Activision is not worth 70 billion.. MS would benefit from the sale being blocked at this point. The bid was made in the pandemic when every company thougth that consumers would continue to spend on anything.
This is a very poor conclusion. And a very poorly informed one at that. value of any company is determined by its share price multiplied by the number of shares available at any time.
In Feb.2021, it was worth around $80B.
In Nov. 2021,it was worth $47B.
In Jan 17.2022... one d before Microsoft announced it was buying Activision, it had a market valuation of $63B.
So I don't ready know what you are saying. If the argument is that MS should never have tried to buy them, that's a different matter, but MS bid at market value.
if you think that was some spur-of-the-moment decision based on consumer spending, then you have no idea how companies operate. The decision to buy Activision probably started months to a year before it was announced or a bid was made. And allotments for that kinda spending were made at the very least at the start of that fiscal year, which for MS would have been around 9 months before the announcement.
And to dispute what you are saying evermore, you gotta understand that the real focus and clear direction of Xbox is not about hardware anymore, but about subscriptions and gamepass. MS is more interested in having 100M subs to gamepass than 80M of them having an Xbox console. They would be just as happy if 80M of those subs were on PC and 20M were on Xbox. And to a company shifting its focus to a sub-service, $69B is chicken change for them in the grand scheme of things.
Could this be why Hi-Fi Rush was "soft launched"? Is just showed up on Game Pass, etc. without any fan fare. Cuts to marketting?
One has nothing to do with the other. Companies stealth-drop stuff the time. Its a form of marketing called user-generated marketing (its actually a thing). And for it to be most effective, you kinda are best off stealth-dropping it.
Some poster here told me they have unlimited money in their WarChest
How much a company has in its war chest has absolutely nothing to do with hires or fires.
Because they have a war chest doesn't mean they would hold onto assets that they consider are now redundant. If they did that, that's just bad business.