When a studio gets bought by a new publisher, where does the rubber meet

Every acquisition is different and it's really hard to justify. Sometimes the publisher buys the studio because the publisher wants the studio's technology and/or IP - this happened with Activision buying Red Octane in 2006 without buying the actual developers Harmonix. Activision got the Guitar Hero name and the plastic guitar controller tech, but Harmonix went with EA and went on to make Rock Band.

Sometimes it's because the studio is floundering and the publisher believes that they can fix things (for various definitions of "fixed"). I've got some firsthand experience working at the acquired studio of one of these situations. The studio was running several live service games, but they were losing money. A publisher acquired them, laid off roughly 75% of the staff, and kept just enough mission-critical people to keep all of the games running. The whole situation was not unlike what happened at Twitter - many foretold doom, but things mostly kept chugging along.

Generally, there's two sets of big changes after any acquisition. There's the set of one-time changes that can take up to a year (often when the purchasing company takes stock of everything they just bought and starts reorganizing and cutting things they decide they don't need, and then there's the normal day-to-day changes that establish the new normal. These new normal changes are usually only felt by the studio executive level and above - the executive producer(s) and studio head(s) must learn to work with their new bosses at the bigger publisher. For those in the trenches, the only real changes tend to be operational - different ways of doing required HR training, using different software packages (like using Microsoft Teams instead of Slack), and procedural changes in stuff like annual performance reviews. All in all, for individual contributors still employed at the team level, things don't change a lot.

P.S. I have no idea about what it's like for a studio to go independent after being owned by a big publisher. That's historically been an extremely exclusive club and I'm not a member.

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