Why people like you cannot understand that every person that buys PS is person which will not buy XBox, pay for GamePass or xCloud or buy anything in their store from which they get 30%? Fifa alone gives EA $1 bilion in microtransactions. That's more than $400 milion for company on whose console people are playing. There is way more to gain than money from few milion games sold on PS5.
That's interesting way of saying that Sony fanboys are toxic.
I say it because I've been a pro in the business since the 80's and am a grown adult who understands financials.
Let me spell this out for you:
On a personal level I have zero stake in this. I don't like Bethesda's product and have never bought one of their titles. There is no "platform warrior" angle from me.
MS expenditure is all about GamePass. If they wanted to shift units they wouldn't be basically bundling their product day and date with that pre-existing service. Its not like its the totality of their offering, there will be millions of people already invested with months or years worth of pre-paid subs who will get to enjoy Bethesda's titles at no added cost to them or INCOME TO MS.
Stop and think about it. This is not a zero-sum game where you get a 1:1 conversion of buyers interested in Starfield, Elder Scrolls etc. turning into GamePass subscribers because many of them will be paying for it already.
Now consider what this means to Bethesda's bottom line as a unit. We're talking about multi-year products that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce; how's that going to work out when their income gets reduced to copies sold on PC and Xbox OUTSIDE OF GAMEPASS?
The numbers don't work. Yes, a huge corporation like MS can afford to subsidize a few loss-leaders in order to support the future health and growth of their service, but they can't afford to stock the entire offering with product like that.
In fact, the logical approach is to load such titles with MTX and other post-sale transactions. At which point restricting availability to only certain designated platforms becomes an even bigger net loss in revenue over time.
The bottom line is that the goal is to grow GamePass subscriber base. And the bigger that subscriber base gets the more it eats into revenues that would otherwise be generated from standard physical and digital retail because the overlap in users increases. This puts what would be otherwise huge-selling IP into a difficult position, especially within a vertically integrated corporate stack where every unit needs to pull its weight elsewise risks getting its funding slashed by the board.
What you fail to grasp is that any corporate entity willing to spend billions on acquisitions to spur growth, is going to be equally prone to consolidate and/or divest itself of units in order to maintain profitability. If GamePass succeeds, but Bethesda as a unit ends up losing money hand-over-fist they aren't going to let that stand.