Thats an IF scenario, not a real one, one I would have found a bit more acceptable since those IPs are theirs to begin with, and they can do whatever they want. They created them with their own effort and will be their first entry in the market. Now if there was anotner scenario where they started buying out other big multiplatform titles, titles they arent responsible of, from other platforms to support exclusively theirs I would have consideted it equally destructive.
Especially if this trend continues
I feel like you’re placing way too much importance on the novelty of creating ground up studios and IPs.
If Disney did not buy Marvel and and lay out a huge timeline to lead up to the end of avengers then no one would have ever experienced the greatness that only comic book goers did. And comic books were dying. The movies were running stale because the same movies would be rehashed repeatedly.
They needed someone with much more vision and experience to make the IP what everyone wanted.
Nintendo and Sony are not just the oldest surviving console players around they survived a period where a great deal of consoles crashed and failed. It was still a miracle that MS survived in a situation where Sega did not. When you put that into perspective, surviving means growth and winning doesn’t mean novelty. Winning means taking the most efficient route you can and truthfully, building a bunch of studios from the ground up against incumbents with nearly 40 years of goodwill, brand power, IPs and strategy makes no sense.
You are doomed to fail.
If You no longer have the luxury of 20 years to build up a solid foundation, what options do you have left really? Your competition is hungry, they are coming in and they will buy up everything to enter the market, and you will be impacted.
this is change and change is coming to the gaming market whether you want to believe it’s coming or not. There is Apple Arcade and Apple TV, there is Google stadia, GeForce Now, Steam Deck, Amazon owns Twitch and lumberyard, Facebook owns Oculus, and Netflix is making some form of games as well.
There will be mergers and acquisitions whether you like it or not, the only question you should be asking is whether the ones making those moves will do those studios and IPs right. The idea that the industry would stay unchanged; and these new entrants would just die off is naive. They have money significantly dwarfing Nintendo and Sony and are looking to increase growth at nearly all costs.
With Disney, there was a limit to new the number of new IPs they could build in any given year. So those acquisitions of marvel and Star Wars have done monumental for them. They had all their things on Netflix and saw an opportunity to start their own streaming service and already have caught up with Netflix in just a handful of years.
that is the power of IP buying and plenty of people are happy with what Disney accomplished.
