I am writing this while genuinely annoyed and I think that is probably the right state to be in for it.
Today, literally today as I am typing this, reports have come out that Xbox is preparing to shut down or sell off Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Compulsion Games. Three studios. Three brilliant, beloved, completely irreplaceable studios. And before anyone says anything, yes I know they are technically in negotiations to spin off and go independent rather than just being switched off outright. But here is the thing. Employees have been told they can go and look for new jobs while the negotiations are ongoing. That is not a hopeful situation. That is a studio being wound down with a thin ribbon of maybe tied around it.
Let me just sit with Double Fine for a second. Tim Schafer founded that studio in 2000 after leaving LucasArts. He has spent twenty six years building one of the most distinctive creative voices in games. Psychonauts. Brutal Legend. Broken Age. Keeper. These are games that could not have been made anywhere else, by anyone else. Psychonauts 2 in particular is one of the best platformers of the last decade, a game about mental health made with genuine warmth and craft and Tim Schafer’s very specific and completely unhinged imagination. Microsoft bought Double Fine in 2019 and Tim Schafer at the time said it felt like a limited integration, that they kept full creative control, that it was basically ideal. Seven years later his studio is negotiating to buy its own freedom back or cease to exist.
And Ninja Theory. Oh, Ninja Theory. They announced Senua, the third Hellblade game, at the Xbox Games Showcase literally last week. LAST WEEK. They stood on that stage and showed their game to the world and presumably went home feeling pretty good about things and then this week they were told the studio is closing unless someone buys them. The employees were told they could go and look for other work. A week after the showcase. I cannot get my head around that.
This is the pattern though and it has been the pattern for years now. Big publisher sees a beloved indie or mid-size studio. Big publisher buys beloved indie or mid-size studio. Everyone celebrates because the studio now has security and resources and does not have to stress about funding. And then two, three, five years later, the studio does not hit the commercial numbers the publisher needed, or the publisher’s priorities shift, or some executive somewhere decides the investment is not working, and the studio is gone. The people who made the thing you loved are looking for new jobs.
Microsoft kicked this off properly in 2018 when they bought Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Undead Labs, and Compulsion all at once. Then in 2020 and 2021 they went absolutely wild and bought ZeniMax, which brought in Bethesda, id Software, Arkane, and a load of others. Then they bought Activision Blizzard King for sixty eight billion pounds, which is a number so large it stops feeling real. Sixty eight billion. And now they are shutting down three studios that between them have made some of the most interesting games of the last decade because apparently the Xbox business needs a reset after revenues dropped nearly half a billion dollars over five years.
I understand that businesses need to make money. I am not completely naive about how this works. But there is something genuinely rotten about the logic of buying a studio specifically because of the creative identity it has built, and then shutting it down when that creative identity does not translate into blockbuster sales. You bought Double Fine because it was Double Fine. You bought Ninja Theory because it was Ninja Theory. The thing that made them worth buying is exactly the thing that makes them commercially difficult. You cannot have it both ways.
The studios that survive these acquisitions are the ones making things like Forza Horizon and Call of Duty and massive games with massive guaranteed audiences. The weird ones, the personal ones, the ones taking genuine swings, those are the ones that end up in these negotiations. And that tells you everything about what these acquisitions are actually for. It is not about preserving creative voices. It is about acquiring content and capacity and IP and then trimming whatever does not perform.
The most depressing part of today’s news is that Compulsion released South of Midnight just over a year ago. Double Fine released Keeper recently. Ninja Theory announced a new game last week. These are not dormant studios coasting. They are active, working, making things. And they are still being shown the door.
I genuinely hope the spinoffs happen. I hope Double Fine buys itself back and Tim Schafer gets to keep making his strange, brilliant games without a corporate ceiling above him. I hope Ninja Theory finds a buyer and gets to finish Senua. I hope all three studios come out the other side of this intact and find a way to keep going independently.
But I also think we should be honest about what happened here. These studios were bought, used, and are now being discarded. And until publishers stop treating creative studios like assets on a balance sheet, this is going to keep happening.
Leave them alone. Let them make their weird games. Leave the indies alone.