The rumour was that Microsoft was interested in Gearbox at first but they didn't want Randy, Lmao.

There's also the issue of Take-Two having publishing rights to Borderlands and first rights of refusal on the IP.

So yeah, Take-Two makes the most logical sense to just bring Gearbox in-house finally.

I think it's mostly that they need money quick to cope with the fallout of the 2 billion dollar Saudi Arabia deal falling through, restructuring and closing of studios like Volition and Campfire Cabal can only improve their financial situation in the long term, they still need cash in the short term. Embracer bought Gearbox for $1.3b, so they are likely hoping that they can get nearly that much back out of them in a sale I guess. Which is a big ask, Xbox might have been willing to buy Gearbox from them for $1b+, but they are locked into these ABK proceedings for another month or two and won't be willing to jeopardize them for Gearbox, and I'm not sure if anyone else would be willing to buy Gearbox from Embracer for $1b+, if Take-Two had really wanted them they would have outbid Embracer in the first place. I think they are going to end up selling Gearbox at a pretty substantial loss over the $1.3b they paid for them, any interested parties are going to smell blood in the water and know that Embracer is desperate for a sale, giving them significant negotiating power over Embracer, guessing like tops will be $800m, may be less than that.

Also it's worth noting that Gearbox's only truly big IP these days is Borderlands, and since 2K publishes that instead of Embracer, they would be the ones getting most of the money from it, not Embracer. I'm not really sure why Embracer bought them to start with knowing that their only big IP would stay locked to 2K, it always seemed like a bad investment to me. Sure they have other active IP like Homeworld, and dormant IP like Brothers in Arms and Duke Nukem, but Homeworld is relatively niche and those dormant IP have little hope of a successful revival. $1.3b for Gearbox always seemed like a bad deal for Embracer to me. 

Would acquiring Gearbox really have any effect on the Activision/Blizzard deal? Everyone involved in the legal proceedings is already aware that Xbox has acquired development companies in the past and will continue to do so in the future, as do the other gaming companies.

I think that LinkedIn can be reasonably accurate, but it can also be very inaccurate at times. It's still an interesting data point in my view. 

On the Sony side, Naughty Dog only has ~400 developers, and yet their LinkedIn page is almost 900; with a lot of people claiming to be dog walkers. There's a lot of deleted accounts that are still listed. The really famous ones seem to be inflated, and the ones that people don't know about seem to have fewer than they should. 

If the same is true for Microsoft's studios, I would expect that World's Edge is a big undercount, Alpha Dog and Initiative might be undercounts. Mojang is probably an overcount. Most of the rest are probably reasonably accurate, within 25 or 50 people. 

Yeah, it's a grain of salt information, more like a "round about" amount for some studios but completely wrong for others.

The Coalition I'm pretty sure is closer to 300 than 200. Tango isn't accurate at all because Linkedin isn't big in Japan, they use another thing but I forgot what the site is called, Tango on Linkedin is like 18 (Lol) but in actual fact they're around 100ish employees. World's Edge confirmed in an interview about two years ago to be around 30-40.

If I could find official sources of headcounts for each studio then I would use those in my OP instead

Lol I realise there isn't sound in space but still it's pretty cool if you fire a missile on an asteroid there is a sound delay after the moment of impact.

It's really frustrating how every single change you make to your ship stores shit in the cargo hold, it eventually respawns but that just means I have a bunch of junk in my cargo that I now need to sell and it puts me off making any changes to my ship at all, Lol.

Forza Motorsport Preview

Forza Motorsport 5, 6 and 7 weren’t bad games at all, but progress definitely began to to feel stale. For the next-gen reboot of Forza Motorsport, Turn 10 Studios took their time to boost things forward, and fortunately that really shows in a preview version I played for the past week. I also want to highlight very early on that Forza Motorsport ships with some of the most impressive and varied accessibility as well as game options I’ve seen in many years. Your entire Forza Motorsport experience is highly customizable.

Gameplay

When you’ll put your hands on the new wheel (or controller) in Forza Motorsport, one of the first things you’ll notice are the overhauled car/driving physics. It’s difficult to describe the feel for physics in words, but cars bring a lot more weight on the track, the “floaty“ feeling of past Forza Motorsport games is gone. I’d say it still feels like Forza while also feeling more complex. I’ve played every Forza Motorsport title in the franchise, and this is without any doubt the biggest evolution to the feel of the game so far. Forza Motorsport feels great to play. It’s the foundation of everything here.

