second biggest investment Epic has made. along with Quixel. i assume epic aims to deliver the ultimate game developing experience. Cubic Motion's tools have been valued at a high amount for a long time.

it took me a while to look up the company but yeah, almost all of the best performance capturing in PS4/Xbox games comes from the same studio and tools. including DMC5, RE2 Remake, and RE3 Remake. Epic has just secured major dominance in game development tech.

Cubic will be free with Epics Game Engine like all other softwares they've acquired. Hellblade used Unreal Engine. Other companies will still be able to license the software for their games.

Epic already provides the most widely used and most versatile engine on the market. This is smart business for them. Now their engine will come with industry-leading mo-cap tools built-in.

Epic was probably already going to win over the next gen regardless of these acquisitions.

In any case, them acquiring these tool makers doesn't mean that they're restricting their use to the Unreal Engine. They may use these tools to help leverage their game engine, as it's an added value, or maybe they'll have it as an additional license within the game engine itself. If the former, then that's really good for smaller studios, because it means it's cheaper. If it's the latter, then it won't be any different than what's available to those smaller studios now.

This is good news.

With Cubic motion and 3lateral, Epic have stated that they intend on making digital human creation much easier. Currently, it's expensive and hard to have realistic characters that are well animated.

When this happens, it will be free, and even indie devs will have a much easier time making this stuff, and it might even be integrated into UE. This is great news for digital human creation. One of the biggest barriers in game dev will be cut down significantly. Epic doesn't have a great rep for EGS, but we know for a fact that they care a LOT about the game dev industry. They've already done so much on the dev side.

Those big studios can always do high quality stuff. Besides, I'm sure they can still license the technology here. I doubt they'll just stop providing those services.

Would it matter if you license it through Epic, or if you license it through the company that they just brought? What would be the difference to the developer? If it's like a lot of other of Epic's high end tools, chances are, they won't restrict it to the Unreal Engine.

Will they ever make games again though?

Its not like other companies do facial animation. This one is just a leader in the tech.

The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.

Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.

15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.

Let me be clear. This is sarcasm