consolidation

Ten Ton Hammer is reporting that Perpetual, a gaming studio responsible for some big name mmos, is being bought out. This may or may not pan out, but it does raise an interesting aspect of the massive game - it costs a lot of money. Some people have said (non MMO) games are uninteresting because of the budget - noone wants to take risks. It would be easy to extend this to MMOs, which many are saying are a bit bland these days. One way to reduce exposure to any single title, of course, would be to consolidate a bunch of them under one roof. Obviously SOE isn't a perfect example of this, but that isn't how it has to go. Right now if I were an investor, I wouldn't want to have my eggs in one game basket. I wonder if the direction this is headed is exactly where we are with the movie industry - a few gargantuan companies slogging it out with mediocre drivel. Let's hope not.