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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9728594" data-attributes="member: 18">When? When in the last 15-20 years did an independent studio do that?Because I can't think of a single example of an independent studio doing that.And every example I can think of, the actual cause, contrary to your "it just happens man" implication, was directly traceable to the publisher who owned the NON-independent studio pushing them to make bad choices (either directly or indirectly).No.The world is not a random morass of dice rolls randomly causing events from a table. Things happen and there's a chain of causation behind them. You can look at a studio and see their situation, and have a pretty good idea of the general quality of certain genres of game they'd put out. There are exceptions, but they're vanishingly rare.This isn't 2010. Predicting "5+ years" is predicting ONE game dev cycle out now for AAAs. One. That's the equivalent, literally, of predicting 2+ years in 2010. Games that took 2-3 years back then take 5+ now. So you can say "That's a big number" but it's not - it's one cycle. AAs are still closer to 2-3, but even some of them are stretching towards 5+.Plus, I'm not actually "predicting" much, I'm talking about easy-to-prove and impossible-to-deny difference in the way an independent game dev works vs how a fully-owned studio which only has the money a publisher allows it to have work. There are companies who give the impression of being at a mid-point, but in reality 95% of those are fully-owned, and the moment it's more convenient for a corporate owner to do so than to keep them open, they'll immediately be liquidated. As easy recent proof, I point you to Microsoft's massive array of acquired games companies. Most of those were allowed to run as if they were independent studios for the most part, but then without warning, MS just shut a large fraction of them down, even when they were making a profit or 80%+ of the way through developing a game likely to be profitable, because more short-term gain for MS could be found by just shutting them down and taking their money/money earmarked for them.If Larian had been bought by a publisher, we'd be having a very different discussion, because then they'd be subject to the same vicissitudes as other companies.Your comment re: "small studios or large ones" makes me think you're either misunderstanding or intentionally trying to reframe the issue though. This isn't about small vs. large. This is about independent vs. fully dependent on a publisher who actually owns them. As Larian show, an independent studio can be much larger than publisher-owned ones. CDPR also also own themselves and are huge.Don't think it's any accident the best Western RPGs of the last 10 years or so came out of those two companies.</blockquote>

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