Which has absolutely not been the case with the majority of Activision/Blizzard titles you are complaining about you big fucking dummy.
Sure, I am not saying it will happen tomorrow or anything but assuming that things will be profitable even as good will erodes is unrealistic. I might be wrong and fans stick by ABK even if all their products turn into slop though we cannot predict the future. I do know, however, that ABK is a woke company and that rarely implies continued success.
The "bad since this game" stuff you are citing was all mid/late 360 gen. 15 or more years ago. In that time the company's stock has quintupled in value and sales have only gone up. If it takes fifteen years for "bad word of mouth" to catch up to them then there actually isn't any. You're just fucking wrong.
Activision makes more money on 'horse armor' style DLC for Diablo Immortal and Diablo IV than likely sales of all copies of Warcraft III Reforged and Diablo II Resurrected combined. They are a massive money making machine for whales and pay pigs dumping tremendous amounts of cash on cosmetic items and micro-transactions. To the point where traditional game releases are not longer even part of their normal business models. Their annual mobile games revenue likely eclipses lifetime console sales for the entire history of their company.
CoD and some of the Blizz shit get to have their cake and eat it too by doing both full game sales and MTX, but yes, they are heading away from it with stuff like Warzone and are all in on MTX.
Microsoft has been planning on shuttering the Xbox brand for over a year now. Major Nelson's last act before quitting Microsoft was contacting various journalists and social media moderators about them using the Xbox brand name less and getting ready to roll out "Windows Games" and "Microsoft Game Pass" as the new brands for gaming. Microsoft is not interested in saving Xbox at all and are actively working to end the brand and associated services probably within this generation.
Microsoft could dump the console market entirely, leaving these manufacturers high and dry like they did companies that made Windows Phones.
They (theoretically, if they sell them) make more money selling the games than the consoles at this point.
But that makes no sense. Selling games has always been how consoles made money (loss leaders). Oversaturating the market just hurts everyone but especialy Microsoft. Grandmas would be confused as to which console the kids want and game devs will have to keep all the models in mind when making games which is unrealistic. Not to mention the fact that the stores will not know how to stock them. They have the same issues with just two models. Imagine three or more. And keep in mind that the third parties that make the console will have to take a cut of the profits. If every single model does not sell a lot, the whole thing crumbles.
The regular PS5 and all Switch models are sold at a profit. Only the digital PS5 is sold at a minor loss. Somehow the Xbox models are massive money losers according to Microsoft. The Xbox Series S is supposedly sold at over a $200 loss per console. It makes no sense to sell any console at a loss. SONY took a beating on PS3 and PS4 units that was not sustainable and they had to increase PS5 prices to stabilize their console business. Xbox 360 units were sold at a profit with the later versions of the console.
Literally every game since the original Black Ops and the original MWIII has sold fewer than the one before it, and those games were the peak of the series sales wise. Life to date consumer spending and total series lifetime unit sales, while still technically increasing, have slowed down massively in recent years as game sales have slowed. App revenue from Call of Duty mobile is down. The concurrent player numbers on Steam for the HQ launcher, which acts as the launcher and hub for all of the recent games, including Warzone, are massively down, and have been sharply decreasing since 2022. Twitch views for Warzone are massively down, and numbers of hours watched are also massively down. The point to all of this is that the series has largely plateaued and is stagnating in terms of both sales and engagement. MWIII was castigated for its gameplay and horrible single player mode, and the entire game felt like a poorly made after thought. The series is treading water, mostly coasting on its past meteoric success. You will be hard pressed to find a long time fan who believes the series is in a good place or heading in a good direction.
Normies didn't eat up Overwatch 2, or Warcraft III reforged, or any of the last Diablo games, with Diablo's player base dwindling down massively, a death nail for a live service.
Does that account for pre-production and post-production? If so, I suppose you could say selling at a loss to increase adoption rates works only if adoption rates actually increase.
