This past week, giant video game publisher Electronic Arts placed a hostile bid of $2 billion to take over fellow publisher Take-Two. Take-Two is the maker of the controversial but mega-selling franchise, Grand Theft Auto. So what does this mean if EA does in fact buy out T2? Well, it’s not as if there won’t be other video game makers, large and small, remaining. There are still literally dozens of them out there.
Every day, some kid wakes up and dreams of making their own video game, and some will. There will always be a niche for small game outfits, and large publishers like EA or T2 will gladly buy and/or publish those games to a national or international market. Video game development is no longer just the realm of bit monkeys who know assembly language so they can get the most out of game consoles.After all, I’ve seen game development for consoles (like Playstations and XBoxes) take place on Windows boxes with Microsoft’s Visual Studio, Photoshop and Autodesk’s Maya. Certainly the latter two pieces of software aren’t that cheap, but relatively speaking, acquiring the knowledge to use them is cheaper than the equivalent 20 years ago. Heck, I even know of a small game company that started just within the last year!
The gaming industry will continue whether EA and T2 merge or not.