I have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly:

- Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist.

- The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless. There are no order of magnitude gains like there used to be. Most of the engineering is on the cloud services architecture or anti-cheat.

- The median "developer" at a game studio is not actually a very technical person. They mostly just spend their days inputting content and assets with the available tools.

- The value of a AAA game is not how innovative the gameplay is but how much content they were able to stuff into the game.

- Nobody cares about "exclusives" anymore when 90% of AAAs have interchangeable gameplay with other AAAs.

- The cost to start a new studio is negligible compared to the cost of acquiring existing IP.

IMO, people should stop chasing making AAA games or whatever nVidia pushed out. They should just build games instead of graphics demos that sometimes sold well.

They can stick to desktops 10 years ago, make smaller teams, and either build their own engine or use something that is not UE5.