A third of bought game studios have died since 2000. Arkane Lyon is on the clock

Arkane Lyon has a deadline, and it's not pretty. The Dishonored and Deathloop developer needs a buyer by mid-December or it faces closure, and Ubisoft plus at least two other companies have already put offers on the table. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft could also sell the studio back to its own management, with shutdown still live if no deal lands. The French union STJV isn't waiting quietly — it accused Microsoft of sabotaging Blade to manufacture a reason to close the place.

STJV claims Marvel's Blade is developing fine, and that a forced 19-month hiring freeze is what dragged it out. The union also says Arkane turns a profit — just not enough of one for Microsoft's taste. Those are the union's words, not a confirmed internal accounting.

The bigger picture is ugly. Industry veteran Sebastian Cardoso dug through more than 300 studios swallowed by large companies over the past 25 years and found roughly 61% sold fewer games, scored worse reviews, or got shut down afterward. A full third of acquired studios closed, and half of those deaths came within five years of the ink drying.

The timing is brutal. Only one acquired studio in Cardoso's dataset shut between 2019 and 2022, then 33 went under from 2023 through October. Call it the hangover from pandemic-era overinvestment — and the buyer's identity is the single strongest predictor of whether a studio lives.

Activision Blizzard wears the crown here: it has either shuttered or hollowed out every studio it ever bought. Disney and Midway sit at a 0% survival rate, and Square Enix and EA — fresh off closing BioWare — aren't far behind. Cardoso notes these publishers tend to buy studios just to feed existing intellectual property, and debt-fueled sprees like Embracer's tend to end in a ditch.

The flip side: Nintendo, Sumo Group, Krafton and Kadokawa have each picked up only a handful of studios since 2000 and closed none of them. They tend to buy only after working with a team and leave the original leads in charge. Kadokawa's FromSoftware bet paid off with Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring. Microsoft, Ubisoft, Take-Two, Epic Games, Sony and Sega sit in the muddy middle — and Microsoft's recent cuts hit 3,200 employees while Double Fine and Compulsion survived and Ninja Theory did not. Eighteen studios managed to buy themselves back, and none of them declined or closed, though Cardoso cautions they were likely healthy enough to afford the exit in the first place.