Microsoft has been on a monopoly spree again lately with purchasing Danger, an attempt at Yahoo, rumors of HTC, and now Epic. Just another thing people don't like about the empire.

Odd that Gamepro ignores the current publishing agreement already underway with Midway games that has been going on for quite some time and which shows investment by Midway into the development of the UT3 engine which is a massively licensed cash cow letting epic sit and do pretty much whatever they want at this point.

Epic seems to not be in a hurry to go anywhere at all. GoW hardly constitutes them going in-house given the amount of developers from other publishing houses that have released exclusives on the 360. If GoW makes them joined at the hip then they're practically the child of Sony given the tech demo for UT3 was based on the PS3 hardware. Thought should be a pre-req for the authors at gamepro before they throw down things like this.

This would be tragic! These companies need to stay independent and continue developing games on their own terms.

Epic will go downhill if this happened, i mean Bungie were a good developer until Microsoft took over and then they were forced to make Halo after Halo, its no wonder they left. If Microsoft do this then Epic are going to be a very poor developer within 3 years, and we will have GoW 4 by then and UT6 heh... But seriously bad bad move if this holds true, would be better to be on the PS3 to be honest, not because it is currently my format of choice but i like how Sony manages its first party talent, it doesn't force them to do anything and supports them 100%, its no coincidence that Epic are working with Sony on and PS3 exclusive, since Sony are good helpers.