I think the answer ultimately is yes. They obviously don't want to do this but I think they will have to in order to highest optimized most cost effective games for iPad, iPhone, Mac. I think that they will also have to do the same thing on the Apple TV side of the business and acquire a studio. Metro Exodus IP and 4A games would be a good entity to acquire because it would have synergies on all Apple platforms. They could make a show for Apple TV and bring the games to iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro.
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If Apple wants to be successful in gaming will they have to acquire a decent sized gaming studio?
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Maybe, but devs won't port their games anyway. Most Unity games don't come to macOS, even though the engine supports the platform.
Same goes for Vulkan support, added to the fact that there are very few Vulkan games. Even if the platform supported D3D, I don't think that would change much.
What dictates the decision to port is the potential user base, user base, and also... user base.
There are too few macOS users interested in gaming. There may be more iPhone users, but the iPhone is not well suited for AAA games. It doesn't have the storage (except for the very top model) and on screen controls are sh*t.
I don't see that changing any time soon.
So yeah, if Apple wanted many more games on their platform, they'd have to either become a porting house or acquire a major game studio.
Which they won't. Their strategy is to shout from the rooftops about how great their SoCs are, but hardly any developer listens.
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Mobile gaming - they're incredibly successful.
I'm not so sure 4A games would be a good purchase for apple. The studio is a one hit wonder, that is they only have one successful IP. Spending hundreds of millions on a studio that just publishes one game will not move the needle for macos gaming. They also have a post-apocolyptic show, that has some similarities to the metro, i.e., the silo. As for iphone/ipad, I'm unsure AAA games are well suited for phones and tablet.
There was some rumors a few months back that they were selling the studio but it was either just that a rumor or the deai fell through. You had mentioned the turmoil in Ukraine, and that might a big reason why buying that studio may not be a great idea. It has largely moved to Malta AFAIK, but there still may be some offices in Kyiv
You can use them to make other games. And to the iPhone iPad point it would be suitable if it was built from the ground up using metal 4 new rendering pipeline that is designed to overcome cpu and gpu bottlenecks. Apple needs a development team to use all of metal 4 and metal fix features to the limit. Metal 4 x even has a feature when you can put machine learning models into the render pipeline and zero current games take advantage of that.
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Yeah I saw a blurb about the Metro Series IP falling under Plion (sub of Embracer) even though 4A "belongs" to Embracer "proper". Which makes it seem like if they sold 4A they would be sans IP. Which probably wouldn't make them a good buy.
But then that means going on a hiring spree, and sort of defeats the purpose of buying a studio. you want a ready-made team to produce the games for you. apple could just go and hire folks to produce games themselves at that point