Original report comes from the paywalled The Information, that they tried to sell to private equity for $100B-$150B, but that it was short lived and fell through. This backs what a lot of us have been thinking based on the moves Sharma has been making, that they track with a sell-off of the Xbox brand.
I think purchasing them was actually the bigger mistake then selling them. If you’re selling hardware at a discount because you plan on making money via the games then you probably want a lot of independent studios paying you to make games on your platform. Maybe offering special incentives for exclusive titles or something, but realistically having some flagship exclusives that may be in house and a healthy 3rd party dev community seems like it makes the most sense. You can sit back and print money once the console is made just by owning the platform. One company cannot realistically oversee the development of enough studios to make that model work. In my opinion, you need a lot of studios to make a lot of games to make your hardware compelling. I’m sure some people use their console as a dedicated COD or 2K or [insert game here] machine, but I no longer buy consoles because there just wasn’t enough to play on them to make it worthwhile for me.
Budgets got higher, which made multiplatform releases just about mandatory. Making third party games exclusive isn’t working out, in general. I don’t know that that’s a genie you can put back in the bottle anymore.
the issue was Sony was killing them on exclusives. god of war, spider-man, last of us, horizon, astrobot, Ghost of, etc etc