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Machiavellian on 25 September 2020
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Mr Puggsly said:
drkohler said:

What makes you think "more people" is "more enough" to offset the $7.5B + the running costs for all the new people/real estate?

There seem to be too many people thinking "MS buys studios - MS gets more gamers" is a proven concept. But is it, really? For me, I have the nagging feeling that, once again, MS had to bail out the XBox group.

Well what we know for certain is MS buying more studios creates more hyped about their 1st party line up. It will get more people using their platforms; Xbox, Windows Store, Cloud and of course Gamepass.

I don't feel MS had bail out Xbox per se, things have been going well before the purchase of Zenimax. Their games are starting to get more critical acclaim, their new studios are working on lots of new content, Gamepass is apparently doing well enough to brag about, they've been finding great success in recent PC releases and people are hyped about next gen. Things were looking good and then they threw in Zenimax on top of that. I think it shows MS is happy enough with Xbox that they want to do more to help it thrive.

Things are certainly looking much better now than say 2013. Yet they aren't done, they are still considering more studio purchases which will bolster their offerings.

I totally agree that this was no bail out for MS gaming studio or the Xbox brand instead you can see that there were moves with the promotion of Spencer that shows that MS was going in a different direction and their focus had advanced beyond the console war.  If you look at how things had changed for MS when they fired Mat and put Spencer in charged.  Next there is a shakeup and Spencer get promoted and now only report directly to Sat.  You look at his moves and we see this huge purchase and it becomes obvious that Spencer sold Sat on something way bigger than Xbox and probably also sold him on the competition and where they need to position themselves to move the company forward.  As someone already stated, gamepass one of the gateway drugs MS has to also sell you all their other services, things have moved where gaming is a platform situation for MS.  Getting EA pass into gamepass is also another big move, I wonder if they tried to get UBI on as well or do something like what Amazon is doing but Amazon beat them to the point.  I see more along these lines as well between MS and Amazon because you do not have to purchase a publisher to get their content on your service.