people) who have a problem with change.
• strikelaserclaw 6y ago
  In just a generation we will have our own version of zaibutsu and chaebols, isn't that exciting !
• ArkVark 6y ago
  Because the 30% 'Standard' commission is fundamentally uneconomic. Independent publishers cannot thrive, when they could simply be acquired by a platform owner (ie. Microsoft) and pay 0%.
• dogma1138 6y ago
  Microsoft and EA have some deal now revolving around Game Pass Ultimate which grants you access to EA Play also.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  We still have large, amazing, original games coming out of small studios. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an excellent example. We may get to a point where there are practically no "medium-large" developers and only "massive" ones like Microsoft, but I'm confident we'll still get great games from outside the massive groups.
• criddell 6y ago
  If Epic is successful in their lawsuit against Apple, then I think it's only a matter of time before the consoles will have to allow alternate stores as well. The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument that people like to use to defend closed console stores isn't as convincing when the console makers also own the biggest money making game studios as well. Go Epic, go!
  • lapetitejort 6y ago
    Following from alternate stores on consoles, we're not far away from Valve's SteamBox, i.e. prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play. I'm disappointed the idea never took off. I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux. If cloud gaming gains more traction, the industry might just do that. Why develop games to run on custom-built blades in a data center when generic blades exist?
    • criddell 6y ago
      > prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play That's been a dream for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
    • andoriyu 6y ago
      > I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux. Take a look at what all linux games are lacking and what nearly all AAA game that aren't on linux have. ... DRM and Anti-Cheat. Let's forget that DRM is trash. Publishers want to have it, and they don't care about our opinion of it. You can't really "port" DRM, you have to develop a whole new one for Linux and figure how to prevent easy-peasy eBPF programs to make cracking it easy. Anti-Cheat is another story. Valve and Easy Anti-Cheat are currently working on bringing it to Linux. You need that and you want that for any online game. Probably not as hard as DRM, but still requires a lot of linux specific work.
  • duncanawoods 6y ago
    > The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument Kind of ironic how bad an argument that is when discussing anti-trust. It's a form of dumping to distort the market. It prevents new competitors becoming viable purely by selling hardware.
• publicola1990 6y ago
  I think Sega is also a major player, they have bought up many studios in recent years including Relic, Creative Assembly and Amplitude.
• kanox 6y ago
  A lot of people claim that this is reducing competition but the gaming industry seems to be much less consolidated than many others.
• aikinai 6y ago
  How did you leave out Nintendo? :(
• acolumb 6y ago
  I find that funny when Among Us (indie) and Fall Guys (also indie) are some of the highest-trending games at the moment.
  • Noos 6y ago
    Both of them are free, though. The former one only got this push due to streamers suddenly playing it together. These are kind of "meme of the moment" games more than anything, in the same way VR Chat was a bit ago, or Five Nights at Freddy's.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • chrysoprace 6y ago
      On what platforms are they free? They're paid games on all the platforms I know of.
      • zerocrates 6y ago
        Fall Guys was "free" on PS4 at launch in the sense that it was included in PS+. Among Us is just really cheap (free to play on its original mobile platforms, I believe, but that's not really the source of its current moment of popularity).
        • chrysoprace 6y ago
          Being included as part of a paid service seems a like a liberal use of the word "free".
          • zerocrates 6y ago
            Well, hence my quotation marks. Plus is a strange case because you need it for online play and some other PS features like cloud saves, so many people have it regardless of what games are on offer. Let's just say that a large number of PS4 players got it at no marginal cost.
• klmadfejno 6y ago
  The barrier between what indie studios and big studios can produce is increasingly shrinking. I'd say the market has never been healthier. The sheer amount of content is still constrained by some linear function of man hours but there's enough crowdsourcing business models like kickstarter and early access releases that even small shops can afford to show a cool concept and get funded for its completion.
• RobRivera 6y ago
  Where can I preorder the butterfly cloud9 knife?
• DubiousPusher 6y ago
  I don't think it's fair to include Microsoft in that list. They buy game studios so they can close them and shelve their IP after several attempts to turn beloved franchises into GAAS products. They're less of a game studio conglomerator and more of a recycling bin.
  • WorldMaker 6y ago
    Depends on which era of Microsoft Game Studios / Xbox Game Studios you are talking about. Also, Microsoft has never really shelved IP ever, even Flight Simulator is back out of retirement! They've sold IP back to (nearly) the original developers, which is somewhat unheard of outside of Microsoft (Fasa's BattleTech/Mech Warrior and Shadowrun IP brands are back in the "indy space" because Microsoft sold it back; you rarely hear of an Activision or EA IP getting sold back to small developers). Even Microsoft's worst turnover period of developer subsidiaries had some interesting mitigating circumstances: Bungie wanted to be independent again (and again that's a weird case where you'd be surprise to see a developer like Bungie spin back out of an Activision or an EA; Bungie themselves had to do a ton of work on their publishing contracts to avoid being swallowed up by Activision with Destiny), and rumors are that whatever happened to Lionhead may have been a suicide, though who knows if the story will ever be substantiated one way or the other (and Lionhead's IP hasn't been "shelved" for long either with Playground Games working on a new Fable).
    • danielrpa 6y ago
      This - only if Activision returned Infocom to an indie or sent it to the public domain!
• vlunkr 6y ago
  As long as no one buys From Software everything will be ok. Praise the Sun.
  • FridgeSeal 6y ago
    Fear the Old ~~Microsoft~~ Blood.
  • rawbot 6y ago
    There's been already 2 Playstation exclusives from From Software, Bloodborne and Demon's Souls (original and remake), so you never know.
• oneplane 6y ago
  Embrace, extend, extinguish but for games!
• 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Bobby Kotick is on Jeffrey Epstein's list. He also lost a sexual harassment case against a flight attendant from one of his private flights. Miss Ukraine 1996 married Bobby Kotick's dad, Charles Kotick (for 2 years, before he passed away).
• 127 6y ago
  Godot, Blender, itch.io, Krita. Nobody forces you to use walled gardens. Games are entertainment, not something mandatory, so I wouldn't worry too much. If there's too much of an lock-in from the major vendors, it will simply cause the indie scene to explode.
• chaostheory 6y ago
  If you think Valve will exit software development, then you don't understand the market. Valve did do that and had this luxury when they were the only big game platform on PC. Unfortunately for them, there's GOG, EPIC, and MS Game Pass now. They need exclusives and the best way to do that without going the EPIC route is by developing their own games.
  • nickflood 6y ago
    I'd argue that Valve doesn't need exclusives just yet. By virtue of being the default PC store they get plenty of games that are not on any other store. But this will change.
    • chaostheory 6y ago
      Alyx wouldn't exist if you were right. GOG and EPIC are credible threats.
• Bombthecat 6y ago
  That's how every maeket works, sooner or later, things will be in a few hands. At least indoe games still have a chance. (among us for example)
• andrea92 6y ago
  Lol, you're probably not far off :D