That is not what being a subsidiary means. Unless the parent closes the subsidiary and subsumes it. These are still Western development studios, with western game developers, developing western-style games.
Having an Asian parent company, does not make a studio sitting in California, with a California-based dev team -- an "eastern" game.
Housemarque is now part of Sony -- its still a Finnish game developer and studio, not Japanese.
But the devouring of devs by these mega corps IS an issue.
Forget the location of tecent because it actually doesnt matter. But EA xbox sony etc did this in 2010s and into 20202s and look whats happened. Its causes bloat and corps come in and lay off and close the devs.
The hope is that indie companies can come in and fill that hole. But the hardware market being so shit, its going to be hard to get companies to survive.
The way they are operating, in this fashion, is largely affecting western companies.
Japanese and chinese companies tend to not struggle with bloated dev teams and costs like I just said.
With the struggle of getting access to consoles and the rising costs is causing companies to close down or consolidate due to the corporations greed of profit always needing to be growing.
This isnt an issue thats unique to gaming, but its unique to american gaming companies. Because japanese and chinese companies tend to have smaller budgets and teams. So they arent seeing the level of shrinkage in workforce we had.
We are on pace for 13000 layoffs this year in the US and Europe. 50,000 since 2022.
The pandemic caused severe over-hiring throughout the tech world, and heavily in gaming. There was also every big studio miscalculating on live-service -- and making large team for multiplayer focus -- that also dried up immensely, post pandemic. And AI is drastically effecting coding jobs.
There is also just more competition. So games have to be good.
The revival of 8/16-bit style games has really launched the Indie market the past 10 years.
Games sales are still going quite strong.(Covid bump is very visable)
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u/18strawberryfields 8h ago
A bit of stretch. Its not the heyday of western gaming that was the 360 era.
But - Bioware just passed the torch to CDPR and Lorian. They just out-classsed them in nearly every way in the WRPG/CRPG open world format.
Rockstar is about to release what will likely be the largest grossing game in history.
Epic Games, Riot, Creative Assemby, and Sumo are all going strong.
EA, Activision, and Ubisoft have been taken down a notch, but still sell games by the boatload.