fat _ usher

Someone on LinkedIn ask me why it's so often bad (within a few years) for a game dev studio that gets bought by a mega-pub. I answered: Once a game dev studio is bought by a big publisher/corporation, like EA, here's what happens: Everything is just fine until the game dev studio has an unsuccessful game, and that's the opening the big corp needs to move in its own people to make sure failure doesn't happen again. The big corp people have no understanding of the game dev studio's culture and team dynamics, and end up acting like a cultural wrecking ball to the original dev studio, and pretty soon the dev studio is nothing like the one big corp bought, and the founders leave along with their vision. And not long after that the dev studio gets fully merged into big corp, losing its ability to make the games it was passionate about and losing its identity completely -- becoming another lost cog in the big machine. Very few purchased game dev studios in the past have avoided this fate. It's inevitable. Once bought, it's less than 8-10 years before the studio's name is no more. Super rarely, the dev studio name is still used but it's fully run by the big corp that bought them, and the founders are all long gone, as is the original culture/vision/experience.