Take Two sell Private Division
I’ve seen so many of these “we have a indie dept now!” come and go over the years and it’s always some flavour of depressing. I guess the big difference this time is that TakeTwo aren’t letting things languish until people forget Private Division exists and at least they never launched it in a flamboyant display of “that’s fucked up, lads” (hello Square Enix) but that’s scant consolation really.
It’s also surprisingly unusual to see someone from whichever large company it is this time come out and say that the games do fine but they’re essentially rounding errors on the balance sheet and that’s not really the business stuff they’re into. That’s a couple of mil savings they could spend elsewhere on a bigger bet as far as they’re concerned and given the choice, they will spend it elsewhere.
And again, we’re seeing this happen whilst the big corps are doing really well. There’s a lot of curious talk recently about the industry being fucked when it’s not really, the industry is fucked up and that’s an important difference. Every few years the industry backs itself into a corner, slings a load of actual humans in a pit and reconfigures itself and it’s properly shit. Every time it’s “they surely can’t go on like this” and it’s been 40 odd years of it now, I’d put money on the other one.
That’s why having each others backs, unionising and all that is urgent as fuck. As much as folk hope for a collapse of the current structures, we’ve got now to deal with, not some hypothetical, fantastical, future. Wishful thinking only goes so far.