25 million players is more than enough alone to make CoD active on pc/Xbox.
Many of these subbers won't be interested on CoD, there are people with very different tastes. Look at the PS userbase: only like around 10% or less of their montly active userbase buy CoD.
Bungie as a whole, around 200 Million as of 2021 in total revenue.
Sony 'vastly overpaid' with $3 billion buyout of Bungie, a developer that may make $200 million in revenues a year, analyst says.
www.tweaktown.com
But Bungie obviously didn't bring the Halo IP with them so that's irrelevant and no, Destiny isn't comparable to Skyrim alone, much less the combination of Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom. And you are still light years from a legit comparison to Activision Blizzard.
This $200M is not the Bungie revenue, it's a Michael Patcher estimation. And well, Patched makes several dumb assumptions in that interview and forgets the most important reasons on why Sony bout Bungie and why are valued like that.
And even if the $200M would be true, we should consider it's with a single 5 years old game and that games make most of that money on their first year and that the game made similar amount of money during several years. So we have to consider that this game pretty likely made over a billion dollars and that they are working on multiple games.
Sony didn't buy them for what Bungie made last year. They bought them because the two IPs that Bungie created redefined their genre (FPS) and the console multiplayer, are industry icons and made some billions across all their history, not only in a single year.
They (so now Sony) also owned one of these IPs, Destiny, which broke the record -and I think still has- of the fastest selling new IP in gaming history. Sony will help to expand this IP to movies/tv shows and mobile, and will use their knowledge, info, expertise and tech on MP and GaaS to their other teams. GaaS stuff is specially key because it's what dominates the market and Sony wasn't particularly successful and experienced on it and Bungie are one of the most successful players on the AAA area.
And well, in addition to be working on Destiny Bungie is also working on multiple new IPs, and plan to release "AT LEAST" one by 2025. Meaning that in a few years they may release a couple of new IPs which may have potential to be IPs of the same or even bigger level of Halo or Destiny. For Sony, even if they didn't own Halo, seeing that they created Halo gives confidence on believing on future Bungie new IPs.
It's hard to find another studio in console AAA games being that successful creating new IPs. The two they created are Halo and Destiny, there's no Zenimax or ABK studio with that level of new IP creation.
Destiny made like half a billion at launch, and if it makes like $200M per year during at least 5 years we're talking that a Destiny game make over $1.5B (not counting revenue from movies, merchandising and similar). So with a couple of games of that size Sony would have got the money of the acquisition back in revenue (not in profit, which would be the one counting for a real recoup) so their pricing isn't that crazy.
Specially when compared to the ABK acquisition, because the revenue of a couple CoD games (or any other ABK franchise) don't make $70B. Even if ABK keeps all their games on PS and Nintendo and don't include any on them on GP day one, they'd take way longer to recoup the investment than Sony will with the Bungie one. And we have to consider that many future ABK games will be day one on GP and may potentially go console exclusive, drastically reducing the revenue and profit they currently generate.
So if someone overpaid for an acquisition, it isn't the Bungie one. And well, I think that the $200M/year of one 5 years old game vs $500M/year of all (a gazillion) Zenimax games including new AAA ones is a great comparision to get a bit of context but I think that $500M is also wrong since I'd bet it should be way higher.