MS said they spending $1 billion investing in games and new game studios , I wonder what the time frame is on that amount?
Well, I don't know exactly how its all going to happen but there seems to be several new studios of unknown size/intentions: LXP, Platform Next, [Fun]ction Studios, SOTA and Decisive Games (new RTS studio) - now, whether some of these get merged or not I have no idea really, but they all seem to exist in some sort for some purpose. Things seem to be progressing at LXP somewhat as I've seen a few Linkedin changes in recent months, the others are a lot more elusive. I doubt they opened 5 new studios for AAA games but either way it seems like a decent level of investment
Team Dakota have opened a new incubation team to start a new project, Twisted Pixel have been hiring a lot recently, Rare have an incubation team too (I'm unsure if its new or not, it might be), Lionhead are hiring a lot and working on new IP in their incubation team
Twisted Pixel and Rare both looking for people with UE4 and Unity experience, Rare are almost certainly working on more than one game and also avatars but I'm unsure if TP just want people with experience on the modern popular engines or if there is more than one things going on over there, there is kind of a hint that they might be.
Lift London are also working on console in some capacity and PressPlay have several unannounced original IP in development iirc.
Not to mention Black Tusk are hiring for Gears, 343i are working on a "new product line" of Halo games or something (probably Halo Wars 2 tbh)
Everything seems to be expanding in time