The price would be extremely high, but there’s no doubt the value is also extremely high. Epic was valued at 28.7 billion based on it’s last round of funding in 2021. That doesn’t mean necessarily that’s the price it would sell for, but we would definitely expect “tens of billions”. My opinion here is that this purchase would do very little to strengthen gamepass and xbox.
Epic, like Mojang, is a company whose games are available everywhere because they’re so popular as to be ubiquitous. Fortnite is a huge moneymaker but you wouldn’t just remove it from competing platforms suddenly. Nor is Epic likely to launch some big new single player game soon. They own other companies… who are also basically on permanent support work for their games (like Rocket League). Or make unsuccessful mobile games. The legacy IP is a big whatever, Unreal and UT are not big by any stretch. Gears was already sold to MS.
The epic game store is a money-loser, the technology it’s based on is nothing special. This is one of those odd things that increases valuation because it has revenue, yet it has no clear path based on it’s existing trajectory into profitability.
UE4 is extremely, extremely valuable, because you’d be collecting rent from basically half the industry. IIt’s also got various middleware solutions bundled in, several of which are individually quite valuable. Microsoft presumably has a favorable bulk licensing agreement with Epic but scrapping that by buying them is probably barely a blip on the accounting sheet.
Even if it only cost 25 billion, it’s a tall order. Part of the investor valuation is that it’s promising the world with it’s “metaverse” talk about how it’s going to change everything (it won’t) and claiming that within a few years EGS will be a profitable part of it’s business (it also won’t). But there is still an extremely valuable company here.
I’m thinking that it would be more of a “Microsoft buy” than an “Xbox buy” even if it would sit under Xbox structurally. It’s a strategic asset to potentially own, but it’s not really going to be helping get GP subscribers or strengthen the Xbox platform, it can’t on any short term basis without hurting it’s core business strengths. You can’t take Fortnite and Rocket League away from competitors, you can’t play favorites and withhold cutting edge engine developments from other game companies to keep it yourself.
Historically, the head of Xbox and CEO of Microsoft have not explicitly stated over multiple interviews that they are definitely not finished acquiring studios, so it makes sense for people to speculate which might be next.
I was thinking exactly on the line of being “Microsoft Acquisition” than “Xbox Acquisition” because with Unreal 4 they would have a chunk of the engine licensing business, not just for games, but for many 3D aplications such as ArchViz and showcases. EGS IMO would be scrapped.
I’d like to think some of the previous speculation had at least some merit and justifications that could be argued… but lately, there’s definitely been a turn.
There is only so much to be discussed until an acquisition is announced again, and the discussions about likely candidates have been done to death. I personally think it’s more fun to speculate about unlikely acquisitions than to discuss if Nordisk is willing to sell their gaming companies again.
Yeah, old Tim would fall on sword before that, lol.
Anyway, this hot take situation imo is partially on insiders, they really went overboard before E3, with mad speculations of 5 acquisitions and now fans are going wild.
Sega has been discussed for over a year I think. It is far less out there than stuff like Take Two or Epic, and at the were at least reasons people thought sega.
