Buying something and shutting it down shouldn’t be possible. You don’t want to own it anymore? Great, they’re independent, good luck have fun. But you didn’t do anything, to say it stopped existing. It is a purely theoretical act. No factory was torn down, no warehouse was liquidated. A video game studio is just a bunch of folks who come in to work on the same thing every weekday. Games are made of labor. If the money stops flowing, that’s a problem, but it shouldn’t be a light-switch existential termination.
If the studios had the resources they could easily become independent. But the corporate side owns the rights to their works, so the now independent studio doesn’t have any incoming revenue.
The average employee won’t work for scraps or nothing. So it’s effectively over if big corpo cuts them off.
That is not what happened here. I am saying: buying a studio and saying whoops you don’t exist anymore should not happen. You are saying: but it does. Because copyright? Even for shit that’s not out yet. A bunch of these closures involve killing unreleased projects, which are obviously never going to go anywhere in the hands of whichever robots own them. Tell me their ownership matters and you will see what backlash looks like.
Thanks for explaining. I was not arguing the point that closures happen, just expanding on why it’s not easy for the studios to get back on their feet again as independents.
There will likely be non-disclosure agreements, non-competes or simply IP rights to take into consideration if we want to argue why these studios can’t continue their work. In the end it comes down to legal stuff and money. The IP rights even for unreleased products very likely are with the parent corporation. The same goes for the codebase.
So yeah. The studios are left with nothing, except a severance pay if they’re lucky.
bAsIc eCoNoMiCs is even less meaningful than just scoffing about naivete. Which you misspelled.
I’m making a normative statement about how this studio - which successfully made a beloved and profitable game, as a product that over a million people paid for - was still treated like it failed, lost money, and ruined everything. And that statement is, if success isn’t good enough, that’s fucking bullshit.
And the thorn that puts in your side is… that it’s not capitalist enough? My guy, do you think the children’s introductory textbook version of supply and demand has a footnote about destroying successful companies for shits and giggles? Or maybe you only spit that libertarian shibboleth at anything besides line-go-up. In just two words, you’ve assured that I don’t know and I don’t care.
The games are the property of the publisher (in the case of Hi-fi Rush, Microsoft Games), so (baring licensing issues like music) as long as the publisher is around the game should still be around.
It could get delisted in the future if there were any licensing deals, although that can happen for any game. If you already own it on Steam you’ll be able to keep downloading and playing it indefinitely.
Hifi Rush is in Humble Choice this month, and I noticed they have a redemption deadline which is a bit out of the ordinary. So it’s possible it’ll get delisted, or maybe Humble is just playing it safe with the keys they have.
None of these companies create jobs, none of them create competition, none of them foster creativity, none of them innovate. Global monopolies are a blight.
And I’m not going to let doom scrolling and apathy deter me from trying to change things. At least I emailed my congressman today
The stupid thing is it totally could have made things better. Facilitated knowledge share, floated work between studios if one needed help, heck, just combining HR and publishing tools could have freed up some costs that could feed back into development. Something.
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