But this flys in the face of gamepass supporters for years who claimed GAMEPASS LEADS TO MORE SALES... Sooo your saying that was a LIE by the fans and xbox themselves.
That was just one of many Phil Spencer's PR bullshit lies for some rare case.
If that would be true, all 3rd parties would want to be on GP and they don't unless MS pays them enough to compensate the lost sales. And well, Sony would copy it. Because obviously companies will do what they think will give them more money.
But instead we saw companies who did stop putting their games there plus MS removing the day one games from GP console tier, making it more similar to the healthier PS+ Extra equivalent.
I don’t think it’s that understandable given it didn’t even really get that much engagement looking at both Steam and the most played list on Xbox. For a game so long in development to not really have any kind of impact whatsoever is quite bad and I think it's why MS is lookin more and more into multiplatform because Hellblade 2 being exclusives makes no sense whatsoever.
I assume MS bought Ninja Theory with the long term idea of having them to make the MS equivalent of God of War somewhere in the future after some time growing.
But when acquired they had a few other projects in the works or in preproduction that they wanted to make (Bleeding Edge, Hellblade 2, Project Mara), so did move them forward and decided to keep them exclusive because that was better than nothing, even if not expecting great sales from them.
I also assume that if doesn't shut them down before, MS will be more confident with their next in their next games, the first ones started since day one inside MS before their greenlight. In theory they should be something where MS will be more invested, better integrated in their catalog and roadmap, and where MS will have more control, so pretty likely would invest more in that project's gamedev and marketing too.
Antoniades said Hellblade 2 was going to be much bigger than the first one, but ended being similar, if not shorter. Pretty likely MS didn't want to have a very long development so decided to its scope to release it asap and move asap to the next project MS is interested in, the first one started inside MS.