Thoughts on snowcastle games? They are small but are the developers of earthlock. Kind of fits in the rpg niche
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I have never heard of them but earthlock looks great, I dont see xbox buying before publishing a title from them, but still thats a good opinion
I still hope that xbox will do the same as 2018 and buy several developers like compulsion
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Agreed, after abk i think getting 5 or 6 developers would be the way to go
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Out of those four Sega offers the most. But I’d be fine if MS buys them all too.
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I mean, per my chaotic strategy, SEGA would lead to two of these down the road anyway. 
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And the third one aswell, once sega helps to expand xbox in japan, I am sure that level 5 will be interested in the platform
Also I have a question which maybe you guys can help since you know a whole more than I do, buying epic games would be impossible for xbox? Just asking because I saw some people here saying that it could become a monopoly under microsoft
The difficulty with Epic Games is that they are the last ‘big’ private publisher. Their last valuation put them over 31 Billion so they are around the size of an EA.
Being a private company they could argue for a higher price than whatever their stock premium would be (if they were public). Plus as Tencent own half of Epic Games it will cause further issues just to attempt acquiring them.
With all of this said if/when the ABK deal goes through it will then be difficult to explain to regulators that owning Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys wouldn’t give them an unfair advantage IMO.
Then you have to also factor in that the Epic Games Store is now the 2nd or 3rd biggest PC storefront and Unreal Engine is one of the biggest game engines available. Even if they can get away with explaining the games I personally think they will have difficulty with the storefront and Unreal Engine.
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Epic is a bit if an interesting propostion - as far as a games developer goes they are fully focused on f2p live service titles. From a game pass standpoint they wouldn’t really bring anything new to the platform - though perhaps they could offer fortnite bonuses to draw people in.
The main advantage would be their infrastructure built around Fortnite (they have a whole research and development structure build around the game with companies specialising in all sorts of stuff - like I think I saw one company they had acquired was specialised in research for developing products for a younger audience) and more importantly Unreal Engine.
Having Unreal engine as a first party tool would be pretty huge - The Coalition already works with other studios to help them utilise UE5 imagine the benefit of having Epic under the same roof to be able to more directly work with first party developers.
This is where I THINK (as someone who is not an expert) they would be most likely to run into trouble. Regulators tend to look at much more specific markets than just gaming as a whole and a quick google search suggests roughly 50% of current gen games are being developed on Unreal Engine. This kind of thing being bought might cause some concern to regulators, but on the other hand if Microsoft were to buy Epic I think it’d be unlikely they’d take Unreal away from anyone. So if that was a problem perhaps putting that in writing might be enough.
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If Xbox is swinging big again after ABK, then I am expecting EA or Take 2. With the length of time theyve apent acquiring ABK and Bethesda though, Im expecting them to first go out and get some independent studios that are targetted to grow XGS and Bethesda in areas that theyve outlined.
Targets like Double 11 and Certain Affinity could immediately follow the ABK acquisition.
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Xbox would not (and should not) be allowed to buy another one of the top publishers after the Activision Blizzard deal is closed.
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“Should not be allowed” is based off an emotional stance and not one that is based on what the reality of the market would be even after another big publisher.
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So what is the market like with Activision and EA off of the table? Sounds like a disaster to me. I want MS to succeed, but we still want a competitive market.
With T2 or EA under MS the market would still be competitive lol.
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Still huge and dominated by mobile and Tencent? 
Granted I don’t see either EA or T2 happening anyway. No reason for Microsoft to go after them.
I am not so sure about. They had plenty of time before ABK deal was even in the cards and we only know that they were in talks with Bungie. If they wanted to acquire those studios, they would have done that long time ago.
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I don’t consider the size of the mobile market a pass to buy up the non mobile market.
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It would be thouroughly onesided. Even if they kept all the sports games multiplatform, gamepass would be the way. Theres no stopping Sony and Nintendo buying publishers and pushing services to compete.
But Microsoft knows they won’t…thats why their competitors are Amazon and Google. They have the moxie to subsidise these investment and already have huge subscriber bases.
But you should. Because it is no different from arguing that COD is a monopoly in FPS market (I remember one guy on Youtube in the comments was arguinng that we should consider western and japanese games as different markets).
Gaming market is a gaming market. Even if they have different mediums, gaming is market is 200b market at this point.
Granted I don’t see Microsoft going after EA at all. I wish it was acquired by Amazon for example just for lulz.
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I’m with you on this.
While obviously there will always be publishers coming and going for various reasons, I feel like grabbing T2 or EA anytime soon is absolute overkill and would be heavily scrutinized by regulators.
Now, obviously I’m no M&A expert, but i feel like MS would have a much better chance going for smaller publishers in regions they don’t have as much of a presence in.
Not to mention (I believe it’s the FTC that has this power) can still sue years after a deal closes if they feel a deal has manipulated the market too much. That’s something MS is and should be wary of. Just because a deal crosses the finish line doesn’t mean MS can’t be in trouble for it years later.
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If you exclude the mobile market then both Take 2 and EA at only like 20 billion dollar companies. Mobile is a huge reason that both would be targets.
Assuming that 1 of those 2 was acquired by Microsoft, there aee still tona of publishers in the industry and a relatively low barrier to entry for new companies.