TheDarkTriforce said:
Yeah right, like The Last Guardian :D These posts are still all rumors and speculation, wait until Microsoft opens their wallet and make a big party with Respawn and then we will see ;)
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The amount of money Microsoft would have to pay would be exhorbitant at this point. The install base gap has grown so large that the formulaic sum needed to secure exclusivity would be astonishingly huge. For a game that will come to the XB1 either way. The expense would be enogh to develop several of their own AAA titles, which would be far more useful to them in terms of intelligent use of their resources. Basically it comes down to this :
(1)- Pay $XXX million dollars to buy Titanfall 2 exclusivity (to compensate the owners for the lost PS4 sales on a dramatically larger install base)
Result :
Titanfall 2 on Xbox One.
(2)- Pay $XXX million dollars to develop 4 AAA titles on Xbox One, that are by definition platform exclusive because they are wholly owned by Microsoft to begin with.
Result :
Titanfall 2 on Xbox One
AAA Game on Xbox One
Another AAA Game on Xbox One
Another AAA Game on Xbox One
Another AAA Game on Xbox One
Even a complete idiot could see that option 2 is better for Microsoft, better for Xbox One owners, and an immensely more intelligent use of resources.
However, Xbox One has been such a collossal failure in 2014 that it's doubtful that the division will get very much leeway moving forward. It's far more likely that we see a slow implosion of the brand as the finances don't make sense any more. The investors are not seeing a return on the promises and capital put forward on the effort. You have to have a sense of history and an understanding of business to understand what's at play here.
The reason the Xbox project exists was for Microsoft to get control of the living room entertainment in a wide sense in order to open the doors to huge new income potential for the company. The OG Xbox was never going to make money, but was seen as a necessary step to get into the game. It was a loss leader device through and through, and built a small but enthusastic fanbase due to high quality hardware and many unique titles, with a great understanding of online capabilities.
The Xbox 360 built on the OG Xbox, and was a bleeding-edge piece of hardware on release, sold at a fantastic price. They suffered a bit by rushing it so much to get ahead of the competition, resulting in some massive write-downs due to millions of RROD, but some of that was balanced by out-of-warranty owners having to re-buy the console to be able to play their libraries (this inflated the raw numbers to a certain extent, but doesn't contradict the fact that the 360 was an unqualified success in the US and UK). In the European continental markets they even managed to reach a certain level o relevance in Gen7.
The Xbox One was planned to be the culmination of everything. OG Xbox and 360 in totality had cost them MANY billions of dollars in the red (the final few years of 360 saw modest profits year on year, but not nearly enough to even balance out ONE of their worst years in losses (2005/2006 dropped them around 3.5 billion, and of course OG Xbox was another few billion in losses).
That plan was to finally achieve MASSIVE market penetration, to gain relevance in Europe and Asia, and to be the entertainment toll booth for everything you do in your living room. Watch a movie on netflix? Pay MS. Watch a TV app? Pay MS. Listen to a song? Pay MS. Browse with Internet Explorer and Bing? Pay MS. Play Single-Player games with required online? Pay MS. Do sports apps? Pay MS. Video message your firends/family? Pay MS.
Paywalls, paywalls, paywalls everywhere. On a console planned for 100M+ install base (with an eventual goal of 1 BILLION consoles, lol).
And don't forget these gems : They wanted to paywall the used games market so that traditional used games would cease to exist. You would have to buy them through a certified reseller with them getting a cut for the favor, and at a price not set by normal means, but arbitrarily decided by them. AND they wanted to have directed advertising based on what the Kinect saw and what their consumer data mining could figure out on you. It sees your Mountain Dew bottle so you get a big MOUNTAIN DEW CODE RED ad on your XBL dash next time you check it.
Combine all of this with a massive expense in marketing, buying Titanfall 1 exclusivity, buying tons of those licenses to GIVE AWAY with bundles, paying retailers the $50 that balanced out the $449 discounted units, paying to idle the manufacturing when the supply channel got overloaded, paying to warehouse excess inventory, taking back inventory from retailers like Target who had too many (these were re-skinned as Titanfall bundles), and we can't forget the swimming pools full of cash they spent on the worthless NFL license.
The amount of money they threw at XB1 already has been beyond the imagination. Much of it right now can only be guessed at, but you can be sure that it's absolutely staggering. No console is truly profitable for a long time anyway, because even if you sell each unit at a slightly higher than BoM cost, that doesn't take into account R&D, licensing, liabilities, marketing, defects, warranty replacements, legal expenses, etc. Xbox One conservatively will cost Microsoft around 3-4 billion in losses for 2013-2014 timeframe.
And what do they have to show for it? Europe is absolutely, irrevocably lost. Japan is hopeless and microscopic even if they break records and sell 2M (LOL), amd their previous strongholds in the US/UK have collapsed on them. 2014 sales have them down well over 3 to 1, with more recent months putting that on track for 4 to 1 behind, a rate that risks greater market inertia against them (modern gaming market is heavily influenced by social media and friends/family purchase decisions, leading players to choose the more popular unit so they can play together, or play the hyped/desired games that their friends are playing).
This isn't lost on the minds of those that hold the purse strings, trust me. They can see the writing on the wall, and there's a saying : "Don't throw good money after bad". They're not a charity, they're in it to make money, and if they see that it's a lost cause, they will roll back their expenditures on the failure as much as possible until pulling the plug. PR wise they'll toe the line until the end. "We're fully committed to Xbox", right until that day when "Thank you for supporting Xbox for all these years, please join us on Xbox Live for Windows, console access and servers will be maintained for an additional 12 months".
All you'll have to do is wait to watch the project cancellations slowly crop up, watch as certain regions start to lose distribution, watch layoffs and selloffs happen.
Titanfall 2 XBO exclusive? At this point you should wonder if Halo 5 will even be XBO exclusive. They may decide that they can make more money selling it on PC.