It seems like a simple fact is often overlooked: you can't just throw money at art and expect it to be good, no matter the form. Netflix tried it and ended up with a lot of weak stuff, Microsoft did the same with similar results. Most games these days are just copies or rehashes of others, not original, full of clichés or old-fashioned mechanics. Acquired studios tried to mash up different ideas, hoping it would stick, often with really bad results, like Redfall. It's like the E.T. game disaster, but forty years later and spanned across the whole company. Hardware is great, GamePass is great, but Microsoft can't produce games.

One thing money can do is enable polish - you might not be able to directly force the next great game, but you can make your games excellently coded and polished.

Polish and Microsoft is a funny pairing over the last few years. More and more things are coming apart at the seams as the vibe-coded duct tape is failing.

Sadly, the only real remnant of the old Microsoft polish seems to be "we'll extensively document how our code fails, and do nothing about it."

The result is that everything in the american economy is getting squeezed.

That’s because the risk of making novel games is large.

Which is a problem for smaller studios but something that should average out at microsofts scale if they kept individual games reasonably small.

No amount of averaging makes upfront dev investment + massive marketing + targeting faddish and trendy consumers into a risk free business.

Another way to think about risk is opportunity cost. What other investments would give me the same return?