Fair enough! 
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The studios/publishers listed above are those that are of interest to me.
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Yeah, my personal 5 picks from the list are
- Square Enix Europe
- Asobo
- IO Interactive
- SEGA/ATLUS
- A smaller studio like Interior Night to nurture under their wing.
For 10
- WB Interactive
- Bungie
- Turtle Rock
- Valve
- Valhalla
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Holy cow
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My friend, what an amazing post that’s given me some new studios to dive into their work. Bookmarking for future reference; fantastic research here
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WB and SE Europe
that’s it
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Thanks. Can’t say I did too much more than a wiki crawl but tons of good studios out there.
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Jesus man, awesome work!
Let’s try to narrow it down a bit:
- Embracer Group: No way. It is spending a lot of money buying lots of AA studios lately. It spent $525 million earlier this year to buy Saber Interactive. This month it acquired 13 more new companies, including Zen Studios. I believe they own more than 40 companies at this point.
- Focus Home Interactive: It is a publisher that has a great relationship with Microsoft, putting the majority of its games on Game Pass. But since it is simply a publisher it would not add much for Microsoft. Plus, it was accused earlier this year of IP theft by a indie studio.
- Level 5: It has a bad history with Microsoft, but I believe that’s in the past. Level 5 has been struggling lately, and it would benefit a lot from Microsoft quality control. Plus, it has the rights for lots of interesting IPs, including Yo-kai Watch, Ni no Kuni, Dark Cloud, Professor Layton and Inazuma Eleven.
- Sega: Great recent relationship with Microsoft, including putting the Yakuza and Football Manager series on Game Pass, not to mention the next-gen version of Like a Dragon hitting exclusively the Series X and the newest iteration coming to Xbox after a long hiatus. Lots of great IPs and an indescribable presence in Japan.
- Smilegate: Nothing much to offer since it focus on mobile and PC online games and the interesting part of CrossfireX is actually being developed by Remedy.
- Square Enix EU: Great studios and great IPs from a company that is struggling to make profit. It just makes too much sense.
- Sumo Digital: Meh. I like the studio since it has developed many games that I like, like Sonic & All Stars Racing. But it has a closer bond to Sony since it has been handling the LittleBigPlanet franchise since Media Mocule started focusing on Dreams. Plus, it is working on a new game to be published by Focus Home next year.
- Valve: I don’t think I need to explain this one.
- Virtuos: It is a great support studio and that’s it. No need to have it under XGS.
- WB Games: This one is on my wishlist! AT&T was looking to sell WB games with a possible price tag of $4 billion earlier this year, but backed off. It has some amazing studios under its umbrella, including TT Games (LEGO games), NetherRealm Studios (Mortal Kombat, Injustice) and Rocksteady (Batman Arkham). The downside is that most of the IPs would not be part of the deal.
I might continue this later 
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I find Valve very interesting; I wonder how long Gabe will wait before he sells it, don’t know if he will let his son takeover since he is already running his own studio IIRC. Valves would be only be bought by really big player, for MS valve would give them a strong foothold in PC gaming, IPs and even esports. MS could use steam to offer cloud gaming like GeForce now does, so any game you own on steam could be played online (publisher allowing), this would allow MS to lock and expand players to the Xbox ecosystem.
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Microsoft + Valve probably wouldn’t pass regulatory approval
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Yeah it would no longer be about studios, it’s literally swallowing up the biggest pc distribution platform, functionally approaching a monopoly of sorts. No matter what people want to believe and have reservations about, steam = pc at this point. Microsoft buying that out would mean they own not just a majority of how games are distributed on pc, but also the entirety of Xbox and 1/3rd of the console space.
Yeah windows is already a monopoly there’s no way they’d ever approve them buying Valve.
I think it might. Depends how big Epic gets.
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Am I the only one who want Warner to buy IOI, and then, EA to buy Warner ?
I think IOI is a great fit for Warner if they do well with the James Bond IP so they can adding them to their internal team. After that, I think EA would be better than Microsoft for buying WB, it’s going to be really complicated for Microsoft to deal with the licence, I don’t think that what Microsoft want, do game with famous licence and not having the right to sell merch of this licence. EA is a third party publisher so they don’t care about merch’s money, they work with Star Wars even if they only sell games.
At the end, with the integration of EA Play in GPU, instead of having WB game day one in gamepass in MS buy them, we have it one year later if EA buy them, it’s still really good.
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I will once again say that Valve doesn’t make any sense to me, because it would cost a gargantuan sum of money, and the more gamepass succeeds, the less valuable Steam becomes.
Panic Button was mentioned. Panic Button already works very closely with Bethesda, not just for ports. They helped during develompent on Wolf YB and Doom Eternal, and were credited as such. They also did work with MS updating Forza Horizon for Series S/X.
Panic Button seems like something you could just buy up and merge into id software - they’re in the same city. Maintaining them independently is also possible but their last original game in 2017 apparently sucked so I don’t think they have much in the way of designers - they’re more of a technically minded team by virtue of how many ports and updates they’ve worked on.
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I think Panic Button with enough TLC and funding could become Microsoft’s Bluepoint. That said, I wasn’t too impressed with the FH4 port so hopefully they get a bit more time/money. Their work on the Switch is nothing short of impressive and they might be good at helping games make the most of Series S hardware while devs focus on Series X.
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EA Play will be more valuable than Game Pass if that happens.
Thoughts on unknown worlds entertainment makers of Subnautica? Subnautica did pretty well critically 87 MC and sales wise too (over 5 million) Currently says they have 161 devs and are working on unannounced projects. They are an independent studio too.
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I don’t think so, Xbox still have Bethesda + XGS game + lot of third party and great indies day one
But the value of EA Play will increase a lot, and this is nice because EA Play is include with GPU