CamHostage
Member
Yeah, I'd much prefer Xbox to have bought Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics. It is interesting that those two studios are both now working with Xbox first party studios on 2 different games. I would love for Xbox to buy both of these studios from Embracer after A/B/K goes through.
I don't really like MS's purchase of Activision either (it feels like pulling ringers into a big match you were looking forward to watching play out, and I don't usually see good things for consumers when a market consolidates,) but the one easy silver lining is that at least there's a good chance with how things worked out that both companies will be returning to their hits / making new titles.
Activision (if you remove Blizzard from the equation) was quickly becoming CoD Corp. and canceling even its generally-successful product lines like THPS and Crash Bandicoot because they were only making millions, not billions. And Square Enix was never "Square and Enix and Eidos" (it has a hard time enough remembering the Enix part of its business, and Enix reportedly was the cash holder who took in Square at the time, I assume the bigwigs are still proportionately Enix people?) Eidos never fit, and I don't know if their brands would have flourished if they were still a standalone publisher (Eidos might have just fallen off the map and sold its brands to THQ Nordic a long time ago.... which would be the Embracer situation we have now anyway, except the studios managed to make it out alive) but if you were an Eidos studio and your game didn't star Lara Croft, you had an uphill battle to fight.
With this situation, Embracer will for sure try to mine the brands for all that they're worth since that's their business mechanism, and MS has indicated that it'd be happy to see Activision dig deeper into its toybox than it has in recent times. So if you like Legacy of Kain/Soul Reaver, Thief, Crash, Spyro, maybe Gex or Prototype or stuff like that, now's not the time to hold your breath but at least there's more than a 0.00% chance that you might see these titles return now that business-as-usual has broken up a bit for these companies.
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