It sounds like a good decision by the team tbh. Blurring the lines by 'integrating' functioning teams into a bigger entity which does completely unrelated things (TV, film and theater) never goes well. The team will most likely found their independent 'spin-off' company as they had planned already, no talent or knowledge is lost, only risk is financing for new projects.
It doesn't. It's the people who actually did all the work who are benefiting, not the corporate entity. The coordinated mass resignations make it obvious that the former management is ready to immediately start up their own company in the office next door and hire on everyone who just quit Annapurna.
Not the parent company, but the game team that resigned is in a better position. They can continue focus on building games, instead of being 'integrated' with the TV, film and theater people (I bet most of that 'integration' is about 'outsourcing' CGI work to the 3D artists in the game team - e.g. a distraction from making games).
You're not quite there. Annapurna does not make games, it publishes them. There's no significant number of 3D artist working there. Even on the movie side, they don't directly make the movies.
Probably through "line must always go up" mentality.
Creative business, especially games, should really not be publicly traded or thought of as having major returns on investments.
It might work on start, but sooner or later the "current hit game" will fade out of popularity and then people will get fired and crunch will become the norm etc... in order to satisfy the "line must go up" mentality, but since game dev is a hit driven business that clashes with the "Line must go up" concept at its core since, being a hit driven business, means that it's totaly unpredictable.
The video game business is very similar to the film or literary publishing business. You need to publish ten novels for one to do well enough financially to pay off the others. Nobody really knows why that one worked. It's possible to do a few sequels, but the formula quickly becomes boring.
No one can guarantee the commercial success of a novel, film or video game.
Is this not the legally obligated line of thinking for american companies? You have some leeway to argue with only providing value to shareholders in some specific manner, but not much.
In the case of a public company that is assumed to be profit, because the shareholders are a vast and ever changing group. Annapurna isn't public, so it serves whatever the private owners want.
Even in a publicly traded stock, the company charter can specify something other than profit. The shareholders know that when they buy stock.
In other words there is more leeway than we commonly give credit. The notion of a fiduciary duty to be greedy is pushed by psychopathic CEOs but isn't really what the law says.
Most companies try to operate at a profit and actually increase those profits over time. That said, reasoning that Annapurna failed only because of that requires some impressive mental gymnastics
