The thing that's confusing is that they own three pieces of kit that basically target the same markets. You could argue that Maya is more for film pipelines and Max is more for gaming and architectural viz...of course the lines become increasingly blurry but add softimage to the mix....aside from giving artists a choice of what software to use and Autodesk reaping the money from it why else would you offer several wares that do the same thing?

I like this line from one of their PDFs:

As well, it is hoped that the acquisition will broaden the appeal of Autodesk products into the hobbyist/game ‘modder’ segment.

I pretty much though max already had that area covered.