A new analysis of over 300 game studios acquired by big companies since 2000 shows one in three studios has since been shut down completely, half of which were shuttered within five years of the acquisition.
Sebastian Cardoso, who has previously worked at Riot, Crytek, and EA, spent about three months tracking 303 PC and console studios acquired over the last 25 years. He published the results on his Game Studio Unlocked newsletter this week, alongside the full dataset.
According to his findings, 60.8% of acquired studios either saw their games decline or were shut down altogether, and just one in four acquired studios “came through both producing at or above their old level, as well as institutionally whole.”
The biggest factor, he found, was who bought the studio. All 17 of Activision Blizzard’s ownership periods ended in decline or closure, as did every one of Disney’s, Midway’s, and Thunderful’s. EA’s figure was 83%.
Of the 283 developers in the census, just 71 studios, or 25.1%, were still making games as well as before and hadn’t been hit by mass layoffs, absorbed into their parent or lost their leadership, although some of that is down to Cardoso’s own rules. He counts a studio as having declined if it was absorbed into its owner or moved onto support work, even if its games held up. Take those cases out and the 60.8% figure drops to 51.6%.
Nintendo hasn’t lost a single studio. It has bought six in 24 years and closed none, and Kadokawa, Krafton, and Sumo Group also have clean records. By comparison, 63% of Microsoft’s ownership periods ended in decline or closure, as did 58% of Sony’s, 50% of Tencent’s, and 43% of Embracer’s.
Cardoso puts the difference down to whether a company buys studios to “feed a machine” or because it “wanted to own good studios.”
Closures have also accelerated. Only one acquired studio in the census shut down between 2019 and 2022, but 33 have shuttered since 2023.
Cardoso also tracked 50 notable independent studios over the seven years from October 2019 to October 2026. Just 2% of them closed, against 12.6% of acquired studios, though he points out the independent figure rests on a single closure.
Studios that big companies founded themselves did even worse as, of 56 in the census, 87.5% declined or were shut, and 18 of the 34 that closed never released a game. NetEase alone opened eight studios between 2020 and 2023 and all eight have since been closed.