The Outer Worlds 2 dev says "it was quite a shock" to get bought by a giant corporation like Microsoft while making a game about how evil giant corporations are

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Art imitates life, etc.

The Outer Worlds 2
(Image credit: Microsoft)

Whether you call it psychic intuition or just the way the world works, The Outer Worlds devs were a little spooked when a megacorporation gobbled up their studio while it was working on a game about how predatory megacorporations are.

Speaking to Edge for its issue 414, The Outer Worlds co-creator and The Outer Worlds 2 creative director Leonard Boyarsky remembers "it was quite a shock" when Microsoft purchased developer Obsidian in 2018 to sit under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella.

"We went to work at Obsidian," Boyarsky – who joined the studio in 2016, after a stint as the face and heart of Diablo 3 at Blizzard – says. "And halfway through a game about corporations running everything, a giant corporation bought our studio."

But the irony was bigger than any threat Xbox may have posed. Boyarsky continues to tell Edge the 2018 Microsoft acquisition didn't and hasn't impacted Obsidian's creative freedom at all – which is likely why The Outer Worlds is proudly a story of "corporate mismanagement, mistreatment, or straight out malevolence," as we write in our 2019 The Outer Worlds review.

Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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