The Studios Are Disappearing — And We're Cheering For the Companies Killing Them
There's a story the industry tells about consolidation. Bigger budgets. More stability. Studios freed from financial pressure to make their most ambitious work.
Then you look at what actually happened, and the story falls apart.
Studios shut down months after shipping critically acclaimed games. Tens of thousands of jobs eliminated across an industry posting record revenue. Franchises locked in vaults because reviving them isn't worth the shareholder attention. Acquisitions justified as investment in creativity, followed within two years by restructuring that gutted the very teams that made the acquisition worth making.
That's not stability. That's asset stripping with better PR.
How We Got Here
Consolidation in games isn't new. What's changed is the scale, and who's doing the buying.
We've moved from "publisher acquires developer" to "trillion-dollar technology conglomerate acquires publisher that owns a dozen studios." Deals large enough to require regulatory approval across multiple continents. Entire portfolios of beloved franchises changing hands as line items.
The pitch was always the same: this is good for players, good for developers, good for the games. Regulators asked hard questions, extracted promises, and largely waved things through.
Then the layoffs started.
The Body Count
This is the part the "consolidation is fine" argument has never adequately answered.
The last few years have produced the worst run of job losses in the history of the medium — tens of thousands of people, across studios of every size, during a period when the industry was generating more money than film and music combined.
The pattern is bleak and repetitive. Studio gets acquired. Studio ships something well-reviewed. Studio gets "restructured." People who moved cities and uprooted families for a job find out via a mass email that it no longer exists. The parent company posts a strong quarter.
Notice what these closures aren't caused by. Not failed games. Not bad reviews. Not commercial disaster. Studios have been shut down after shipping successes, because a spreadsheet somewhere determined the return wasn't sufficient relative to the alternative uses of that capital.
That's the actual logic. Not "this studio failed," but "this studio succeeded insufficiently."
What Big Money Does to Games
The creative cost is harder to count than the human one, but it's just as real.
Budgets became a cage. A $200 million game cannot afford to be strange. It must appeal to everyone, offend no one, hit every engagement metric, and support a monetisation layer. Every decision gets filtered through the question of whether it might cost the game a percentage of its potential audience. What comes out the other side is competent, expensive, and largely interchangeable.
Risk aversion is now structural. It isn't that executives lack imagination — it's that the financial model punishes deviation. When a single failure can wipe out a division, nobody green-lights the weird thing. So we get sequels, remakes, remasters, live-service pivots, and franchise extensions, endlessly.
Franchises became hostages. When an independent studio dies, its IP sometimes finds its way home. When a conglomerate owns it, it sits on a balance sheet forever — dormant, unavailable, unpurchasable, gathering dust because reviving it doesn't clear an internal return threshold. Series that people genuinely love are simply switched off, and there is no mechanism by which anyone can get them back.
Exclusivity became a weapon. Games that were multiplatform become locked to one ecosystem, not because it improves them but because it makes a platform more attractive. That's a decision made explicitly at the player's expense, dressed up as strategy.
Live service ate everything. Once your parent company measures success in engagement hours rather than copies sold, the incentive shifts toward games designed to never end. The fifteen-hour authored experience — the thing plenty of us actually want — doesn't fit the model, so it stops getting funded at scale.
The Leverage Problem
Consolidation doesn't just affect what gets made. It affects everyone who makes it.
When six companies control most of the industry, developers have fewer places to pitch, fewer publishers to play against each other, and dramatically less ability to walk away from an unfavourable deal. That shows up in contracts, in ownership terms, in pay, and in how much creative control a team retains once the money arrives.
It also shows up in what happens after a layoff. When the entire industry consolidates simultaneously, an experienced developer suddenly finds there are far fewer doors to knock on — because the companies that would have hired them are running the same cuts.
The "stability" argument was always backwards. Being owned by a company large enough to absorb your failure also means being owned by a company large enough that your entire studio is a rounding error.
The Part Where We're Complicit
None of this happened without us.
Subscription services are the economic engine behind most of this consolidation, and players embraced them enthusiastically — because fifty games for the price of one is obviously a good deal. But that model requires an endless content pipeline, which requires owning studios, which requires acquisitions. We were handed a genuinely great value proposition and, in accepting it, funded the machine that's been eating the industry.
Same with preorders. Same with treating publisher marketing as news. Same with the collective decision that whether a game is good matters less than whether we get it first.
That doesn't make the corporate decisions defensible. It does mean the leverage hasn't entirely left the building.
Where the Actual Games Are Now
Here's the genuine hope, and it's not a small one: the interesting work has simply relocated.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came from a small French team and outclassed studios with a hundred times the resources. Balatro was one person. Some of the most-discussed games of the last few years came from teams small enough to fit around a table, released without marketing budgets, and found their audiences regardless.
Distribution is why. It's never been easier to put a game in front of players without a conglomerate's permission — and the moment a studio doesn't need permission, most of the leverage described above evaporates.
There's a pattern in the wreckage, too. The people laid off don't disappear. They start new studios. Some of the most promising developers working today are staffed entirely by veterans of teams that got shut down for succeeding insufficiently. The talent survived the buyouts. It just isn't where the money is anymore.
What To Actually Do
Not much, individually. But not nothing.
Buy from smaller studios when the game is good. Not charity — self-interest. The variety in this industry now comes almost entirely from teams small enough to take risks.
Stop preordering. It's a free loan to companies that have repeatedly demonstrated they'll ship whatever state the game is in.
Know who made what. Franchise names outlive the people who built them. A beloved series returning with none of its original team is not the same series.
Refuse the framing. More games on a subscription service is good for your wallet. It is not automatically good for an industry that has to keep producing them under increasingly extractive conditions. Those are separate questions, and the marketing depends on you conflating them.
The Honest Counterargument
To be fair to the other side, because I'd rather be right than just loud:
Consolidation genuinely does provide funding stability that some studios couldn't otherwise get, and a handful of ambitious games exist purely because a parent company funded a seven-year development cycle. Subscription services have made hundreds of games accessible to people who couldn't afford them individually — a real democratisation. Large organisations often bring better benefits and HR structures than the crunch-until-someone-breaks culture plenty of small studios ran on. And rising development costs are a genuine problem that selling to a larger partner does actually solve.
Reasonable people land in different places on whether those benefits offset the costs.
I don't think they do. Not by a distance. An industry that generates more revenue than film and music combined, while eliminating tens of thousands of the jobs that generate it, has a distribution problem — not a funding one. The money is there. It's just not going to the people making the things.
Disagree? Tell me where. This one I'll happily argue about.