Rockstar also doesnt manage to bring back some of their own great IP's like LA Noire ie.
Well, true. But R* have done better with the IP they've brought back than EA over the decade, I'd say. I mean just compare RDR2 to Dragon Age: Veilguard :/
Can Sony be added to the mix? This is a decent company and has decent franchise like for example Beyod good and evil which they wasted. A good purchase for Sony.
Even though I'm upset with how Sony basically kinda screwed up Bluepoint and Bend for this gen, at the end of the day they're the only platform holder who's both made M&As at a somewhat large scale this gen and shown they can give a huge glow-up to otherwise obscure IP. Astro Bot's going mainstream, Helldivers went from being niche AF to arguably the biggest game of 2024 (or at least tied with COD, and HD2's rise was much more impressive than COD mostly re-establishing status quo after BO3 embarrassment), etc.
Most of Ubisoft's IP either have diminished market presence or are effectively dormant. However, quite a few have a lot of nostalgia with gamers, like Rayman or Splinter Cell. I'd argue the places best suited to those IP are either among devs/pubs with proven expertise in those genres AND have shown they can significantly bolster the profile of niche IP or make hits out of relatively new IP. Platform holder-wise the only one aside SIE who's demonstrated this is Nintendo, and I think they would mainly just be interested in Rayman (if they were even interested in acquiring any Ubisoft IP, which I don't think they are).
So the only platform holder I could trust IP like Splinter Cell, Watch Dogs, Far Cry etc. with is SIE. Otherwise, it'd be a publisher like Take-Two, CDPR...well those are the leading picks in terms of non-platform holder publishers. Maybe some smaller outlet like Devolver depending the specific IP. I don't think any Japanese publishers would be interested in Ubisoft IP, nor many Korean or Chinese ones (maybe NCSoft?).
I know a popular answer some would say, heck
Punished Miku
just mentioned it, is Microsoft. But IMO they aren't a good fit for most any of the Ubisoft IP and it gets back to the core issue that, they haven't really shown they can grow any of the IP they've already acquired! Starfield was a muted flash in the pan; RedFall was a train wreck. Hellblade II was a
MASSIVE step back for that IP. COD's only about the same as it's generally been, at best. Indiana Jones was "decent" but somewhat lukewarm in commercial performance. Jury's still out on Fable and Outer Worlds 2. I could go on and on.
They simply haven't demonstrated they have the capability to make a niche IP bigger & better both critically & commercially, haven't shown they can revitalize diminished IP either (jury's still out on Gears E-Day for example; same with DOOM Eternal in terms of market performance compared to the other games). Their corporate strategy with Game Pass is a major part of the problem IMO, and I think we saw how with COD sales of MW3 on Xbox vs. other platforms like PlayStation.
Then the usual rebuttal is "well it won't matter if they publish the games on PlayStation anyway!", but then I wonder do those people stop to ask if it's even healthy to have a massive company acting as publisher, just buying up so much of the valuable (both commercially and in terms of cultural cache with gamers) IP in the market. Like what's fundamentally the difference between that and just acquiring publishers, when the latter is mostly in service of getting the IPs anyway?
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