And Square decided to shift to UE. Yes I know that there is alot of custom stuff/modules that you can bring to UE
Knowing Square they probably did some extensive customizations of their own to the engine to fit their project.
I dont neccessarily disagree. I think fostering studios and then acquiring them like Sony did with housemarquee and BP, and MS with playground games and Obsidian is the best way to go about doing this. Sony buying SE or MS buying Zenimax is probably more monopolistic, but at the end of the day these kind of big acquisitions happen all the time in the industry. Watching Ford vs Ferrari, I found out that Ferrari was bought out by Fiat in the 60s. Ferrari. It is what is.
I'd rather Sony and MS grow their studios organically by hiring more devs, creating more internal teams, but as a fan of BP and PS collaborations, Id like to see them continue to work on PS IPs and remakes. And I wont lie, Playground Games' Fable reboot is probably my most anticipated MS first party game. I know MS has 343 and Coalition but I dont trust either team to do a Fable game justice. At the very least, PG will give us a gorgeous looking open world. If MS had allowed them to go third party like Bungie, who knows what kind of GaaS game a third party publisher might force them to make.
You only have to look at how third parties have treated talented devs recently. Bungie forced to slave away on Destiny DLC for years by Activision. Every single one of the 15 or so studios at Acitivion are now forced to work on CoD games. Every single one. It was announced by Activision as if thats a good thing. CD was forced to make a soulless Avengers game after the fantastic Rise of Tomb Raider. Sony let Kojima finally make something other than MGS sequels Konami forced him to make for 30 years.
First party publishers can definitely help studios raise the bar. There is a reason why 7 out of the last 10 GOTY winners are first party titles.
The thing here tho is that Sony acquiring SE would not be monopolistic either in terms of IP ownership, or being a forced thing (Sony has worked with Square on multiple projects over the years). The same thing applies to Microsoft and Bethesda; there's a false narrative that Microsoft's not invested into Bethesda over the years, when in fact they have going as far back as Morrowind if not earlier.
I personally would like to see more collaborations wherein these third-party entities remain their own entities, but like you said I understand the market reality of things as they are. I'm never going to argue against an acquisition once it's been made official, but I don't think we need to enable the mentality with gamers actively speculating and hoping for them out of thin air, either, because it's just going to degrade general gaming discussion.
I mean it's gonna happen anyway, right? That's what
EDMIX
has been telling me. So why not be curious if you know it's going to happen? Doesn't mean I'm cheerleading or hoping/praying for something specific, but I'm not gonna be blindsided if an acquisition happens, at least.
Making original content, what a bummer.
You don't want original IP? At one point every franchise you love now was an original IP, they just got a chance to grow. I welcome more new IP, personally.
Competition is good, consolidation not so much. And consolidation is the proposition MS and the big sharks have brought to the table.
If Sony doesn't buy their trusted partners it would be a problem.
MS did not bring consolidation to the table. If you want to be technical and look at it from a perspective of market relativity, Sony brought consolidation to the industry decades ago.
When the vast majority of 3P games were going to PlayStation systems like PS1 and PS2, many of them basically as exclusives, that was a form of industry consolidation, in the form of content consolidation, aggregated to a single platform ecosystem. And last I checked, PS1 and PS2 are for many the best consoles of all time.
For where the industry was at back then and its size, that was essentially market consolidation that Sony helped foster with their financial power and resources, and that seemed to work out just fine for games and gamers. So while you don't have to personally favor consolidation, the reality has shown that it's produced no net negative for the industry as a whole.
So it is what it is.