InXile, Obsidian, and now Bethesda. Basically, if EA proves willing to sell Bioware, Microsoft will have bought computer role playing games. It will have consumed -- a genre. Think about it. Granted, for the company synonymous with monopoly and murderous capitalism in the modern era, capturing a niche market is still small potatoes, but it bears mentioning we no longer bat an eyelash at our corporate overlords outright buying an entire pre-existing idea. Not just property or copyright or manufacturing power, but an idea, a genre, a mode of expression - dead.
And it is death, make no mistake, regardless of the company figureheads' redacted public statements to the contrary. The larger companies get, the more massive their mass appeal, the less capable they are of creativity. A niche product originally so dependent on thought exercises and novel situations will exude nothing but the most nauseating pablum from under a megacorporation's public relations censorship board. Granted, little of these companies' output in recent years has proven worthy of the products from around Y2K by which their old leaders made their names, but the sheer combined bulk of that increasingly undeserved name recognition, whipped to march by a single marketing interest, will easily steamroll ersatz competitors. They will finish the ongoing process of redefining role-playing to fit the preferences of the braindead filth comprising the majority of this species.
Sure, some slim hope lingers in Europe, but let's face it: Paradox and CD Projekt will not match the clout of Microsoft, and if our last hope for tactical RPGs lies with fly-by-nights like Owlcat, we may as well all start buying football games. The best we can hope for going forward is, here and there, some odd little unpolished indie gem like Dead State or The Age of Decadence.
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