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

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.

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SideFX - Houdini

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What do they do?

They are a procedural generation tool.

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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.

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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.

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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

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