| > They're spending up the wazoo on Xbox 2002 - Rare - $375 million 2005 - Lionhead - ??? 2014 - Mojang - $4 billion 2014 - Gears of War - ??? 2018 - Compulsion - ??? 2018 - inXile - ??? 2018 - Obsidian - ??? 2018 - Ninja Theory - ??? 2018 - Playground - ??? 2018 - Undead Labs - ??? Sept 2020 - Zenimax / Bethesda - $7.5 billion January 2022 - Activision Blizzard - $69 billion This is just acquisitions, so it isn't exhaustive as it doesn't include first party costs and development expenditure, or Halo expenses / 343, as it assumes they essentially paid nothing to Bungie (or their costs were negative) after that split happened. Microsoft don't publish extensive separate numbers for the Xbox division, but their Q1 2022 filing nonetheless states $3.6 billion - which is up 8%. They've also been open that they still, 21 years later, make at most break-even on their hardware sales. That's a lot of expenditure relative to income. To state the utterly obvious: they're not getting nothing for that money, so it's not like they are sunk costs, but I'm not sure what standard would meet "spending up the wazoo" if not 20 times revenue (at minimum, as it only includes spending on acquisitions for which the amount paid is made public). |