There is a person named Mario.
It can feel like we are on the verge of a future where every video game is published by Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo or Embracer Group, with consolidation happening all across the video game industry.
A new forecast says that consolidation may change. According to Lucas Shaw, the next big mergers will be between TV services and studios. They will start buying each other.
Shaw thinks about the future of entertainment.
A gaming company will purchase a TV company. Tech and media companies are selling bundled services. One is sold by Apple. One is sold by Amazon. Disney is trying to make money. It's kind of sold by Microsoft. Major components of these bundles are music and video. No one has been able to crack the gaming component.
The entertainment industry is experimenting with interactive stories and video games.
These two worlds are going to get closer. If popular games are included in the service bundle, they can raise prices and reduce Churn. Amazon and Apple have been struggling in gaming. A TV company could be bought by a gaming company to leverage their intellectual property.
This misunderstands the market and doesn't register the current status of some market players.
It's on the internet.
If a TV or entertainment company buys a video game publisher, there is a limit to what they can do. We are missing the core component here that it is not like you just throw up a bunch of game tiles on Disney Plus. Something like this would need to be completely cloud-based, technology that is far from proven, and represents a small portion of the industry. Microsoft has invested a lot in the cloud, but it still relies on Game Pass titles being downloaded directly to PCs or the Xboxes it makes. After years of trying to break into the market, Stadia just folded.
If you want to talk about a different kind of video game, you have to be talking about games that are meant to be played on mobile devices. They are not triple A titles in any way.
This road has already been visited by us. Disney used to publish a lot of video games until they stopped publishing them in the first place. Disney doesn't bear the responsibility of developing and releasing the games themselves because they are paid by other companies. It is not possible to say that Disney should buy a game publisher and put all the games on Disney Plus. That doesn't work at all.
There is a Jedi order.
A gaming company buying a TV company ignores one of the biggest players in the industry right now, Sony, which is the video game market leader with the PS3 and is also a massive TV and film studio. What is being proposed here is something Sony has already been doing, making movies that are box office hits, and licensing out other titles such as The Last of Us for what is no doubt going to be a megahit series. Sony doesn't have their own streaming service, but they've been doing well with their current strategy.
There is no reason for Nintendo to sell itself to a media giant or try to combine with one. Everyone is going to make a lot of money from the animated feature licensed out to Universal. There is no need for a merger.
It is possible to bundle a bunch of TV shows and video games in one subscription, but there are too many variables to consider. Given how cloud-reliant it would be, and the fact that game streaming and video streaming are not the same thing, the tech does not really exist for that to work in a coherent way. I don't see why gaming giants would want to buy out media brands when they can just keep licensing their characters to be made into intellectual property. The exception, not the rule, is if you already exist in both worlds.
It's the last of us.
Tech giants are more likely to buy media companies. We are already seeing this with Amazon, but I wouldn't put it past Apple or Meta making a mega- purchase. I think everything is being consolidated to a certain extent, but not really.
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