What Square Enix’s sale of Tomb Raider tells you about the future of gaming

metro.co.uk:

Paying $300 million for Tomb Raider and two well-respected developers seems like a steal but there’s a clear reason it didn’t go for more.

In the last few months we’ve seen Microsoft pay £5.9 billion for Skyrim maker Bethesda and a record-breaking £50 billion for Call Of Duty owner Activision Blizzard, while Sony has snapped up Destiny 2 developer Bungie for £2.7 billion. For most people, once you get past a few million it’s hard to comprehend such immense sums but paying just £239 million for Tomb Raider, the studio that makes it, and all of Square Enix’s Western developers and their associated franchises seems like a steal to everyone… except other games companies.

£239 million ($300 million) is less than the production budget of Avengers: Endgame, with the 2018 Tomb Raider film reboot itself having a budget of around $100 million. To suggest that the entire franchise, plus developers Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montreal, and additional franchises such as Deux Ex and Thief are only worth an extra $200 million seems madness but this is not a case of Square Enix being foolish. They wanted more money, but nobody was willing to pay it.

Although there’s no indication yet of who the other interested parties might have been it seems impossible to imagine that Microsoft wasn’t amongst them, given their current acquisition spree and the fact that they already made one of the modern Tomb Raiders a timed exclusive. Apparently they weren’t tempted though, despite using Crystal Dynamics to help with the reboot of Perfect Dark, and that says a lot about the sort of games big companies are willing to invest in nowadays.

All of the recent big acquisitions have one thing in common: live service games. Destiny 2, Call Of Duty, Overwatch, World