Microsoft Might Be Forced To Purchase Epic Games!

[WilliamWatts]

Reasonable said:
MS is an obvious choice, but Epic have also got themselves contractually supplying their engine to a whole host of developers, many of them producing multi-platform games, which I suspect would horribly complicate such a purchase with regards to on-going support for those clients.

Also, Activision or EA would surely be interested, and overall represent even more obvious purchasers with the ability to more easily accommodate Epic's middleware business as well as leverage the fact that Unreal is a multiplatform engine.

This does illustrate the continuing trend for consolidation and the absorption of smaller companies into large global businesses.

Would that be more complicated than say an EA game developer trying to access an Activision owned Epic for say Unreal Engine 4? Im not really sure if any publisher has what it takes to own the company as they all tend to have in-house engines anyway whilst a console manufacturer has the conflict where Epic would not gain early access to console hardware to develop the engine for that architecture.