I feel like they don't even own the trilogy of Epic developed games with how 2, 3 and Judgement have never actually been re-released outside of backwards compatibility. The source code for those games is probably lost in some Epic server replaced with Fortnite server space by now
Thought M$ bought the rights to the whole franchise?
It could be a Crash Bandicoot situation, where Sony/Naughty Dog owns the source code and rights of 1-3 and CTR but Universal kept the franchise. I remember that with the remake of the original trilogy, Vicarious Visions had to ask Naughty Dog to get the files of the games to get a proper 1:1 recreation of the games. Don't quote me on that as I can't remember where I read that.
Both overpaid for what they get. What did Sony get that’s not Destiny and Marathon? M$ gets COD and a whole lot of legacy IPs. But they’ll never make back the billions they spent on Activision
Microsoft will probably get close to $90 billion in profit for 2024. But the Activision deal has lost them an additional $2 billion so far on top of the acquisition costs already which were $75 billion. Microsoft's non-gaming portfolio is essentially subsidizing their gaming moves for the next decade or beyond. But if they get out of the Xbox business and start losing more ground to Valve on PCs then they will never come close to making back their overall gaming related losses that they've accumulated over the last decade. Especially all of these acquisitions of giant companies.
MS with Activision. Activision has more IPs than just Call of Duty, yet MS is drip-feeding Call of Duty in hopes it would inflate Game Pass sales. Game Pass is not a bad proposition on paper; MS just made it more expensive for the SAME experience to recoup that massive Activision acquisition. In hindsight, this further proves the theory that MS will leave the console industry and be third party like Sega did.
Sadly, MS is mostly insulated from suffering any negative financial consequences. Their many source of income nowadays is Azure and the rest of their cloud services, they've most let their other divisions rot away.
They might just decide to kill off their gaming division entirely. The whole thing is been mismanaged from top to bottom - devs are being given too much freedom and constantly miss the mark, the quality of the games they release is poor, Halo was left to rot in the hands of incompetents that were quite open about their dislike of the franchise.
Most likely they will send out an update for the xbox consoles to make them an offline product.
Or, alternatively, leave a skeleton crew in place for a few years as to keep the service running at reduced capacity, releasing occasional software updates as necessary.
Now I doubt we're going to see Microsoft admit defeat just yet, but if they were to just fold everything I would imagine they would license out the IPs they have just like how Disney licenses out Star Wars to certain publishers
The best scenario would be one last update to let users install Windows.
that's microsoft as a whole, for that comparison to work you'd have to include stuff like life insurance etc. for sony.
only if you want all your games sold via microsoft's goypass when they own 90%+ of the market, at which point they can ask whatever price they want.
