There were some pretty big happenings in the game development community last week, which basically translates into financially strapped development houses as a result of the current economic climate.  Over the last week, there have been some very large mashups between dev houses: in a forced cage fight to the death, Bioware crushed Mythic Entertainment, while ZeniMax more graciously bought out and consolidated iD Software into their fold.
Find out what this means to you as a concerned gamer after the jump.

Here’s the match up:

ZeniMax Media (winning the 2008 awards for both Most Easily Forgettable Company Name and  Most Overpowered Board of Directors), is the parent company of Bethesda Softworks. They approached iD Software and offered to buy them out. iD Software is best known for their first person shooters Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein as well as their quirky cast of key characters (John Carmack) and disgruntled ex-employees (John Romero and American McGee).

What does this mean to you?: Okay, iD Software’s founder, John Romero, tweeted the following: “ZENIMAX???? Disgusting.” This tells us all we need to hear about what he thinks of the deal, but for the rest of the gaming world, this buyout looks freakin’ sweet.  It’s literally taking each company’s weak points and complementing them with their new purchase’s strengths: iD games had crap for storyline, while Bethesda are masters at fully realising an imaginary world. First person shooter gameplay using the new iD Tech 5 engine, mixed with the compelling story driven gameplay of the Oblivion and Fallout series?  Pffft.  No brainer.  Expect some great things from this merger; start watching ZeniMax Media.

On the other hand, not all good can come from mergers like this.

Electronic Arts merged two of the dev houses under it and smashed them unhappily together.  Bioware, the Canadian RPG powerhouse behind the Knights of the Old Republic series, Neverwinter Nights, Baldur’s Gate and Mass Effect, more or less have forcefully absorbed Mythic Entertainment, known for Dark Age of Camelot and its current Warhammer Online. Mythic’s Mark Jacobs was ousted and replaced by the Bioware chain of command.

What does this mean to you?: Not all of these chocolate/peanut butter style combinations can go together as swimmingly.  Some of these mergers are more like Alec Mercer from Prototype “merging” with a health pack…I mean, civilian.  As we’ve seen with EA in the past, they’ve developed the disturbing trend of buying out any and all competition, merging everything into one big ball of pus, and then milking the holy hell out of their brand names until they are reviled by the gaming community.

When you’ve got two RPG developers being forced to work together, where Bioware is obviously the big winner of the combination, obviously Mythic and it’s people are going to find themselves no longer working on keeping Warhammer alive, and instead, working on getting Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic MMORPG out the door that much faster. It makes sense: Mythic has got over a decade of MMORPG experience, and it would make sense that Bioware could use some help making Old Republic as awesome as it is in the movie.  But as anyone in any kind of game of domination can tell you, when you force slaves to work under you,you can’t really expect 100% quality from them. You expect a revolt.  I’m sure Bioware will make Mythic do all their dirty work and, eventually, all of Mythic’s energy and resources will be absorbed into Bioware.  I think we’re going to see some problems with Bioware until Mythic has finally given up struggling and taken its submissive place under Bioware.

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