Since all these 3rd party rumours started coming up I've been thinking how is it going so wrong.
It seems like the reality has set in over at Microsoft, the math isn't mathing and the purchase of Activision Blizzard has ironically put them in a spot where Xbox cannot be agile or competitive in the way Sony or Nintendo can.
The purchase of ABK brought their headcount to 21k people. Now reduced by 1.9k. 17,000 of those come from ABK and they run a operating cost of $5.4 billion every year. Add that to Xbox who were likely losing money every year, plus Bethesda who haven't had a hit since Fallout 4 and have halved their accessible userbase and are most certainly losing money and Xbox now have a $80 billion dollar deficit to account for
Suddenly those margins are looking razor thin to non existent. They made a loss last quarter and there is no guarantee future quarters will be looking any better with no COD releases or anything big on the near horizon
With higher operating costs every year for Xbox the level of risk has increased substantially, and the magnifying glass on the business gets much bigger from the rest of MS. They can't skate by anymore and not be profitable for MS, it is do or die time.
Even though ABK makes a profit they are on a shakey business model, relying mostly on one product to continually be successful. For all of Phil Spencer's bluster about Crash Bandicoot and Hexen reboots, there is simply no room for Activision to ever miss a year of COD or see a downward trend in sales
The nail in the coffin has been that Bethesda and ABK have not resulted in any hardware momentum at all, and subs have been flat for years. Nevermind their whole userbase having been trained out of buying software
Simply put you cannot sustain a headcount of ~21,000 people and release exclusives to a console that will be lucky to break 40 million and has abysmal software attach rates and then resets userbase every 5 years.
I'd hesitate to say you could do it even if you were Sony with 100 million systems sold. Which is probably why Sony hasn't actually been interested in buying a publisher. The only option for Xbox is to go multiplatform or lose everything they acquired when Satya says enough is enough
A funny side note to this is how Apple completely shattered Xboxs ambitions of a Gamepass/Store on the Apple Store in just the last week - leaving them with even less options
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