Thoughts on AT&T Shutting Down WB Interactive

It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who has seen the complete mess that always comes as the result of corporate mergers and buyouts, that sometimes certain divisions that were once pillars of one company are basically kicked out the fucking door by the new corporate power structure to make sure the 'bottom line' is as pretty as possible for stockholders. Perhaps the biggest once most people my age can recall would be the AOL-Time Warner merger which basically saw World Championship Wrestling get sold off to the then World Wrestling Federation for a couple of million dollars, because a.) the accounting practices of Turner Broadcasting and then Time Warner were fucking abysmal and b.) people really hated that the only reason anyone watched TNT was for the wrestling on Monday Nights.

Still, in the realm of video games, it's probably not as noticeable as often video game publishers like Blizzard or Electronic Arts stay within their lane... but when outside companies come in, say for example Disney, things gets a little strange. Everyone knows Disney as a media empire, the House of Mouse has had its fingers in so many pies from amusement parts, movies, television shows, comic books and of course video games, and for the most part Disney handles things in-house as it relates to its various divisions, often striving for the peak of quality of whatever it is they are doing... right up until affects their bottom line. You see Disney had an in-house video game Division, obvious called Disney Interactive Studios that was around from 1988 to 2016, to make their own games and distribute them to the various consoles out on the market. But Disney being Disney, overtime they found it cheaper to just licensee things out to other publishers to do the developing, marketing and distribution in order to maximize their own profits. It's why Disney basically shutdown Lucas Games who was working on the Star Wars 1313 game (that most people were looking forward too) and awarded the license rights to Star Wars games to Electronic Arts.

So what we're seeing with AT&T and their move to shut down and sell off the studios associated with WB Interactive which includes NetherRealm Studios and Rocksteady is that they are looking to just licenses out their intellectual properties. They make a profit off of it it because a video game publisher is paying for the right to make a game based on something they own and also get a good size of the profits of anything sold, the risk entirely falls on that of the publisher. They not only must develop and sell a quality product they have to do under the pressure of having to make the another company 'happy'. It's why when EA screwed up royally with Stars Wars Battlefront II it was such a big deal and a blow to the Star Wars brand that Disney basically had to step in and tell them to get their act together , threatening to pull the license and award it to another publisher. It's why EA basically got rid of micro-transitions as it related to SWB2 for quite some time before slowly rolling them back in. In the case of AT&T, which will still own the rights to Mortal Kombat and obviously the DC Comics franchises, they are going to be in seat Disney has been in.

Now, What does this mean for things like Mortal Kombat... well once would assume that whoever buys NetherRealm Studios would get the Mortal Kombat license to go along with it and probably will still have the permission to develop the Injustice series for further installment, but now the risk ends up being there could be a chance that if NRS gets shutdown by whoever buys them, another studio would work on the MK games. So one would worry if say Electronic Arts bought NRS, and known their habit of shutting down studios and basically restructuring them to the point they can't be effective... but considering that the Mortal Kombat franchise is so huge, I wouldn't worry too much, but I'd have that in the back of my mind the entire time.

The real question is who do we want getting their hands on these different studios and getting access to the various licenses to the AT&T catalog? From my point of view, the big ones are Microsoft, Sony, EA and Blizzard. Microsoft and Sony would make whatever they get their hands on console exclusives, so of the two, I'd want Microsoft to have the rights to things since you not only have the Xbox release but also PC versions, and they have proven to be willing to work with Nintendo to expand things to the Switch. Sony on the other hand would want to keep everything to their systems only, so this would probably reignite the console wars based on what games are exclusive to what system. With EA and Blizzard, they'll want to release whatever is developed on as many systems as possible, but both have made decisions that were not in the best interest of their customers for the sake of profits.

Anyway.... that's just my opinion