Hey everyone, Daniel Floodworth here. I guess I'm heading up this thing.

Let me explain what we're doing. We've been kind of talking behind the scenes about trying to

react to some topics a bit quicker rather than just waiting for the weekly

podcast to happen. So this is impromptu. This is big news. Today Microsoft

announced that they are acquiring in the process of acquiring

Xenimax who owns Bethesda and all kinds of other studios and if you want to

catch up on it I'm going to summarize a little bit from

games industry.biz who I thought had a really quick breakdown of a lot of what this means.

So it's a 7.5 billion deal.

Oof. So many bees.

So many bees. It's going to expand. This one deal is going to expand the number of Microsoft

development studios from 15 to 23 they're getting eight studios in this

deal so it's basically a third of their entire development staff now.

2,300 employees.

This includes Bethesda, Ed Software,

Arcan, Machine Games that does Wolfenstein,

Tango Game Works that does Evil Within and GhostWire,

Zenimax Online, Alpha Dogg and Roundhouse Studios includes Prey, Rage, Doom,

Elder School, Star Field, like it's just craziness.

They're talking already about bringing these franchises to Game Pass and then, you know,

it's going to take a while for the deal to close and what we've seen from some of the past

Microsoft deals as well is that these things like they don't like cut off deals

...