Members of the Xbox team - and even Phil Spencer himself - have on several occasions said that they would like to buy a Japanese video game developer. So far, this hasn't happened and Microsoft seems to have slowed down the process of growing its family of Xbox Game Studios.
But according to renowned Microsoft insider Brad Sams, the company came really close to buying up Platinum Games last year. He revealed this on Twitter and wrote:
"Pretty sure last year Microsoft was looking to buy them, guess that deal fell apart or they decided to go another direction."
This is at least partly confirmed in a later response from another very trustworthy insider, Daniel Ahmad:
"They were looking for funding so were talking to a lot of companies last year, yeh."
That means games like Bayonetta, Nier, Mad World and Vanquish all would have been Xbox Game Studios titles in the future. Why the potential fell through is unknown, and today Platinum Games has secured an investment from Chinese giant Tencent, which will supposedly lead to better opportunities to continue developing new IPs for multiple platforms.
Do you think Platinum Games would have been a good fit for Microsoft?