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Square Enix To Buy Eidos, Midway Files For Bankruptcy
arcticstoat writes to tell us that Square Enix has been revealed as the potential buyer to Eidos, developer of the Tomb Raider franchise. Eidos had been shedding workers and studios in an attempt for financial stability. This comes alongside news that Midway Games is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to stave off creditors while they sort out what's left of their resources. World of Goo publisher Brighter Minds Media also filed for bankruptcy last month. Free Radical, a UK studio recently put in a similar position was snapped up by Crytek, and we discussed news of Sega's financial turmoil as well. It seems that claims from late last year suggesting the games industry may be "recession proof" are quickly being proven wrong, though Kotaku suggests that most of the blame falls on the developers.
This is like when Eidos invested heavily in John Romero's company (Ion Storm at the time) and it died, only this is on a larger scale. The games industry was at a boom then, and the developers tried to grow faster than they could. It's hard to be recession-proof when you're riding on a boom (as developers recently were). Rather than building and growing in excess, as John Romero once attempted, companies should have been more conservative like John Carmack with id Software after Romero split.
Does this mean we can look forward to more abandonware of classic videogames?
It doesn't matter if it is a factor in declining game sales or not. You have a damn right to resell whatever you bought - it's YOURS, not theirs. Car sales have declined much more and no one thinks of forbidding people to sell used cars in order to fix that.
People have less money, they will buy cheaper games - and less games altogether, since they are somewhat frivolous items. That is expected, and the game industry should learn to deal with it without finding a scape goat. Cut your development costs, your marketing budget, make better games. And stop whining.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
The only reason why people are willing to pay as much as they are for new games is because they know that they can sell them later. The used game market props up the new game market.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Some of this is due to big developer "ego". Ignoring the Wii/DS because it isn't as sexy as the big consoles - trying to dictate to the market then listening to it and changing your strategy accordingly.
I'm not sure about that. The Wii gets plenty of 3rd party love, but those games don't sell as well. The attach rate for the Wii is friendly to existing Nintendo franchises, not 3rd parties. On the PS3 and 360, the 3rd parties get more attention from consumers. If anything, I think the Wii deserves less attention.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20988
If you'd read your own link, you'd know that the metric you're using, the attach rate, can't be used to draw the conclusion you did:
Recently Anita Frazier, analyst for the NPD Group, has commented that tie ratios "can be an indication of the health of a system", but can also be used in misleading ways.
Moreover, "as a system gets further along in its lifecycle and perhaps hardware sales start to diminish, the tie ratio tends to go up because software sales are the bigger draw. If a hardware system is doing gangbuster sales, then the tie ratio can go down even if there are lots of overall sales."
And guess which system is kicking the asses of the combined competition?