Fumanstu That would be an interesting question in the cases of both Sega and Bethesda - MS aren’t just buying a developer, they’re also buying a publisher. Which has contracts with various other developers obviously. Who does actually own the IPs there? Sega obviously own Sonic, but I’m going to assume they don’t own the rights to Football Manager or Total War, they just publish those games on behalf of the people who do.
Now, you assume the relationships between the two parties are fine - why wouldn’t they be - but are MS smart enough to keep their nose out of those relationships? Megacorporations tend to be full of people who like telling other people what to do. You can look at this two ways - if you’re CA you can say ‘wow, OK, we just got a pipeline to a whole bank vault full of cash’ or ’well, who will we’ll be talking to in six months?' But right now, they don’t know which it’s going to be - could even be both.
Here’s my considered view - the initial read is that MS just bought a lot of names we’e all heard of and that must be a good thing for them. And on initial read, fair enough. But the devil is in the detail and we simply don’t have the detail yet - there’s a lot of stuff in this that will take… maybe years to pan out?