[vvanders]

Transitions are hard, and I'm sure there's definitely that failure case.

However if you look at EA and the acquire/in-house cycle they go through every 4-5 years, there's no way you can hope to be stable under those circumstances. Ditto Microsoft and the 2-3 cycles they went through with similar disasters.

Fundamentally the two types of companies have different goals which drive their culture. Publishers exist to make money, pure and simple. They diversify risk by supporting multiple developers but at the end of the day they want to see growth and cash. A developer on the other hand may be happy staying mostly cash-neutral as long as it keeps them afloat to keep creating the art/experience that drives them.

I'd argue that those two cultures are at distinct odds(based on what I saw play out when I was in the industry) and trying to merge them leads to disaster.