Dude, you dont spend $70 Billion with expectations of making your money back faster. $70 Billion is the very antithesis of "quickly". You invest that kind of money for the long game. $70 Billion says, "we don't need Sony or Nintendo money". And I'm just stating the obvious on that last quote. The fact Microsoft paid that kind of money in CASH, means that money was just lying around not being used. Do you really believe Phil and Co need Sony at this point? $70 Billion says, "we aren't even thinking about Sony". You guys keep thinking that Microsoft is still conducting business the traditional way. Only Sony and Nintendo are still doing traditional business.
Microsoft just made a clear statement with this investment and Bethesda (not to mention the other devs under XGS) that they are changing the gaming landscape, entirely. And their doing it in a way that Sony and Nintendo cant touch -- that's not just financially. Not to mention they just spent over $100 billion in less than a year! Azure is a huge motivator behind these mega acquisitions. Subscription and cloud based gaming are the future. No other company out of the Big 3 can deliver that.
They are a corporation and not a charity, so obviously want to turn their investments into profit asap. They obviously want to recoup it but not today or tomorrow. Obviously a $80B investment isn't a short term bet, it's a long term bet specially when they put the new ones day one on a subscription.
MS already had a lot of money 20 years ago when they debuted with Xbox, but Sony ousold them every generation. To have money doesn't mean to outperform their competition. Now with ABK, MS Gaming still makes less revenue than Sony (and way less if they stop making games for them), still has less of the console and game subs has half of the userbase of the Sony ones.
To recoup that money yes, they need the Sony and Nintendo money. For that reason they kept all the previous games of these acquired companies on these platforms, kept updating them and releasing new dlcs and games for them. Plus in the case of Switch, a few ports. And this is why Spencer begged Sony and Nintendo to allow them to put GP on PS and Switch.
The clear statement that MS, AB and Spencer said even in the SEC filling is that they will keep them on PS, that they will continue supporting their existing communities on non PS platforms and that they won't remove from there and that the acquisition won't change previous AB plans.
Spencer said they want to keep CoD in PS and in the SEC filling even mentioned Minecraft as example: an IP where the main game has been updated on PS after acquisition and its next games (Minecraft Story Mode and Minecraft Dungeons) were released on PS after acquisition, and that will honor pending deals. They also did and made the same for Zenimax: PS got all the updates, dlc and games released after acquisition for the IPs that already were on PS before acquisition, plus also honored their deal with Deathloop and will do it with Ghostwire Tokyo.
They aren't changing the gaming landscape, this is only PR bullshit. They will be the 3rd public gaming company after Tencent and Sony in revenue, and won't be also market leaders on console, PC, mobile, game subs or VR. PS4 has around 120M and PS5 seems on track to outsell it. If CoD sells 20-30M and around half of that is on PS, then pretty likely each CoD gets only bought by less than 10% of the Sony userbase and only a portion of them would leave if exclusive, let's be generous and say slightly under 5% of the PS userbase.
They would steal 5% of the userbase of a competition that doubles them in userbase and is experiencing a big growth this year, generates more revenue and posts great profits. That means that with this growth, PS in a few years they would have compensated that lost 5%. They wouldn't have changed anything but have spent $70B in acquisitons and would have been keeping the money from the PS CoD on the table. And not the 30%, they would keep there the 70%.
So since they wouldn't change basically anything the gaming landscape with making CoD exclusive, they prefered to keep it on PS. Because they aren't changing it anyways but at least they get that money from the PS units so they will recoup their investment faster, and due to the $60/$70 on PS vs $15/month on GP pricing some will play it on MS platforms anyways (which doesn't mean they need to leave PS to do that, many players have both consoles or a PS and a PC).
Some games will now Xbox (sometimes timed?) console exclusives, mostly their new IPs, but other ones will remain on PS, mostly existing IPs there before acquisition. King will continue the same on mobile as it was but with a different owner. AB will continue the same on PC but selling less due to games included on GP.
Even on PC, Blizzard and CoD on GP could help them get more users vs the competition because dropping the entry price. But most of their main competitors on PC are F2P games with no entry price.
