In an Interview with Phil Spencer by Kotaku, several interesting topics were discussed. One of those was the bethesda acquisition which happened last month. 

Stephen Totilo asked Phil:

“Is it possible to recoup a $7.5 billion investment if you don’t sell Elder Scrolls VI on the PlayStation?” I asked.

“Yes,” Spencer quickly replied.

Then he paused.

“I don’t want to be flip about that,” he added. “This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that. Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games. But I’ll also say in the model—I’m just answering directly the question that you had—when I think about where people are going to be playing and the number of devices that we had, and we have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base, I don’t have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us. Whatever that means.”

Phil shared his expectations of how the console launch will go:

“I think we’ll sell every unit of both of them that we can deliver,” he said, referring to this first holiday season. Microsoft isn’t releasing estimates of how many units they’ll ship of either device this year, but he expects them to go fast. “I think demand is just going to outstrip supply of pre-orders. For us and PlayStation, I think that the manufacturing supply chain is going to dictate [market] share more than anything else.”

And then?

“I think, over the generation, our expectation would be that price really matters and that you would see the Series S sell more,” Spencer told me.

A link to the rest of the article.

https://kotaku.com/xbox-boss-phil-spencer-on-series-x-launch-halo-infinit-1845392984

“I don’t want to be flip about that,” he added. “This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that. Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games."

He won't be taking any games away from players. The Sony player base will just play those games on their gaming PC's. Adding 120 million Sony player base now to the Xbox ecosystem should be very profitable for them. They will recoup that 7.5 billion very quickly.

“Is it possible to recoup a $7.5 billion investment if you don’t sell Elder Scrolls VI on the PlayStation?” I asked.
“Yes,” Spencer quickly replied.


Its gonna take awhile to recoupe those 7,5$ bn USD, if your cutting out part of sales potential.

I realized you edited.  I will remove my responses out of courtesy.

Is there some easy way to get a idea of how much profits the company makes?
My first thought was I must have made a mistake or something, because it seems way to low.

Could be a case of me googleing the wrong thing? or misunderstanding the results or trusting a random googleing to provide easy to understand numbers.

I think you are underestimating how large (what is being referred to as the Bethesda acquisition) it actually was. 

If MSFT was serious about restricting games, then they should have started with Minecraft.

I know bethesda is just part of Zenimax Online.... the parent company or whatever.

However again if you google "zenimax online revenue" the 1st results are:

"ZeniMax Online Studios's estimated annual revenue is currently $81.4M per year."

I guess if your planning like 20+ years down the line, you might eventually reoupe the investment.

KEKW thats ESO

I believe they will going forward.  By the time they had acquired Mojang for 2.5 billion, Minecraft had already been released on PS4 consoles.  Minecraft dungeons was not part of the original acquisition, it wasn't even a thing yet.  Releasing Minecraft dungeons multi-plat took advantage of an already existing consumer base for its product.  There is no PS5 player base yet and so I think Microsoft will have some decisions to make going forward.