Phil says acquisitions are a good thing

https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-acquisition-healthy-phil-spencer-interview

“I know sometimes I see dialogue out in the industry about, well, are acquisitions a good thing or a bad thing,” says Spencer before congratulating Sony on their acquisition of Housemarque announced earlier today.

“One thing I’ll put out there is… starting a new studio — starting any small business, frankly, is a very risky proposition, starting a video game studio even more so. And if a team actually takes the risk of starting a new company, starting a new studio, building that over years, building value in that. To say they shouldn’t sell, I think, is just short-sighted.”

Spencer says that the value of growing a business to become something valuable is part of why creative teams start new studios in the first place. The immense risk it takes to start a new company is the potential reward that comes with it, and Spencer says “M&A is absolutely a part of that.”

Spencer clarified that not every new company has to sell and that there are a lot of studios that can fail. But successful teams growing and potentially getting acquired “is a natural and healthy part of our industry.”

“It’s such a risk-filled journey for them to get to the point to create real value. I’m always going to congratulate when teams get to the point where they realize that value through acquisition or just massive independent success… many of those leaders will go off and start other things over time. It’s kind of the natural turnover that happens with entrepreneurs and startup businesses. And for us, we’re always out there looking at where we could continue to build our first-party capability and looking at teams that we think would be good fits for us.”

Well there you have it, SW. Do you think we will continue to see more and more acquisitions? And are you happy about it? I'm pro competition and giving more value to each system. I think having one system is boring.

Good Guy Phil was the bigger man, and congratulated Sony immediately on the acquisition. Poised and graceful.

After the Bethesda acquisition was made public, none of PlayStation's social channels tweeted anything for the rest of the day. Cowardly, and lacking humility.

Good old Phil loves acquisitions at immense cost trying to bail out his ass having failed at every level imaginable from day one.

We can confidently predict that Phil will be cheerleading all MS acquisitions till they finally work out it would be much, much cheaper to just sack him and bring in someone who has some semblance of a clue what they're doing.

So far Sony has acquired much better studios than Microsoft. Philip is getting hard countered by Apex Jimbo.

Depends. Small studio acquisitions is good IMO. More secured job positions for them generally. But big publisher/devs like Bethesda? Nah.

Now they should ask RARE if the acquisition was a good thing😂

Gotta catch ‘em all! 😅

He is speaking truth there though.

The only people who celebrate acquisitions are shills.

That's some laughable reasoning.

Poor Rare.

I don't care who does what as long as the quality of the games remains the same or gets better. Destroying studios like Zipper after forcing their hand to sell out and chase other franchises is unacceptable. It appears that perhaps SONY learned their lesson after that though... hopefully...

Rare is seeing tons of success with Sea of Thieves, which they might not have been able to do without Microsoft money. Dunno why you think Rare would not be pleased about getting acquired by Microsoft.

Off course he would...

yup they have creative license to do what they want and they love it. and the budget to make it work. SoT isn't made without them being acquired by microsoft and everwilds looks very intriguing as well.

With that said, phil has a point. It's capitalism. People start studios to make money to build a business, they take a huge risk. If they can turn it around to make a profit that's good if not they could go bankrupt. If they get to a point where a larger corporation wants to buy them, it makes sense to sell. A business is an investment, selling it for large profit is the investment paying off.

An entrepreneur's dream whom starts a business is to gain enough traction to sell for millions, if not billions. It's only bad for tribalistic fanboys.

Just look at the smile on Dr. Dre's face when he sold Dre Beats to Apple for 3 billion.

I mean....sort of? Not really. No? Maybe...

If it's already owned by a so-called "AAA" publisher, then what's the difference, right? A publicly traded company is a publicly traded company and they're going to do what's right by their shareholders, not their customers.

If the developer is making quality products and isn't publicly traded, well, that's not exactly a good thing because now that company isn't interested in making games and earning money for it, now they want to earn money by exploiting games (and, of late, gamers).

Pretty much. The amount of corporate support on these boards of late is really, really depressing tbh. No wonder this place is on life support.

@NathanDrakeSwag: Yesh sure if you think those studios are better than Besthesda, Playground Games, Obsidian, Collation. 🤣

Bethesda hasn't released a good RPG since Skyrim in 2011. Playground hasn't proven they can make anything besides racing games. Obsidian makes janky garbage. Coalition is tied down to a franchise no one cares about anymore.

