How successful does Titanfall have to be for it not to be concidered a failed investment on Microsofts part?

How much hardware and software has to be sold ?

I'm not saying it was a bad investmest, what i'm saying is that with any investment you have to have a certain return on that investment in order for it to be a success or failure.

I didn't really get why they bought the rights to Titanfall 1 exclusivity when it was already a 1 year exclusive to begin with. It seems like not worth it to get that extra year in (before Titanfall 2). It will probably work out for them, but making new games, rather than paying to not have games appear on other consoles would've also been a good investment. I'm guessing they also want to buy the rights for the Titanfall series if the first game is a system selling hit.

It shouldn't be too difficult for it to at least "break even". EA probably valued the deal on the assumption the X1 would be dominating the US right now by a slimier ratio to the 360/PS3 (i don't think many were really expecting to find ourselves in January with 1:1 US sales).

Either way it's hard to give solid numbers since we don't know the cost of the deal.

The more millions it sells, the more brand association it will have to Xbox. So like Mass Effect or Oblivion, the future releases will favour the Xbox.

Then again i PS4 install base balloons then it kinda counters that :P

There probably just trying to get its name associated with xbox just like mass effect

We have no idea what they paid, so we have no idea if they will get value for there money.

If they paid $10 yes

If they paid $1 Billion no

Well the rumor was they paid EA $50 mil for the one year exlusive to Titanfall on the Xbox 1 so maybe triple that would be my guess.

Presuming thats just for exclusivity and no profit share, id expect they would at least want a 500k boost in hardware sales, $150M would of paid for alot of advertising otherwise.

If EA turn this into an annualised title then MS are gonna feel a bit stupid paying for more than a 1 year exclusivity deal, as no one will care about Titanfall, when Titanfall 2 is out.

I actually think a good job was done in balancing the angles. It's all about the scenarios that can be played out.

1) If all objectives achieved then great. It moves X1 consoles and sell a lot of copies across all platforms.

2) If Titanfall doesn't do much for the X1 there is still a 80m userbase on the x360 to fall back on to make some money.

3) Of course it can fail to achieve anything significant.

Pick one. I really can't although I favour the second option as the most likely outcome.

Aaaand another Titanfall thread... Well, seems it gets a lot of attention although so many users seem to dislike it or play it on PC... We will never truly know, though.