Microsoft Might Be Forced To Purchase Epic Games!

[Reasonable]

jarrod said:

matt247 said:
unlikely. EA/Activision are most likely to buy them. Epic makes a lot of money off of the unreal engine, so id MS bought them then they would lose a lot of potential money because they wouldn't want the engine to run on other systems and and developers would have to license a two different engines if they wanted to be multiplatformer or go with another engine. Epic will still have a strong relationship with Microsoft, just look at Valve; MS gave Left 4 Dead 2 a codename even when EA was the publisher.

EA owning it would kill UE3 entirely, just like what happened with Renderware after the Criterion buyout.  I think it'd be the same with Activision honestly, no one would license it due to the ownership and it'd die.

The best bet for UE3 would be if another (non-gaming) large media or technology company bought Epic.

Yah, that's the point I was making earlier.  Epic's middlware engine business puts a totally different slant on any purchase.

It'd be funny if someone like Bethesda bought them, after id they'd be sitting on arguably two of the three (valve being the other) key engine developers from PC.  I doubt they'd buy them as this would simply given them two essentially competing engines, but I agree with you it would be better if a neutral tech company bought them vs EA, Activision, MS, Sony, etc.