I think they'll wait and see if ABK/Bethesda acquisitions will turn things around before doing anything like that. Revenue from Xbox consoles is more profitable than selling through other platforms.
Money talks sweetheart, Sea of Thieves is raking in cash, imagine thinking that making a product pulling in millions of $$$ with millions of subs is not flourishing, please do everyone a favor and never ever run a business.
SoT is not raking in "millions of $$$ with millions of subs". You think those 20 million players are concurrent-cumulative? They aren't. The game usually has daily concurrent averages of 15K on Steam, chances are many of that 15K are the same players on for several hours, and play daily. The 20 million figure MS gave were for total login counts, but they don't differentiate between unique players, or the same person logging in multiple times over the course of a day, a week, a month etc.
This is a big reason why MAU is a generally garbage metric unless actual financial numbers are provided. Something Sony does with PS+ subscriptions. Something Microsoft does not, with any of their games, or even Game Pass.
As someone who played and loved Conker and Banjo sure, but bottom line what matters is the bottom line and any studio would trade away "nostalgic goodwill" for a golden goose GAAS title like Sea of Thieves.
You are really overestimating the financial revenue power of Sea of Thieves, here.
I think Starfield will do better than most people seem to give it credit for and Bethesda will be fine.
Sure, the game will do decently well. I think it could do 3-4 million in its launch month. That's great, actually, when compared to most games on the market.
But some people are delusional thinking it's going to pull off Skyrim numbers. It can't get anywhere near that without PlayStation and Nintendo. With the game also being in Game Pass, means even less in terms of B2P sales. It's why I don't see it going much beyond 14 million in lifetime sales, and even that might depend on some lucky happenstances outside of Microsoft's control.
That said, yeah, Bethesda will be just fine.