Buying out rival developers (that become money pits.)

[V-Bro - The Titan's Driver]

I never figured out the ultimate point of buying all the rival companies.

I swept the competition and found myself dominating with sales 10x more numerous than the runner-up. This made it easy to buy out the competition. However, aside from having them make exclusive games for your own consoles, I don't know why else to do this.

They have huge monthly costs, one I bought for $2 billion overall costs 10 million/ month; it appears to be an arbitrary number based on its buyout price. These values don't reflect their performance.

When they sell a game, the cut of the profits NEVER covers the monthly expenses. Giving financial assistance doesn't appear to create better games (and sales). To add to the problem, I found that some have huge gaps in time when they release no games ... for years, and no games means no income for that time.
Ultimately, I shut down a bunch of studios to cut down costs and kill lazy non-producers.

They were more useful as stocks. If you only bought up to 75% Shares, they go up in value overtime and could be sold immediately if you needed to invest or pay debts.

Did anyone ever figure how to make acquired developers do... better?

[ṔU̡И͞ISHE̵D ̧S̀И̡AK͏E]

I just buy them out and shut them down. Getting bought out developers to make games is flawed, since it's random, and a second topic is assigned automatically to the games they produce, so if you want them to make a soccer game, they would have "rock star" or something else as the second topic.

Honestly, they're just there as stock. Just make sure you buy them out completely first so you can shut them down before the end of the month and not have to pay any operating expenses.