After announcing the recent closure of 4 Bethesda development teams, Brad Hilderbrand, former director of public relations at 343 Industries, The Coalition, and other Microsoft teams, clarified some details through his official LinkedIn account .
Hilderbrand mentioned that the release of games for the Xbox Game Pass service causes it to fail miserably in achieving sales goals, especially with the cessation of growth of the service’s fan base, so that the revenues no longer cover the budgets of those projects. The revenues go to the best-performing projects, but the best games top the attention of service players for a month or a few months in the future. The best times and then attention turns to other games.
Hilderbrand mentioned that stopping the growth of the service base would not have been important 3 or 4 years ago, before the wave of acquisitions that the company began. The Xbox division was during that period a division that made some profits but did not cause significant losses, but now it is a division that must compensate for the cost of numerous acquisitions, especially the acquisition. Activision Blizzard and reduce costs until that goal is achieved.