All these aquistitions will lead to 1 or 2 companies owning the vast majority of the creative talent and major games in the industry.
Monopolies and oligopolies result in the complete disempowerment of consumers.
Think about cable and phone companies and how horrible and powerless people are when dealing with their exploitative practices. Don't like one, well tough luck, the competitor is just as bad and they all conspire together to constantly increase prices while offering a peppercorn more.
In 10-15 years no one will own games, they'll all just be exlcusively available on a few companies' subscription services, which lets face it, every company is ultimately after. They want you paying annually what you would formerly pay for once. Similar to MS. Office.
I'm generally not a chicken little type of person, but all these aquistitions in the AAA industry is starting to look very much like the sky is falling.
Be ready to pay $30-40 a month to play AAA games and have no other options to just buy a game. If the average console owner buys 10 games in its life cycle (5/6 years), a subscription will have people buy the equivalent of 5-6 a year. We should end MS/Sony brand loyalty and resist this consolidation of the industry.
Pss..
Only few companies rule the world. They own most of everything in the world.
The most popular brands in the world belong to these companies.
www.dividend.com
People argue against brands. But in reality bigger fish owns both of these brands.
Gaming would be that level in 10 years. It's why MS Is very worried about the big boys.
When they said Sony and Nintendo aren't their competitors, they weren't kidding. 70$b cash ended that argument.
We will see, what Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple would buy in these 2 years.
Embracer itself has 86+ studios. That is good start for these companies, since it gives them some games for their new console/cloud. With EA, take 2, or ubisoft their cloud gaming value would sky rocket.
Its scary how much success money brings. Xbox went from 5 studios to 30+ studios and insane IPs for $75b