The new gameplay core experience is defined by several pillars:

• New and more complex physics simulation allowing for more varied racing
• Overhauled AI, which finally makes racing in singleplayer actually fun and competitive
• Racing strategy, including pit stops, tire compound, fuel management & more. Pit stops are semi-animated, which is fine but can be improved on, and I think a flag/safety car system or something would make the racing experience even more believable.
• Forza Race Regulations, a new system based on machine learning, which I tested in multiple situations. I came away impressed with the accuracy of regulation results, although the real challenge for the system will be in multiplayer.
• Progression. As you race, you’ll constantly earn experience and level up your car. The system feels incredibly rewarding during gameplay, giving you a sense of progression throughout the race. You use that earned experience to upgrade your car, which is a nice change from previous Forza games, where you did this with credits.

Visuals

I played Forza Motorsport on Xbox Series X. As expected, Turn 10’s latest is a beautiful experience. The environments are the clear highlight. The tracks and all the details around them just look fantastic, the new lighting system in connection with photogrammetry does an impressive job here. All tracks in the game support full day-and-night cycle lighting, all tracks support weather, all tracks have 3D props, vegetation, details, spectators, all tracks are built from the ground up and have the same high quality. Fantasy tracks naturally look even better due to artists having more freedom. The cost for this are less tracks than in Forza Motorsport 7; Turn 10 took a “quality over quantity“ approach here. More tracks will come post-launch, as Forza Motorsport is basically a platform for months and years to come.

To confirm the “elephant in the room“: yes, Forza Motorsport does indeed support raytracing at 60 FPS during gameplay. Forza Motorsport will launch with three visual modes to choose from:

• PERFORMANCE | Prioritize 60 frames per second on-track performance at 4K resolution.
• PERFORMANCE RAY TRACING | Enable on-track ray tracing at 60 frames per second with variable resolution. I’m not Digital Foundry, so I can not pixel count the average rendering resolution. To my eyes, the resolution still looks still quite high, dynamically changing likely somewhere in the above 1440P range.
• VISUALS | Maximize 4K visual quality on-track with ray tracing at 30 frames per second.

Comparing these directly, I felt like the differences weren’t that extreme, although car reflections definitely do look more realistic, more natural with ray tracing enabled, and cars as a result blend better with the environment. I didn’t experience any framer drops in either of these modes, performance felt rock solid, just like with previous Forza games.

One more little detail: to my surprise, night races now feature dynamic shadows. Your car lights, other car lights, even track lights cast dynamic shadows, and it makes for a cool racing experience at night time.

Sound

For Forza Motorsport, you better put some quality headphones on, because the game totally deserves it. Turn 10 finally invested a lot in a better sound experience, and you can hear it the moment you start the game with a new, punchy Turn 10 Studios animation. Engines do sound more punchy, details like hitting the curbs or tyre wear feel much more refined and believable. I could only test a few cars in the preview here, so I do hope the quality of these preview cars can be translated to the rest of the game.
Settings & Accessibility

Forza Motorsport launches with one of the most impressive settings & accessibility options catalogue I’ve seen in recent years. I’m just a small guy on X, I do hope the larger outlets will give the studio credit here. Just a phenomenal job by the team where you can really adapt the whole experience to fit to your needs, from gameplay to multiple difficulty settings, from HUD & camera to detailed sound segmentation. from completely customisable controls to solutions for blind people and so, so much more. Controls not included, Forza Motorsport features about 150 different menu items to change the game how you want to play it. Forza Motorsport adapts to you, not the other way around. Bravo, Turn 10!

Verdict

After 6 years, Turn 10 Studios is back. And I loved what I played of Forza Motorsport so far. A few questions remain though. The quality of the netcode and Forza Race Regulations will make or break the competitive multiplayer side of things; other games in the genre have failed in these areas as well. Will the available singleplayer cups at launch offer enough variety? And given Forza Motorsport is now a live platform for quite some time to come, how large will future content updates be and how frequent will these be delivered to the game? After this preview, I do know one thing for sure though: Turn 10 Studios is striving for quality with Forza Motorsport; you can feel it when racing, you can see it when taking a moment to enjoy the visuals, you can hear it when the car engines roar through the night.

*Thank you to Xbox & Turn 10 for allowing me to preview Forza Motorsport at home!
**Screenshots taken on Xbox Series X | Performance Mode.