Independent census finds 93 of 283 acquired game studios closed

Sebastian Cardoso — a game developer with more than 20 years of experience and writer of the Game Studio Unlocked newsletter — found that 93 of 283 acquired game developers had closed. His independent analysis covers PC and console studios bought by large companies since 2000; it is not an official industry count.

Cardoso classified 60.8% of those 283 developers as either closed or declining in output after acquisition. The wider dataset covers 303 studios, including support and porting teams considered separately, and includes acquisitions by Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Some studios changed owners more than once, yielding 325 ownership periods; that is a different denominator from the 283 developers.

The 60.8% figure also rests on Cardoso’s judgment. Of 79 studios he classified as declined, 26 received that grade because they lost their identity, were absorbed into a parent or reassigned to support, even if their games held up. He says the combined decline-or-closure figure falls to 51.6% without that rule.

Studios acquired earlier also had more time to close than recent purchases. The results describe this dataset, not the odds facing a newly acquired studio, and do not establish that acquisition caused the closures. Cardoso froze the data on October 30 and published the dataset and grading method with his analysis.

Photo: Nintendo’s development complex in Kyoto; Nintendo is one of the companies covered by the analysis. xanday, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0. Image cropped.