It bought Borderlands developer Gearbox in February 2021; Star Wars remaster company Aspyr Media in April 2021; 3D Realms and Ghost Ship Games in August 2021, Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, and Square Enix Montréal in May 2022; and the rights to The Lord of the Rings franchise in August 2022. Since then, the studio has been a poster child for what happens when you rapidly grow, buy up and then consolidate other companies, and ultimately fail to secure a $2 billion partnership with Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund. In other words: late-stage capitalism.

It was doomed from the start.