CD Projekt Is Not Interested in Being Acquired

Comments

• oscarlavi@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Insomniac, the dev team behind the wildly successful Spider-Man games just had a leak. In the leak, it’s discovered that they were strong-armed by Sony (who owns Insomniac) to downsize staff despite exceeding sales targets and hitting goals. They needed to downsize to help balance Sony’s books, who have acquired a slew of failing or underperforming studios.

  Sony owns Studio A, and Studio B. Studio B have underperformed for the last few years, whilst Studio A has outperformed their targets. Because of the shortcomings in Studio B, Sony are now out of pocket, even accounting for the earnings of Studio A. Studio A are forced to eliminate staff roles to make up for Studio B’s mismanagement. A well oiled and well performing Studio have to butcher their teams to balance their parent entity’s books. It’s so fucking short sighted and stupid.

  This isn’t just a Sony/Insomniac issue either, I guarantee this goes on throughout the industry whenever there’s a parent company. It’s just how it will always be in those circumstances.

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  • scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is how any corporate ownership happens. Success is expected and exploited to cover the non successful units. Rather than retool bad units or invest in changes in them, they will squeeze the successful units as much as they can to power the rest of the business.

    I have seen it personally in the travel industry. My spouse is seeing it in the food industry.

    No one should be happy that Microsoft and others are buying up the game studios.

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    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Activision Blizzard was a special case for me because they were already shit so new ownership might get them back to a neutral. I hate hating a company whose products I used to love so much.

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  • isles@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Corporations shouldn’t be able to own other corporations.

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    • gataloca@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s quite radical. But I agree, speculation is a big problem and dysfunctional.

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• dinckelman@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I totally understand the appeal of money, in situations like this, but we’ve seen the history repeat itself time after time.

  It’s really great news, that they’re saying no. Look at what happened with Blizzard, immediately after acquisition. Or Bungie (multiple times now). Lionhead too, the makers of Fable. Or Volition, the recently shutdown studio behind Saints Row. The list of these is endless

  Being absorbed by a gigantic corporation, just to be told they’re not interested in anything you do, is not helping anyone, except for those who are lining their pockets in the upper management and shareholder ranks

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  • TWeaK@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The appeal of money already stung them once. I maintain that the reason they had to release Cyberpunk before it was ready was because of contractual obligations and penalty clauses from a Hollywood actor they enlisted, in the hope of selling more copies with his name. Movies have much more fixed release dates than games and the actor’s agents were the big dog at the negotiating table, setting the terms to suit themselves. I’d like to think they’ve learned their lesson.

    Also, CDPR own GOG and have a stable income, one that relies on their current structure. I doubt anyone buying them would look to keep them DRM free.

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    • Hyperreality@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion, but I think cyberpunk would have been just as good without Keanu in it. I assume they mainly hired him for marketing purposes because he's famous and a meme.

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  • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Selling your company is also the quick and easy cash-in. For most people that just want a good life that’s a solid choice, but for someone who really believes in what they built and their product they not only betray their vision, they also give all that future growth potential to that nameless investor or corp who will just milk it to death.

    CDPR has several titles and IPs with great name recognition and future growth potential, cyberpunk for example. They also are not in any financial trouble as far as I know, so they would be fools to sell that off now.

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• Ledivin@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Could you imagine the state of their poor devs being abused by both CDPR and a shitty publisher? I don’t think anyone would make it out alive

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  • tacosanonymous@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s what I was going to say.

    They literally do a good enough job on their own overworking then laying off staff.

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• echo64@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Reminder that CDProjekt is a public company, so this basically doesn’t mean anything. There’s a number where they can’t say no (because the board would force it), and no one has offered that number (yet? microsoft is looking pretty desperate after their buyouts thus far haven’t exactly set the world on fire)

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• Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  As long as they have the majority of shares it’s fine.

  Else: Hostile takeover /shrug

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• ekZepp@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Nice news. Keep up the good work👍…

  …eventually…

  … with some path update.

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