2.5billion may sound a lot, but consider how little tax these companies pay and that is small change. This obsidian thing will likely be a tax write off, so they won't need to pay tax anwhere next year.

A good question. If Microsoft wants to jump into RPG making it could buy a studio that's experienced in this kind of games. It's the only reason I can think of. The IP's held by Obsidian are not profitable enough for a giant such as Microsoft.
Yes, I mentioned that was a mistake on my side.

There goes my joke... drowned amidst my own ignorance.

Jokes aside, I also wonder why MS would buy Obsidian now that most of its talent is gone, but they also bought Rare so there's that. Maybe they want to secure a new IP that Obsidian might have been working on until today.

This could be the case. Obsidian is working on a secret project based on the Unreal Engine. We don't know anything about it, but presumably it's something huge. Two years ago they released this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nyRhvna3c4. I thought this might be a clue, but now I'm not convinced. License for Star Wars games belongs to EA. So if it's a game in the SW universe then EA would be the publisher. Whether Microsoft profits something from it in case of acquisition of Obsidian is debatable.

The folks who made Obsidian as great as it was (most importantly Chris Avellone) are long gone. If Microsoft really wants to plant their flag on that sinking ship, I say they're welcome to it. Not sure why they would, to be honest. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson with Rare, but if not, what do I care?

Playstation has been killing it with single player role playing games. Xbox has been getting destroyed. It's a knee jerk reaction.

Sadly, Microsoft doesn't understand the reasons why single player RPGs are doing so well on Playstation and will probably whip Obsidian to make a single player always online action role playing game and get confused when whatever next big exclusive Playstation has up it's sleeve smashes them out the park....again.

Yes, many great developers left Obsidian. But is PoE2 bad? Many consider it a lot better than the first one, despite the fact that Avellone wasn't working on it. I don't see that this ship is sinking.

I wonder if the Xbox even has the audience for this genre. MS have been pushing online shooters, sports games and racing games so hard, you'd think that anyone who cares about quality single player RPGs/Action-Adventures either plays on PC or already bought a PS4 ( or both ).

Pretty much. The interesting thing about all this is two of the xboxes greatest successes in its history have been KOTOR and Mass Effect. They were on a good thing, then lost their minds driving the xbone and windows 8 to the glory of the cloud....and well...here we are bathing in schadenfreude as they attempt to correct.

The reviews and average ratings seem pretty solidly in favour of the first. I've not played either Pillars game (been meaning to, but never really got around to it), so I can neither agree nor disagree with that assessment, but it does certainly seem that for whatever reason, their more recent releases just aren't hitting the same notes as their earlier works.

From their point of view as a business it makes sense: Online shooters and other multiplayer games are comparatively cheap to produce and offer them plentiful opportunities to generate extra income and gather customer data, even years after the original release. Open world single player games, on the other hand, are expensive and lack most of these "advantages". That's why so many of the big publishers have shifted their focus towards multiplayer games... Did I say games? I meant lootchest lotteries.

"Live services".

"A tax on the stupid"

That's not entirely fair. Some people have legitimate gambling addictions and literally can't help themselves. The psychological manipulation involved is intense, and I don't blame all the people taken in by it. THat's not to say a lot of them just aren't stupid, but a large portion of them were destined to fail through no fault of their own.