I can’t tell if this is good or not. My gut says no, but also maybe yes?
The cynical side of me says they’re doing this to sell one of the halves off to one of the other publishers. The optimist in me hopes this leads to one more publisher in this space; we sorely need less consolidation.
That’s my thought as well – the licensed sports game market is probably more reliable (and generates more revenue vs. development cost) than originals, and they can “streamline” their business by splitting the originals business off for a sale. Not including sports probably makes the originals side more attractive to platform holders, as most sports games probably include provisions that require multiplatform releases (see also: the MLB signing a publishing deal for Sony’s “The Show” on non-Sony platforms).
Yeah and we can all knock their sports division all we want but it brought in money. With this change and in the possible outcome that they’re not out to be bought, we’ll have to see if the originals side will become a lot more risk-averse and pivot more into the GaaS market than they already were.
I’m interested to see where this goes.
