Sometimes life is darn funny, you hear something and nobody believes you. For instance when we heard that Microsoft were planning to show off a Halo game at the Tokyo Game Show this year, everyone laughed and joked. A few weeks later in an interview with Edge Online, a Microsoft rep actually confirmed the existence of a Halo game being showcased at Tokyo Game Show.
We also heard (“heard” being the key word) Electronic Arts were planning to buy Epic not much for their franchises but to fund development for the next iteration of the Unreal Engine.
Mark Rein, the big guy at Epic believes however, “Rubbish” is the only set of syntagms that can come out of his mouth. We would serve to remind you that Take Two also issued a similar statement when the rumors floated that Electronic Arts were attempting to buy the company a couple of months ago.
The fact still remains whether Electronic Arts can offer the right price, here’s a small excerpt from Mark Rein commenting on a Microsoft buyout:
“I have not seen the actual GamePro article but if they’re going to make predictions about us selling Epic we would prefer if they started at $2 billion. Because we don’t want anyone thinking that we’re cheap.”
Well Electronic Arts very recently offered the exact same amount ($2 billion) to Take Two before the company went ahead to reject it. We would not be surprised if Epic Games goes without too much of a struggle in the future with Unreal 4.0 at stake. This is still subject to amount of speculation, but given the rapid closure/merger of AAA developers in the recent past, a situation such as this should not come as a surprise.