I think that's the most interesting thing coming out of this. Bethesda used to be 5th before MS got them.
Ubisoft is in Europe so basically MS would control half the AAA industry devs and IPs in USA if they get Activision
Well, Ubisoft has over 40 studios around the whole world. Even if they have their headquarter in some place, these huge companies are global. When I did work there I did work from Spain but had a meeting in the Abu Dhabi office where I did met coworkers from studios located in many different places like UAE, Romania, Canada, India, China and more. The country where they have more workers is Canada.
The 4 they mentioned aren't the top 4 3rd parties, and we don't know the position of Bethesda because being private we don't have their numbers. And well, the times where they were super successful with Skyrim and Fallout 3 or 4 was many years ago, since then they haven't been that successful.
That Initiaive studio producing nothing and needing Crystal Dynamics to help says it all
All big games are codeveloped/outsource a huge chunk of their work to other studios. Typically around 80-90% of the people who works on a big AAA game isn't from the lead studio that often gets most of the marketing and PR attention. They need several studios working on a game to reduce the amount of years needed to develop it.
Many times outsourcing studios don't even appear listed in the game credits, or are briefly listed mentioning only the name of the studio or a few managers. This happens more often with localizators or art oursourcing studios who made like almost half of the art assets you see in the game.
People sometimes have the idea that cases like Ubisoft where they mention like 7 or 10 studios working on a game are rare, but they are the norm. Ubisoft is only more transparent than others, crediting everyone involved in their projects. As an example, I remember that over 20 studios worked in both Street Fighter IV and V.
Interesting… FTC listed the companies that are not fair game to be purchased.
EA, Take 2, Ubisoft and Activision are the blocked ones.
They didn't say that can't be bought. They list them as the biggest 3rd party publishers. In fact, this is only true if you only count companies with headquarters in western countries and if you only count console gaming publishers. Because if you also count platform holders, Asian companies and PC/mobile gaming companies as an example Ubisoft goes down to almost top 20. And this is talking about public companies, there are private ones like Epic or Valve who very likely are in a high position on that ranking.
That paragraph they included there is very cherrypicked / biased.
It or Horizon will probably win at the baftas, so there's still salt to be had. I'm actually really surprised that horizon got nothing, it's a very technically impressive game
It shows that this year has been awesome. With giants like Elden Ring and GoWR was difficult to get awards in many areas.
