After Yahoo, Microsoft To Buy Out Epic ?!
In News.
With an attempt to buy Yahoo seemingly thwarted, is Microsoft looking at yet another acquisition in Epic Games? That’s the word from GamePro editor Travis Moses, who writes in the latest issue of the mag that “Microsoft will buy Epic Epic and Microsoft are practically joined at the hip already. Microsoft’s game publisher division paid Epic millios of dollars to develop the award-winning “Gears of War” in November of 2006 for the Xbox 360 platform.
Gears won multiple awards and sold several million copies. The online version of the game remains among the most popular on the Xbox Live network.
The two companies will be exhibiting at the GDC side-by-side. And speculation is quite strong that Epic may announce a Gears sequel.
However, Microsoft would be interested in acquiring more than game development in an Epic buy, according to Moses. Epic also licenses its Unreal game engine to developers around the world who produce titles for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and other platforms as well as PCs.
“Epic Games is one of the few highly regarded indie developers … partly for their games but mostly for their Unreal engine technology,” Moses wrote. “Microsoft has lots of cash on hand, and in buying Epic, could collect royalty rights for Unreal technology across other platforms.
Games for $1 billion this summer.”
While we fully expect someone from Microsoft to utter the words Gears of War II at GDC this week, unless determined to prevent an Unreal Tournament III for Xbox 360 cockblock, we’re a bit hesitant about buy-out talk. The company does have a keynote planned this week, which we’ll be liveblogging (*gulp*). Ready the F5 key for news.
Source: WRAL
