The point here is that mergers and acquisitions are not the underlying cause of the problem. Yes, most M&A is private equity these days, but the problem with that is private equity. Yes, as the post we’re discussing suggests, most AAA gaming is in shambles after the hAIst of the century; blaming that on mergers and acquisitions needlessly excuses the leadership of the acquiring companies from their ultimate responsibility for the shambling. Consider ustwo: they’re employee-owned, a registered B corp, and are pivoting from employees to contractors because it’s more cheaper. One of the launch workers for that game described an event in 2014 that is an much earlier, pre-AI instance of the shambling:

> I remember having a call with a business partner just before Monument Valley came out. And they couldn't get their head around it. They're like, 'Right, so it lasts two hours, it doesn't have in-app purchases, it doesn't have leaderboards, it doesn't have adverts... Well, why are you making this again?' No one could get their head around it.

That their unicorn became real is in sharp contrast to how their business leadership thought it would go, and then they launched two sequels that were no more successful than the second and third Matrix movies. We were lucky that MV escaped containment. The studio was not threatened by mergers or by AI; it was threatened by bad management, who wanted to engineer the most financial profit rather than simply shipping a good game.

Yes, Ubisoft will fuck over everyone they buy. But that’s because Ubisoft is badly managed; consider the Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider trilogy, widely considered excellent and preceded by their acquisition. Yes, it’s easier to place the blame on AI. But that’s because bad management is often greedy and miserly, and AI fits those desires like a glove.

This is no defense of Ubisoft or AI fucking over everyone, and I sure do loathe them both, but consider my point about Bungie in these terms: They took their own reins and mismanaged themselves into the ground, with a merger halfway through their decade that did not noticeably alter how they mismanaged their business. Bungie spent ten years doing strange financial engineering with multiple funding sources (Sony was merely the last one), locking the color palette picker behind cosmetic transactions, selling season passes and DLC, launching an entire sequel that bombed in year one because it removed the addictive loot box mechanism, and going so far as to delete one entire half of their world-class game rather than just refactoring it.

That’s bad management, and they’re a poster child for the entire gaming industry as a result. The financial engineering I’m blaming for this collapse, for these shambling monsters we’ve created — well, some would call it profiteering, but fintech has finops and findev, just like any other tech industry, and they engineered this outcome, so I’m simply giving them the courtesy of name that they deserve.