What non game studio acquisitions could MS do that would support the Xbox Ecosystem

[Ruthwik_Rao]

yall thinkin MS should buy Epic seem to forget how equally aggressive Epic has been on the acquisition front recently. They’re the ones who shall also be acquiring more studios and tech in the coming years, imo this whole Epic Publishing thing they’ve started with Remedy, Playdead, GenDesign is them testing the waters with partnerships first. Fortnite is gonna stay afloat I’m sure, but they acquired Psyonix, they probably have ambitions on acquiring others soon. And imo Epic is a very good parent company to a lot of these, and even in tools they acquire, they just seem to acquire them and make them free to everyone (Quixel megascans being made free for Unreal Engine use took the whole CG and game industry by storm). In other words, I’d rather Epic stay independent because they’re a healthy competitor to both Steam and Xbox on PC. Interestingly enough, as of now, Epic store Game Giveaways have been superior to the Game Pass PC catalog, and you get to keep those games forever. I’d hate if this shit stopped because MS acquired em.

[Putfire]

SideFX - Houdini

[StevenPaniagua]

@Putfire

SideFX - Houdini

What do they do?

[DeoGame]

@StevenPaniagua

What do they do?

They are a procedural generation tool.

[DeoGame]

Blackshark.ai is a big one based on their work in MSFS.

I also think that buying a support house like Virtuous, Skybox or Sperasoft may not be a bad decision.

I also second Blur and SideFX.

[Ruthwik_Rao]

@StevenPaniagua

What do they do?

Basically the vfx industry standard software for fx and simulations. If you see any water, smoke, fire, destruction in movies and games today, there’s like 90% chance they were made in Houdini. Its procedural nature comes from the way it uses nodes for everything.

[euV2]

@Ruthwik_Rao

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.

Unless MS buys discord, it would make no sense for either Xbox or PS as it makes gold and PS+ even more redundant.

[Ruthwik_Rao]

@euV2

Unless MS buys discord, it would make no sense for either Xbox or PS as it makes gold and PS+ even more redundant.

it would unite PC and Xbox even further is my perspective. Xbox has that vision, PS doesn’t, what better way to boost the value of your console to a PC player (or a console one with pc friends) than having a very big important app exclusive to it?

But I get what you mean, it’s still something they could experiment with. Maybe integrating Xbox Live into Discord in some way would be better? Idk

[andrew_schmidt (HaloGaming08)]

@nrXic

…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.

343i was going for that halo 1 and 2 look since a big criticism of 4 and 5 was the art style didn’t really look like halo obviously they went back for infinite