I’m not sure what indies FeiEX is referring to but I’ll put my energy out there for Moon. It wouldn’t be the first time Xbox scooped up a developer that is in the middle of making a game with Private Division.
I think you mean to say Xbox has timed its recent acquisitions, excluding Bethesda, for big shows like E3 and X0. Outside of Xbox, the rest of MS have acquisitions that aren’t tied to any big event.
Didn’t Phil mention that he wants to move acquisition announcements out of shows like E3?
Well know this took quite the turn.
Any thoughts on what this could be?
Ahhh old book sword. Love that game.
I know you’re probably long gone but I have a question…
When you mean indie, do you mean like independent studio that could still be considered AAA/AA
Or do you mean
INDIE indie, like Replaced/Scorn level?
They have the most first-party studios compared to their closest competitors. They have fixed the image problem of having a small first-party. I don’t think they need to time things with big shows any more.
Gears for breakfast
I think this is the most recent comment we had from Spencer about this (IGN June 30 interview, starting about 28 mins ish)
So approximately 6 weeks from being confident the deal was going to be signed to the official announcement. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for fussing around with announcement windows, and I’m not clear at what point they actually made a letter of intent or had a signature from the Zenimax side (this is not public as far as my research is showing). The implication of his comment however is that the signing from Zenimax (on some kind of preliminary agreement, or perhaps the final thing) did take place between those two dates, some point between early August and Sep 20.
This intuitively makes sense to me, and even before this comment I strongly doubted they held things back for any meaningful amount of time, because as a major acquisition that requires regulatory approval and is of massive strategic importance for the company, any delay is self defeating and trying to keep it secret as long as possible just increases the likelyhood of a leak after the deal has been signed and submitted to relevant authorities. If they could have announced it 3 weeks earlier, I am confident they would have.
Even the motive of getting the announcement done by preorder date for XSX feels a little weak for me. This was already 6 months into the covid gaming boom, and their main competitor already sold out on their preorders a week earlier. It’s not clear to me that there was any need to announce it specifically prior Series X/S preorders which everyone knew was also going to sell out very quickly even before the announcement. If the Zeni deal got announced in, say, Late August or early September I think the impact would have been identical. The choice of that day as opposed to one day earlier or later, sure, I could imagine them deciding to relocate it on that scale, but not a span of weeks or months.
Why do I get the feeling you are trolling everyone? 
Needs more Cowbell to be taken seriously…
I for one am looking forward to whatever (if any) acquisitions are coming soon, so that the speculation and riddles/rumors can take a rest for a bit…
Oh they will never end
You really should read the statements I’ve made (backed by sources from Japanese government documents and M&A firms) when it comes to Japan’s allowance of foreign investments/acquisitions. Similarly, @pg2g is correct in the assessment that people throw around the anti-trust argument far too liberally, with no understanding of what the restrictions actually entail, especially in regard’s to Microsoft’s own history with US Congress on the matter.
I guess the indie devs would make sense if that’s why Charla was congratulating someone. I can’t really see supergiant being one though. They have to be riding high financially right now. On the other hand Hades probably inflated their value. They put out 3 games last gen so they are pretty efficient and I’d like to see what that team is capable of with first party money. Transistor is awesome. Is there a contractual reason why it never came to Xbox?
No contractual reason, I believe they said it was the game engine.
Yeah, if you’re trying to use it as a podcast microphone, sure
As a snack, it’s delicious
Which Avalanche? WB or Nordisk?