Ever since it was bought out by Microsoft in 2018, Obsidian Entertainment has become one of the Xbox publisher’s key first party studios. Now, it turns out Microsoft wasn’t the only company looking to acquire the Fallout: New Vegas developer.
While attending the EGX convention in the United Kingdom, which took pace last week, GamesIndustry.biz interviewed Obsidian Entertainment founder and CEO Feargus Urquhart to talk about the Microsoft acquisition and his experience working with publishers. During the conversation, Urquhart mentions how Obsidian was approached by another company prior to Microsoft.
He doesn’t name the company in question, only saying that the suggestion for acquisition was posited to him while having lunch with one of the main people at the publisher. Apparently, this publisher was struggling to hire new employees to work on its own game and wanted to acquire Obsidian with the intention of moving all of Obsidian’s staff onto this project.
Obviously, Obsidian rejected the offer, with Urquhart adding some advice for what studios should consider if/when they’re being bought out. Urquhart believes that if a studio is going to be acquired by another publisher, then it needs to be a cultural fit; that they must be the kind of people one can imagine sitting down and having a beer with.
Studio acquisitions appear to have ramped up considerably over the years. Microsoft has openly stated that it wishes to acquire more first-party studios to make exclusive Xbox games. Aside from Obsidian, it’s obtained Playground Games, Ninja Theory, and all of Zenimax’s studios, which includes Bethesda and Arkane, which are working on Starfield and Redfall respectively.
As for Sony, it too has been making some notable acquisitions in only the last few months. In June, it bought Housemarque following the success of its PlayStation 5 exclusive Returnal, followed by Firesprite and, more recently, Bluepoint Games, the studio responsible for the Demon’s Souls remake. Despite it being best known for remasters and remakes of beloved titles, Bluepoint’s next project will instead be wholly original, although details on that are incredibly scarce.
Going back to Obsidian, it’s incredibly busy at the moment. Currently, it’s still updating co-op survival game Grounded, but it also has two major RPGS in development. The first of them is Avowed, a fantasy RPG announced in 2020. The second is a sequel to The Outer Worlds, which was announced at this year’s E3. Considering both games only have CGI trailers, it’s safe to assume that both are ages away from coming out.