Shifting the story to be more low-level, more about low life shenangians, including crime and fighting back the goverment as an ordinary man instead of ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED or corporate wars, which are interesting only from the another corporate's POV and already realized by far smarter people in the industry with exactly one game - Syndicate. I know I'm vague but it's easier for me to say that Deus Ex' focus being too popular than Shadowrun's or Cyberpunk 2020, for example. And also the fact that in cyberpunk games we can't have fun outside of using built-in implants on missions and trolling the poor enemy's AI.
Because of being kinda ironic, isn't it?
By publishers. Eidos wanted to make a new game with the new protagonist.
Unfortunately usually the money to make the games come from the publishers. Doesn't matter how good of a developer studio you are, if you don't have a publisher you don't get the money or published. If you don't get money or have your product published, then you shut your doors and go bankrupt.
Of course, they can go (to kickstarter and omit themselves from AAA-market) but the rights to Deus Ex are still in hands of Square Enix. SE can just hire someone else less rebellious to make new DX game even worse. Or outsource it to India. With sad results.
Unfortunately usually the money to make the games come from the publishers. Doesn't matter how good of a developer studio you are, if you don't have a publisher you don't get the money or published. If you don't get money or have your product published, then you shut your doors and go bankrupt.
That is the world we live on these days.
I don't know where do you live where companies can just get millions of dollars out of nowhere to do those things
, but even Obsidian had to get Paradox to become their publisher for Tyranny because the crowdfunding scene wouldn't work for long (and they got like 4x more money to make PoE than they asked) and they still need a Publisher after the big success of PoE. If it was that simple they wouldn't have need Paradox and could have just continued being independent and yet they are almost bankrupt even though their games are being crowdfunded successfully and sell quite well. Also there is no way a newly made publisher out of nowhere can compete with the big ones already established. They wouldn't be able to get any good deals because already existing publishers can just choke them out of business. For example big ones can just make a deal with Steam and GOG (and any other big game selling platforms), saying that Steam and GOG shouldn't accept games from this new publisher in exchange of 10% more profit from every sale of this big distributor's games for 5 years (for example).
Not always works well enough. Well, someone tried... http://steamspy.com/app/268870
I don't know where do you live where companies can just get millions of dollars out of nowhere to do those things
In the world of developing games or you have a publisher with a big wallet or you're history. There is no easy way out or becoming independent because you need money to come in always, you already spend most of your money to pay for your staff and other expenses related to the job (building space, electricity, water, cleaning services, etc) and you usually only get money when you sell a game, which if you're lucky happens a lot when you release the game but then until you release the next game you basically are spending the money you made from the previous game sales.
It only sucks money non-stop, so Devs need publishers to come by and give them the money they need to stay afloat before they release the next game (not to mention that these publishers already have good contracts with the major game selling platforms, so the devs do not have to sweat to get a weak contract that would mostly suck for them because they are the small fry and the game selling platforms are the big fish so they wouldn't be pushed by publishers but would be pushed by Steam/GOG/etc).
