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The Staff of SOH
The business/investor world is full of interesting twists... However, by doing a "buy," shares for both companies go up....and Sequoia makes money! don't worry, sometimes it's a good thing.
Big studios does this all the time. They "close" studios to get rid of debts, paperwork, make the shareholders happy, etc. But then they immediately fund a "new" studio composed of the entire original team. There are many advantages to this:
- selectively get rid of people they don't want without fear of lawsuit
- re-adjust old company policies
- sell technology to themselves. I know, sounds weird, but on the shareholder side, it looks good. For example, MS can "sell" the Flightsim engine to this new studio; even though they could be funding it. So essentially they are buying their own product. But on the paperwork side, it shows a profit made on the engine. It's the same deal when Google "bought" Youtube. Both Google and Youtube are invested by the same company - Sequoia National.
- retain talent which can otherwise land in other publisher's hands which can be a competition years down the road
- use a different budget. Internal studios draw money from one source, and external studios from another. So if you need to balance the internal budget, close some studios then use the external money to fund the new one.
This happend recently with another MS owned studio called Ensemble Studios (they made the successful Age of Empires series). MS closed this studio in Jan 2009, and as a result, 1 "new" studio was formed (Robot Entertainment). However, MS is backing this studio financially and this studio is making games for the Xbox 360
-feng
