[pandaman]

Even if they had made it exclusive, $70B is too much for this. CoD sales would fall - not everyone buying it would go out and buy an Xbox, Xbox hardware sales would raise. Let's be optimistic and say every CoD player (including ones who already bought Xbox ) goes out and buys another Xbox and then buys 2 xboxes in the next generation. So it's ~20M more Xboxes sold. To break even on this investment in 10 years MS has to make ~$2400 from each console sold over lifetime ($68B - 10*$2B annual profit = $48B over 20M extra units). Of course, if each sold Xbox made that much money they would not sell them for $400, they'd pay you to get one.

[isqueiros]

I already thought the deal was bad to begin with, but if you look at the numbers like this it feels even more catastrophically bad, damn.

This is not even considering they basically bought all the PR issues that came with Blizzard.

[venzaspa]

CoD is just one title though, the deal included WoW and Candy Crush and the rest of the Activision IP.

[pandaman]

Yes. How many consoles would WoW and Candy Crash move?