Sony invests $250 million in Epic Games [2020-07-09]
- Thread starter chris1515
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Inuhanyou
Veteran
Is it not eyebrow raising for first party platform to have stake in an engine that most companies use? MS uses unreal engine the most. Is it not unethical for sony to do something like this?
I hate how the big players seems to increasingly be trying to monopolize what is essentially third party stuff. Dont they have enough of their own resources. Its like they are in a race to see how devoid of life they can make the gaming industry
I hate how the big players seems to increasingly be trying to monopolize what is essentially third party stuff. Dont they have enough of their own resources. Its like they are in a race to see how devoid of life they can make the gaming industry
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Deleted member 7537
Guest
What?¡ Sony is not buying Epic is just getting a sit at the table (board). And why would Sony stop Epic from licensing UE? The more money Epic earns the more valuable their investment.
I think this is just in line with Sony's moving to a platform agnostic environment. Horizon, Death Stranding are the first Sony's published games of many to come to PC and other platforms. Epic not only has a engine that pretty much runs on anything but also a game store that is becoming the only real competition to Steam. It's a very smart move IMO.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/h...eceives-Strategic-Investment-Sony-Corporation
edit: Just a small reminder. Sony had almost 10% of Square Enix until 2014. It didn't stop Square Enix from releasing their games on mobile, PC and consoles. It would be stupid for a shareholder to force the company they are invested in to make less money.
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Deleted member 7537
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Technically from the article it's Epic who was raising Equity. It's a typical method to grow a privately held company. The alternative would have been an IPO and it looks like Epic wanted to stay private, but still needed to grow significantly.
I'm more surprised MS and Nintendo didn't bother to take part in it, I was thinking they need Epic to grow as much as Sony does, but maybe not... Epic is much more than gaming (just start a new project in UE4 and look at the templates categories). Sony have multiple divisions that have business incentives to help Epic get the capital they asked for, and if more and more of their business is depending on Epic, a minority share is a good protection against any potential takeover attempt, which possibly require a super-majority shareholder vote. I believe private shareholder agreements can contain such stipulations. But I'm not a whatever-that-job-is.
I'm more surprised MS and Nintendo didn't bother to take part in it, I was thinking they need Epic to grow as much as Sony does, but maybe not... Epic is much more than gaming (just start a new project in UE4 and look at the templates categories). Sony have multiple divisions that have business incentives to help Epic get the capital they asked for, and if more and more of their business is depending on Epic, a minority share is a good protection against any potential takeover attempt, which possibly require a super-majority shareholder vote. I believe private shareholder agreements can contain such stipulations. But I'm not a whatever-that-job-is.
Really interesting there. So now they are partially owned by Sony and Trencent ?
Wonder if this will cause MS to go to another engine
https://www.pcgamer.com/every-game-...ck,new era of free-to-play games as a service.
Wonder if this will cause MS to go to another engine
https://www.pcgamer.com/every-game-...ck,new era of free-to-play games as a service.
MS doesn't have an open chequebook for Epic or engines.
It's tangled up in gamepass at the moment and acquisitions like Mojang still take time to pay themselves off (given how much they paid).
I'm not sure what MS would benefit from owning some of Epic aside from just investment purposes.
My first thought about this is sony is seriously considering moving towards more content on pc. Many Sony games incoming to epic game store? Part of the cut epic store takes from all games goes to sony. Getting cut from non sony content could lessen the sting of not having psn store on pc. It would be great if sony started to support pc fully.
edit. If it's about movies and such then the trail starts here?
edit. If it's about movies and such then the trail starts here?
Epic is a direct competitor with the epic store.
Epic is now also owned partially by china (400m investment)
Epic is now partially owned by another competitor Sony
Could be a very bad place to be if Epic prioritize Epic store and Playstation over Xbox and windows store. Imagine if Unreal engine 5 hits and it doesn't have Xbox support or it skips features on xbox or implements features on PS5 over features on xbox. Its not a great position to be in
Won't happen.. That's not how the licensing works. You license the engine, and you can make whatever adjustments you want to it. UE5 source code is out there for all developers to modify (should you choose to).
There is likely 1 main branch of UE4 and soon to be UE5 that MS will keep in house and continually update. they just need to pay millions to Epic to ship titles on it. But there's nothing stopping MS from modifying the heck out of it for their own purposes.
Epic is in a win/win situation with their unreal engine. If one wants to use the engine but not epic store then pay licence fees for engine. If one uses unreal engine and epic store then you pay the cut for store but no unreal engine licence fee. No reason for epic to try to discourage anyone or any store to not use unreal engine. Epic gets their cut in all conditions. Except of course if there is less than 1M$ revenue in which case using engine is free but one likely still wants to use some kind of distribution mechanism that would take a cut.
If the engine does everything they want, why swap to something else? All the reasons for wanting to use UE still exist. It's not like Sony's investment is going to make Epic crap up their engine on some particular hardwares!
Yes you can make changes. But Epic also integrates changes from other developers and also develops the engine on their own
