Halo franchise returning to PC as Halo Online Free-to-Play game

[Arkaign]

They could make it work, but it would needlessly divide the PC gaming community, and almost certainly lose money by taking that path.

Let's say that by going with Steam, they would hit 800M revenue quarterly at some benchmark time, and worked out a deal where the fees were set at ~20%. That's 640M sales revenue. Now let's say that by avoiding Steam and that absolutely massive audience, they lose 33% of actual sales due to people not being willing to go through an additional route to buy their games, their CC is already linked with steam, they have a backlog, they don't see it, whatever. That 800M then becomes 528M.

So basically they have to ask themselves two questions :

1- Are they so proud that they'd be willing to lose money in order to avoid partnering with a company that is already responsible for greatly expanding and maintaining PC gaming (and by extension : tens of millions of PC users using and upgrading Windows installations over the years)?

2- If they would make more money by getting XX% of their sales via Steam, would they be happier than 100% of sales for less total income on their own, such as GFWL.

Honestly there's very little incentive to try to reinvent the wheel after the fact YET AGAIN, when this is the perfect opportunity to just walk in and start raking cash in.

Think about the MS M.O. for the past decade :

"Ohh iPod is making $$, let's make the Zune!"

"Ohh iPhone is making $$, let's make a smartphone series!"

"Ohh iPad is making $$, let's make a tablet!!"

Notice a similarity in all of these things? Trying to break into a marketplace that already has a solid victor (or two). Now for the above examples, they had no choice really : it was either try to make a device to gain entry to the market, or not to try at all. All of the above attempts of Microsofts have either ended in abject failure, or relegated them to bit-player status in the market at large, with by any respectable accounts only losses to show in the total scheme of things when factoring in various write-downs, R&D, marketing, etc.

Now they come to that same crossroads : an established market with tons of money being made.

Reinvent the wheel and risk it all against a titanic opponent? (terrible plan)

or simply take advantage of an open door to billions of dollars? (wonderful plan)