Just an amusing observation about that image. Ah yes, "METRO", the prestigious and highly regarded experts in all matter video games. Best known for their littering of London (and any public transport in and out of) on a daily basis with rubbish; a free, daily tabloid newspaper. A trusted review source, indeed.

They could if they'd actually learn some lessons from their own biggest flops and change their business model.

The smaller development studios that haven't yet been gobbled up by a gigantic publisher like EA or Microsoft can still to this day make a healthy profit off of even average games that they make with a fraction of the money and staff. So the big companies should be able to do the same thing without bloating every release into something that costs tens of millions of dollars to make, requires hundreds of staff to build, and has to sell five million copies in order to turn a profit.

If the bigger companies would show a little more restraint and pay a little more attention to the fans of the games they're making, they could stop the cycle of spending millions of dollars and years of development time on games that they end up canceling because they don't see enough of a future profit margin in them, and also releasing games that sell millions but still get labeled a failure because it's not ENOUGH millions.

I firmly believe it comes down to corporate greed. Offhand, I cannot think of a single game studio that has been able to continue putting out the quality of games they were known for when they were still independent once they get bought up by a big publisher. As a smaller studio, they're usually run by people who love gaming and make the games they want to play. Once EA or some other giant is running the show, it ends up becoming strictly about the profit margins, no matter how much the people in the formerly-independent studio might wish otherwise. They have to answer to a higher master than what they think would be fun to play, and they're rarely free to do things the way they want anymore. Even when it starts out that way, it almost never lasts.

I've used Maxis as an example in other threads here; as many people will remember, they were the studio behind SimCity, The Sims, and most other Sim-something titles back in the day. Not all of their games were giant successes like the first couple versions of SimCity, but they had enough success to be a profitable company, valued at $125 million when EA bought them in 1997 (which would be close to $250 million today). Maxis technically still exists, but very little remains of the original company. All of its studios have been closed, and it is so thoroughly integrated with EA thanks to the Sims franchise that for all intents and purposes, the studio that was Maxis no longer exists. What does exist basically does whatever papa EA tells them to.

There are so many other similar stories where the studio in question is simply gone, as are the games or franchises they were known for. BioWare is well on its way to being the next. Most of what the studio once was is long gone, and it shows in their more recent game releases.

True. Clueless moneymen moving into anything, not just gaming, often spells doom.

There are some exceptions occasionally. For a recent example - Warhorse with Kingdom Come, where the extra money from a big publisher clearly showed in the scope and quality of the sequel. But even then, the budget was still mostly reasonable at the supposed $40 million. Which is about the max of what I'd expect from a major production. Not the ludicrous multiple hundreds of millions of some of the recent big flops.

But again, for every positive example, there are like 5 bad ones. It is very difficult for a studio to retain its identity in these cases.