Just because a company is doing well doesn’t meant they won’t sell; often the opposite. The best moments to sell for the most amount is when you’re performing better than you think you can sustain, or when the markets are overvaluing companies in your industry. Gaming being hot right now is a perfect reason to sell, although arguable it might continue to grow exponentially and owners may want to see that out.
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They should act and acquire Hello Games and Asobo already. They can keep leveraging the tech their teams develop and both of these teams have already developed great tech and shown they’re very innovative. Great thing to have and be able to share amongst studios.
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MS won’t go for anymore publishers. They have no more need. As I’ve said before too much bloat and fat with all of them. Whoever they acquire next will be the devs they have a longstanding working relationship with
There are some, SE West and Koei make sense.
I think MS will just continue to partner with Asobo. There is a ten year contract in place already
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Yea actually good point. They may get CD and Eidios Montreal of Square
What if every developer or publisher were owned by either Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft?
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I can see the other side of that. The fat that belongs to publishers makes them their own entities and be able to manage their own studios independent of much over-sight from the Xbox gaming division. When expanding fast, Microsoft won’t have the capacity to offer a lot of over-sight. There may also be something to be learned from a publisher who has success in parts of the world where Microsoft has had no presence or success…like Japanese publishers. While I believe another Western publisher would be over-kill, if they could ever land a deal with a Japanese company, it could be huge in expanding their presence to the other half of the world. While Japan itself is not a critical market for consoles, it’s critical that Microsoft gain credibility with Japanese developers due to their importance worldwide. A publisher eliminates doubt of that commitment where as buying a small studio here or there doesn’t really change mindshare. Like the exec from Tecmo said, Microsoft is pushing there but Japanese studios are still skeptical of their long term commitment to them.
MS still could if it helps with their plans. I don’t take anything off the table as MS is in this growth phase and trying to cement themselves as the first party leader in gaming… As Phil has stated.
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I don’t think Microsoft will buy another publisher as a whole, but I could see them trying to acquire divisions of a publisher (Square Enix Europe and SEGA Europe, mainly).
If Microsoft’s way of thinking in regards to Asobo is “Nah, we don’t need to acquire them, we’ll just have a 10 year partnership with them”, Asobo will be acquired by Google or Amazon, it would be really dumb of Microsoft not to acquire Asobo.
They make games with AAA production values but at a very low budget, A Plague Tale: Innocence probably costed around just 10 million dollars.
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That’s an interesting point. Could they get Sega Europe separately? There’s some really good studios there. The thing about Sega though, much of their value is in their IPs and Atlus. Getting a portion of Sega without getting Sonic, Persona and Yakuza seems like it would be a huge miss. Then again, getting those other studios might not be that expensive. Maybe a comprehensive deal that includes Sega Europe and guarantees that future Sega Japan games release into Game Pass day 1.
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Hard to predict, I thought they were almost done with acquisitions before they announced Beth, haha.
There are smaller publishers they could consider.
Gearbox is probably on Take-Two’s shopping list because of their mutual interest in the Borderlands series, but Gearbox is technically a publisher (Godfall, We Happy Few, Risk of Rain 2, upcoming Homeworld 3). They own the IPs for Brothers in Arms, Borderlands (this is the big moneymaker), Duke Nukem and Homeworld. Unfortunately, their past BiA and Borderlands titles were published by Ubisoft and Take-Two, so you wouldn’t necessarily get those in the back catalog with a purchase. I would not expect Gearbox to be sold for less than 1 billion dollars.
Techland is a private company, although they are small both as a devleoper and a publisher. They published one of InXile’s games, Torments: Tides of Numenera, and internally they are known for their Call of Juarez and Dying Light games. Dying Light sold really damn well so that’s why people would mainly be interested in them. Dying Light 2 seems to have a rocky development, but as long as it’s given enough time it should still sell well (the first game did 10+ million).
Less likely but not completely impossible prospects:
Team 17 has a market cap of 1.5 billion USD (a bit hefty!) but it has a lot of smaller content, including family friendly stuff. They own Overcooked, Escapists, Worms, Lemmings, Alien Breed, and published Moving Out, the Yooka Laylee series, Golf With Your Friends, Blasphemous and much much more. The only way you’d buy them is if you planned to keep them around as a micropublishing label of course - otherwise they’d just licence them for GP. The main drawback here is there’s nothing “big big”, although they are a profitable company with lots of titles.
Paradox Interactive is a fairly large mid-tier publisher, and although I would be quite mad if they sold out to somebody, they are a theoretically possible target for making inroads into the PC space more. They already collaborate quite closely on getting games into GP including Crusader Kings 3 day one. They have many highly successful PC games in their catalog, and a few that are not-so-successful commercially (like Obsidian’s Tyranny). They own the World of Darkness IP and are publishing the upcoming Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. They’re also dipping their toes into mobile games including conversions of their mainline titles, although nothing is officially announced yet (Microsoft will presumably eventually want to have native android stuff eventually). Their console titles are limited, although they are trying to expand there (Stellaris was their first push).
Nacon, formerly BigBen Interactive (market cap 750 mil USD) has a lot of mid tier games under it’s belt and owns 4 development studios, including Cyanide (Styx franchise and upcoming Werewolf game, Call of Cthulhu 2018 etc) and Spiders (Greedfall). The main objection here would be that they also own a hardware accessory division, which makes PC and PS4 peripherals, which is not something most buyers would care about.
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Pretty sure 2K owns Borderlands.
Take 2 Publishes them, but Gearbox appears to own the IP, since they’re the ones dealing with e.g. movie licensing on the series, not Take 2 (although Zelnick is an EP as well as Randy). Tales from the Borderlands I believe was made under license from Gearbox, not under license from Take 2. Then there’s the tabletop game, which was announced by Gearbox but does not mention Take 2. And the Borderlands Trademark which is owned by Gearbox, not Take 2.
Text from The Hansome Collection store pages on the net:
From a Take 2 store page where it’s Merch for Borderlands:
While you could argue maybe one or two of these as being coincidental or not being enough to conclude, I think overall it is pretty ironclad that it’s GB that owns the IP.
Didn’t know Gearbox owns the Borderlands IP, that actually makes them way more valuable.
IO Interactive hs some kind of legal right to make and publish Hitman games on their own without Square Enix - even though Square Enix owns the IP - , if someone was to acquire IO, would could they use that right? Or would that need to be renegotiated? How would that work?
I agree with this take. It would be Double Helix all over again.
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There’s just no need to aquire Bungie in my eyes. All they really are is Destiny, and if MS bought them Destiny would remain multiplatform. That aquisition isn’t going to drive anyone to buy an Xbox or purchase Gamepass. At this point they have Destiny on the platform, and get a cut of it as well. Put the 2 billion into buying up studios like Asobo, Techland, Moon etc.
To me Bungie could be a possibility, especially in regards to Amazon and Google. If Amazon or Google manage to snatch Bungie, there is no guarantee that the franchise will stay on Game Pass for long. If MS buys Bungie, it is to secure Destiny and all future IP’s on Game Pass and Xcloud.
The fact people are saying Xbox won’t acquire another publisher when Satya Nadella himself said they’d be looking at buying another one in wake of Bethesda is kind of a head scratcher.
They’re exploring all of their options guys.
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Probably in the vein of Buying studios not whole bethesda sized purchases.
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