Try telling that to millions of cows who are crying over MS Bethesda deal,starfield is just a drop in the ocean of salty tears

Why in the living **** would anyone care about what he says?

The whole interview is worth to listen to.

Acquisitions aren't inherently good or bad. They can bring good things, like bringing stability to developers and they can bring bad things like making the whole scene more vulnerable in case something goes terribly wrong.

Damn, the situation at Sony is so bad that MS has to come out and defend their recent acquisition. Seems like Jim 'lying' Ryan's track record is forcing Sony to be quiet.

What a flat statement, by a flat character. Aquisitions are a good thing... if beneficial to the end product. But with Microsoft, not upholding the banner of quality and a string of bad business decisions throughout, this is not the case.

Phil is getting ready to leave MS and send a resume to Sony.

not really. that's very shortsighted. I'll give you a few examples

Bungie - bungie is not the bungie we know today without MS buying them. MS completely changed halo from what they were originally making which was a RTS. With microsofts money and backing and their input and advertising halo become a massive franchise, which led to them being one of the largest companies in gaming and the whole halo franchise being what it is and led to destiny being what it is. Without MS acquiring them, they likely release a halo RTS game for the PC and fade into oblivion and may not even be around right now

Naughty Dog - personally i'm not a fan, but before the sony acquisition they were making games liek crash bandicoot and jak and daxter which i mean they were fun when I was a kid but it's nothing that would propel them to large success. being purchased by sony and having the financial backing and freedom they were able to create uncharted which became a flagship series and allowed for TLOU. Personally i'm not a fan of those franchises but many are, had sony not acquired them, they are likely working on jak and daxter 10 right now or crash team racing 5.

rare - rare is another one. before MS they made small scale childrens games. then MS made them do kinect stuff which was dumb, but they stuck with them and allowed them to make SoT which is one of the most popular games right now and is leading into yet another new IP in everwilds. The money backing and stability and creative freedom allowed made it happen. without MS buying them they are making some banjo kazooie game for the nintendo DS if they are still open

No on the other side of things

Bethesda - didn't need to be purchased, they were fine on their own with many really good franchises. MS adding them only bolsters their platform and doesn't really do anything for Bethesda as a company

EA - every company they buy, they kinda ruin. the 1 exception is respawn. They did ruin the titanfall franchises, but respawn did make apex legends which is largely popular and a really good star wars game. Sucks they ruined one of the best PVP shooters ever made in the original titanfall for games I don't really care about so it's a 50/50. The other companies though they killed dead space (although thats coming back supposedly) and forced devs to make bad games then closed their studios down after the games failed.

In short like anything in business it's good and bad. it's not just shills. buyouts have led to some great things for some companies and gamers while it led to disaster for others. A buyout is always good for business. the owners get a huge return on their investment as do stock holders. it makes sense business wise. it's called capitalism. as for gamers sometimes we benefit and sometimes we get screwed

I absolutely do not want to see more Bethesda sized acquisitions.

Acquiring individual studios is fine but, full blown publishers leads to bad industry consolidation.

Could you imagine if someone bought out Capcom, Square Enix etc? It would be bad freaking news for whoever is on the opposite end of it. For instance, Resident Evil never being on another PlayStation console ever again would be infuriating.

So far Microsoft has acquired much better studios than Sony. Jim is getting his ass handed to him by Phil!

I think it's a double edged sword. While there's some great games that have been made because of larger financial backing, There's also alot of examples of how acquisitions stifle creativity. Once you get acquired by corporate overloards, you're not necessarily making what you envisioned, but what the company that acquired you wants that will make the biggest profit. If the game fails you and your team can be dismantled and reallocated to other teams, and if it's a success, odds are your stuck doing sequel after sequel for that IP because it's a safe bet (that's why Bungie left Microsoft in the first place).

In Bioware's case, the last 3 games they made suffered because of acquisition. All three where ment to be completely different games and where not only forced to throw in completely different gameplay elements halfway through development, but also forced to use an engine that wasn't designed for their type of game and forced out the door prematurely to meet a quarterly sales deadline.

Corporate windbag says what they are doing is good. Fascinating discovery.