We always talk about studios when it comes to acquisitions but what non studio acquisitions could occur that would help Xbox. The three I have in mind are:
Discord, Unreal Engine, and Unity Engine. Any of these three would elevate either the studios or the Xbox ecosystem tremendously in my opinion.
And MS has done things like this in the past. Remember that the physics engine Havok, which runs most game engine physics, was acquired in 2015.
What about a true achievement acquisition?
Ya. Achievements are a big part of the Xbox community and having stronger integration and support would be great.
Discord would be very big.
I think Discord asked on twitter what people wanted them to work on and people said more integration to gaming consoles.
Yep, and my very wild but very plausible guess is Discord shall come to xbox this year and it shall be alongside the console release of Among Us.
Disney!
Dark Horse Comics to lock in some lesser known franchises that can grow to be huge in the video game industry.
Tbh I prefer having TA independent and not beholden to Microsoft.
Microsoft could implement similar tools and resources any time, there’s nothing stopping them except the will to do it.
Epic Games easily.
Having Unreal Engine on gamestack and tuning all their tools to Azure plus having license incentives for developers to target Xbox (the whole platform not just the console) would be a huge win for Ms overall
JP Animation Studio.
A beloved ip or license
Or If they purchased Blur Studios to help with cut scenes.
True but you could make the argument they have enough exclusive IPs that still haven’t been reworked on. I’m guessing your mean like mainstream IPs or a like those sports deals?
Oh man that would be glorious!
Blur Studios. They work on movie CGi but do a lot for games as well, doing the cutscenes in the Halo remasters as well as many others. They even did the State of Decay 3 trailer.
With next gen engines like Unreal Engine 5 being able to take in film quality assets for real time rendering, and with modern SSDs allowing for quick loading of Hollywood quality animations, having access to Blur’s talent, know-how, and workflow might benefit all of MGS’s studios.
Also, I personally like the ultra-realistic look of their Halo work and wish Infinite went in that direction rather than the look the game currently has (in Blur’s work, there’s a lot of metal in character armour whereas 343 decided to go with plastics for armour), but that’s a subjective thing. And as another side note, I wished the Halo TV show was all CG from Blur, but recent innovations and TV and movie making (like in the Mandalorian) has subdued me, but other MS IP are ripe for a CGi TV show (Banjo). Also if they do that show it needs to be done in UE5 in real time on the XSX 
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In the past it would be a mistake to bring a Hollywood quality asset into a game, but now it’s exactly what you need to have the best looking games.
Going back to the State of Decay 3 trailer, imagine that quality of characters, objects like trees, and animations in the final game. The lighting would be another story, but largely similar. SoD2 used Unreal Engine 4 so UE5 for future projects seems like a reasonable expectation. A small developer like in Undead Labs probably couldn’t get all of their assets to that pedigree, but having Blur alongside them could help.
The final reason for doing something like this is that a lot of these special effect houses are in a cut throat industry where they out bid each other for every project. It’s not a sustainable model and you see some of these places shut down after they’ve released a big movie. Giving them financial stability so they can actually keep talent, grow, and take on risky projects could be something they would appreciate and would look forward to.
Don’t even get me started on the Halo Wars 2 cutscenes, like holy shit if they could make a Halo movie that would be ace, but extremely hard haha but extremely worth it.
Spoliers and all
Interesting thread topic!
I’d say Discord, Unity, Epic Games (if that counts), Blur Studios, Blackshark.ai + any other ML-based tech innovation companies.
Discord would be great, they can make it a default Windows app and replace Skype since its almost irrelevant now. Also they have partnered with MS a lot too.
Unity won’t make a lot of sense since Windows/XBOX experience isn’t invested heavily in Mobile/smaller experiences.
Epic Games would be Great as that will almost complete the Game Stack MS provides and will cover nearly all tools for Games Development, but don’t think they will seek it. Now because of the Bethesda Acquisition they will have tons of in-house engines to work with. (Slipspace, Fuel, Unreal, Id Tech, Creation Engine) and they can work developing those.
Blackshark.ai would be a high probability and make total sense as it fits the ambitions and future goals within MS
That’s actually a very good choice. With engines being able to take cinematography assets straight away having an studio able to produce such high quality work could do wonders.
