Sony invests $250m in Epic Games to acquire a minority stake

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PotentHerbs said:

shikamaru317 said:

Best case scenario, the company that makes the Engine that so many of your studios use is acting as a PR mouthpiece for your closest competitor, which is something we've already been seeing since the PS5 Unreal demo, with Tim Sweeney doing multiple interviews praising PS5 while barely acknowledging Xbox Series' existence. 

Worst case scenario, Sony continues buying up Epic stock and uses their larger sway as a shareholder in a far more underhand way to attack Microsoft. Maybe not blocking Microsoft off from using Unreal entirely, but maybe attempting to get priority Unreal engine updates for their own studios, while Xbox studios have to wait longer to get those updates. 

I doubt Sony is underhanded enough to try something like that to attack Xbox, but you never know, business can get pretty cutthroat at times. In the unlikely event that Sony were to try something like that, it's better to have the majority of your studios on other engines, rather than the majority on Unreal. 

Honestly, that just seems like a bunch of fear mongering. 

Epic is not the only third party developer heaping praise on the PS5. Industry legend John Carmack, among other third party developers, have praised the SSD setup for the PS5. At this point in time, MS has bigger issues with the Xbox brand, than a lack of PR praise from a third party publisher. Also, you do realize Tencent has about a 48% stake in Epic as well?

Sony getting the UE5 engine optimized for the PS5 hardware doesn't mean it will be gimped for Xbox. It just makes it easier for third party developers, who use the UE5 engine, to more easily take advantage of the PS5 architecture. 

Can’t say that now. When just the demo hit there was plausible deniability. The Q&A praised the PS5 tech (which is fine) however everything was done to avoid acknowledging the Series X, only saying “UE5 will work amazing on all platforms”. The transcript is clear as day a bit one sided, and now we know why. 

It was a huge PR boost for PS only when it should have benefited both equally, arguably Xbox more so because they have numerous high profile games being developed with it in mind.

The fact that only Sony got good PR from the demo reveal is a proven example that this meagre minority stake is allready paying off.