Who's to say MS couldn't license out the Unreal engine for their own evil purposes?

I think buying Epic games would be a win-win.

Nintendo should buy them for no other reason than to just fuck with everybody.

Hey if they can they will, they want Epic to make Gears of War a huge franchise like they did with Bungie and Halo.

I think they should just buy Square Enix and EA, what else are they going to do with their money

This.

Buy them now MS!

Shit buy Valve while your at it.

I'm surprised MS hasn't got either Epic or Valve yet.

M$ lacks much in the way of first party support, when compared to Sony and Nintendo, so letting Epic go would be a huge blow...I'm not sure EA has the money to buy Epic tho. I think M$ needs to look at buying them, or at the very least, signing an ironclad publishing deal with them for like 10 years are so...that way, they don't have to worry about, putting up billboards. Valve has the best of both worlds with steam...and using EA as a tool.

Eh, buying a company is not going to do anything except drain their pockets. There are plenty of good, under-supported developers out there who are willing to take their current positions. It's a liability to own a software company, and it doesn't take away games from the competition really.

It's a good idea because they are a struggling developer, but a better idea would be to actually help them out with exclusivity deals and spare devs or even a lower fee for game sales or something.

They should probably split the company up - the tech guys making a business licensing off their engine, then the developers are free to be snatched up by one the powerhouse publishers. Whoever picks them up it will be regarded as a coup given their success.

The big question is how much and who has the money right now? Bioware/Pandemic sold for $800 million. I don't think EA/Activision are all that successful currently and M$ just made 7 billion in 3 months.

MS have bigger fish to fry.