>>714980926 (OP)
Mattrick managed MS IP's into decline(by 2013 there were just 2 IP's MS had that had any kind of public recognition - Gears and Halo), Spencer thought throwing money on studios will rebuild the catalogue but it failed because of mismanagement and the fact that they were dealing with shysters.
Take obsidian as an example. Theoretically this is the perfect company for MS to buy, they're always doing random contract work and the financial instability is grim often, they have dedicated fanbase, their output at the time decisions of purchasing them(circa 2019) were made was good(Pillars games had too much hype train behind them but from the perspective of 2025 they're pretty nice RPG's, TOW was still in development), they also had the promise of simply being a good selling point for Xbox if given enough resources. The only downside is that lately their writers started declining and being replaced by female fantasymance novel writers but that's an industry-wide problem, hard to fix it.
So what happens from there? Obsidian manages to get good sales from TOW and pitches Avowed as a sort of TES but in Pillars world. At this point it's still in the air whether MS will buy Zenimax so that's a big deal. They eventually buy them and Avowed goes through 3 separate iterations(we've got the 3rd) - TES clone, coop game with hub-world and expanded version of the game world in the 2nd iteration but now SP only. On top of that it's obviously limited in features just so the development is smooth and it's relatively playable at release. Very evidently Obsidian pitched avowed to increase its sales price(TES clone), then started making the game they actually wanted made(the coop one, see their cancelled Xbox One launch exclusive for why I think they wanted to make it) and then had to run fucking recovery operation, MS should've cancelled the project the moment they moved away from their sale pitch.
>>714991336
Fable was rebooted like 3 times since F3 was released.
