alt Hacker NewsBungie, in its post-Halo standalone incarnation, was running a microtransactions empire from day one and funded itself on the debt owed by those; it was not ‘taken over’ by financial engineers, so to speak, because the call was coming from inside the house from day one. They executed on some very nice tricks to get funded but their business was operated consistently (impeccable scenic and gunplay, variable-quality story and voicing, catastrophically-bad management) throughout.
The others are all well-known acquisitions or acquirers, but I’m not seeing a clear link to my point. Certainly they’re stellar examples of ‘greed minmaxers’ but not so much of ‘profitable incompetence through financial engineer takeover’ like happened to, say, Toys R Us or Wizards of the Coast. Perhaps you could explain in more detail?
If that were true, then Bungie post-Halo would still be Bungie post-Halo, a part of Microsoft. Not Bungie post-Activision... certainly not Bungie post-Sony...
It's not all the studio head's fault in some of these situations. It was larger studios/publishers like Microsoft Studios coming in and buying them out. The consolidation of these studios is what burned them.