Crytek would IMO be a good purchase, even if they arent what they once were. The closest thing to a multipurpose engine that microsoft could realistically purchase is crytek with cryengine. id has also made a lot of investment into tooling for the idtech engine too, with a bunch of usability improvements (there was a game industry panel thing were they talked about this) I mainly think this because they opened a dedicated engine team for id in frankfurt, and it seems like a lot of investment to have a dedicated engine team for idtech, that serves a handful of internal clients. I half think zenimax was working this way on its own, intending to release a commercial engine offering eventually. Idtech is a multipurpose engine at heart (or atleast it was when zenimax acquired id), so with some investment it would likely be a very capable multipurpose engine. The con to this is that Amazon has a licensed version of Cryengine in Amazon Lumberyard, so if Amazon and Microsoft got into a game engine fight there wouldnt be much differentiation between them (tbf, thats probably not a concern right now)Д«ut the good news is they have already purchased a scalable multipurpose engine! with the zenimax purchase they got id who make/use idtech, in the 2000s they were building idtech to become what unreal engine is now, the only reason (according to some interviews I have seen) that unreal beat idtech is that the id team took too long getting the engine 'perfect' and coincided engine updates to games that id were releasing, by the time that they released a new version it was 1-2 years old (because they updated the engine, then used it to build the games they were shipping, to ensure that it was up to snuff, and then coincided the release of the engine with the game release). Cryengine would need some work to get it up to snuff but they could do it. Click to expand.the closest thing to a multipurpose engine that microsoft could realistically purchase is crytek with cryengine.

Why is the gamebryo engine so bad