2022 Was The Year The Video Game Industry Ate Itself - Kotaku

Having already bought Bethesda and half a dozen other studios, it set its sights on the seventh-biggest gaming company in the world: Activision Blizzard.

Investors proceeded to spend the last 12 months salivating at the prospect of offloading stock in the risky world of game development to the highest bidder, while some smaller studios dreamt of cashing in their chips for the cold embrace of an increasingly tiny handful of megacorporations, though not all.

Behaviour Interactive, responsible for Dead by Daylight and one of the oldest independent studio groups in Canada, told Kotaku it planned to stay that way after it bought Midwinter Entertainment earlier this year.

Lots of companies did get bought and sold this year, and it’s far from clear how all of that consolidation will shake out over the long term for industry creativity, developer autonomy, and individual players.

Mobile gaming is worth more than the PC and console gaming markets combined, and big publishers want a piece of it to succeed, or at least survive?

In the meantime, Bungie says it will remain its own publisher as it prepares to launch Destiny 2 transmedia projects, a potential mobile game, and a brand new IP.

Speaking of mobile, Sony also acquired Savage Game Studios, a new studio founded by industry veterans which is reportedly working on its own big-budget smartphone game, and spun it out into an entire PlayStation Studios Mobile Division.

Whether Embracer is interested in the studios themselves or just their famous IPs remains to be seen. It shuttered Square Enix Montreal just months after its big rebrand, and announced its beloved mobile spin-off Deus Ex Go would also be shut down. It was a weird move considering competitors are racing into the deep end of the mobile gaming market, and even sadder for the developers who lost their jobs because of it. And the whole Embracer strategy of 1) buy a bunch of shit, 2) make games, 3) get rich??.

Then this year, NetEase bought the studio outright, securing its future amid toxic workplace allegations and increasing development costs.

The studio’s first major release since 2018's Detroit: Become Human is set in the High Republic era of the Star Wars universe, though Kotaku understands that early development on the game had been struggling as recently as last year.

Last year it acquired No More Heroes III studio Grasshopper Manufacture, as well as more recently formed new studios Jackalope Games and Nagoshi Studio helmed by several industry veterans.

Over the last year alone, it added Fulqrum Games (King’s Bounty II), Inflexion Games (Nightingale), Novarama (Killsquad), Offworld Industries (Beyond the Wire), Riffraff Games (Bottle), Tequila Works (Rime), and Triternion (Mordhau) to its sprawling list of minority, majority, and 100 percent ownership stakes (even as it brutally gutted gaming media website Fanbyte).

In March it bought Next Games, maker of the Stranger Things mobile RPG, for $65 million.

Adding to a growing roster that began with the acquisition of Night School Studio last year, Netflix also created its own in-house game development team led by former Zynga and EA veterans.

Ever since the Xbox manufacturer announced its eye-popping all-cash bid to bail out CEO Bobby Kotick’s crumbling Activision empire at a premium price of $90 a share, the question on everyone’s lips was “Call of Duty exclusivity when?” But Microsoft has gone through great pains to argue that the $69 billion deal is not about console shooters but about mobile gaming.