Corporations shouldn’t be able to own other corporations.
Comment on CD Projekt Is Not Interested in Being Acquired
oscarlavi@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Insomniac, the dev team behind the wildly successful Spider-Man games just had a leak. In the leak, it’s discovered that they were strong-armed by Sony (who owns Insomniac) to downsize staff despite exceeding sales targets and hitting goals. They needed to downsize to help balance Sony’s books, who have acquired a slew of failing or underperforming studios.
Sony owns Studio A, and Studio B. Studio B have underperformed for the last few years, whilst Studio A has outperformed their targets. Because of the shortcomings in Studio B, Sony are now out of pocket, even accounting for the earnings of Studio A. Studio A are forced to eliminate staff roles to make up for Studio B’s mismanagement. A well oiled and well performing Studio have to butcher their teams to balance their parent entity’s books. It’s so fucking short sighted and stupid.
This isn’t just a Sony/Insomniac issue either, I guarantee this goes on throughout the industry whenever there’s a parent company. It’s just how it will always be in those circumstances.
isles@lemmy.world 9 months ago
gataloca@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That’s quite radical. But I agree, speculation is a big problem and dysfunctional.
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 8 months ago
Having a brain is quite radical these days. Not wanting to pay for breathing is also quite radical.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 9 months ago
This is how any corporate ownership happens. Success is expected and exploited to cover the non successful units. Rather than retool bad units or invest in changes in them, they will squeeze the successful units as much as they can to power the rest of the business.
I have seen it personally in the travel industry. My spouse is seeing it in the food industry.
No one should be happy that Microsoft and others are buying up the game studios.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Activision Blizzard was a special case for me because they were already shit so new ownership might get them back to a neutral. I hate hating a company whose products I used to love so much.
wooki@lemmynsfw.com 9 months ago
Think about that for more than a half second.
You know ownership results in degradation of better teams.
Why would you think buying a liability will be good for the performing teams? Do you like seeing good teams suffer?
Blizzard should be dissolved. Let the IP die and talent can move onto other teams.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I mean, when you’ve already given up entirely on those teams, either they improve or remain irrelevant. I’m not holding my breath for them or anything as I’ve already got enough games in my library to never touch a Blizzard game again while still remaining as entrained as video games can keep me.