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Bandai Namco to shut down Reflector Entertainment (www.gematsu.com)
submitted 21 hours ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

Could it ever plausibly be made illegal to buy a company and then liquidate them within a given period of time? Eg, the company goes up for government auction rather than the parent retaining the assets. I definitely feel trade law needs improvements, just picturing if anything works here.

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  • [–] 8 points 13 hours ago (1 child)

    Bandai Namco bought this studio in 2020. It's been over 6 years. In that time period (and, in fact, the entire history of this studio), Reflector produced one (1) game. Which was a pretty terrible flop.

    I get it. I hate to see stuff like Microsoft buying up a ton of studios and then shutting them down, even after they make successful games like Hi-Fi Rush. In cases like that it definitely seems like the bug corporation is more interested in eliminating potential competition than actually creating new products. But sometimes a studio is just actually bad and needs to be liquidated.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago

    I might argue that 6 years isn’t a tremendous amount of time for a company. Given those failures, it could be that it’s still better for the publisher to stop paying the studio’s losses, but still let anything left go to general auction. Yes, a poor break for the company, but that would be the loss accrued from a bad buyout.

    That would mean that buyout/slash isn’t a viable method to gain someone’s patents, or kill competition.

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  • [–] 2 points 13 hours ago

    There is a law that regulates how you can sell your stake in a company if you have a large quantity. So people could not just get up one morning and sell all of their shares, which would crash the company. That concept is similar and probably related to outright shutting down a subsidiary like large corporations have been doing in the gaming industry.

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