Wow, not a single point from your last post defended. Fair enough.
Let's take these new points one by one as well.
Profit above all else is not a good way of running a business. This is business 101. If Xbox or Microsoft were hurting for change, I could see your point. But they're not, and in fact, despite your concern over revenues, we know that everybody is bringing in ridiculous amounts of money despite (because) Covid.
Microsoft's main goal here is to make more profit than the money would have made in interest. $500m a year is double or closer to triple the interest on $7.5b. $200m would do it. Keeping that in mind, who at Microsoft is going to protest if revenues drop from $500m to, let's be generous, half of that?
Especially if not putting the games on PlayStation today increases the number of people playing on Xbox or PC tomorrow?
There's a lot of presumptions in here. It seems your point, and correct me if I'm wrong, is "game development is expensive, and so are multi-billion dollar mergers".
Which Microsoft would have known before buying a game development company in a multi-billion dollar merger.
Those same costs are present whether the games go exclusive or not. The question is can Microsoft/Xbox foot the bill? Yes, they can. They can foot that bill and Zenimax will still be profitable. We're talking short-term costs here for the most part, and longer-term costs are put into a game's financing.
So then, this boils down to "is there more harm from releasing on PlayStation than benefit?"
That's up for discussion, but from everything we know about Microsoft's immediate goals, we've gotta say yes. People who can buy a game on PlayStation won't jump into Gamepass, and will probably just wait hoping for exclusive games to be ported. People who see Starfield is coming to PlayStation and are desperate to play it will pick that console, rather than playing it in the Xbox ecosystem.
We could go further, asking whether Microsoft benefits more from a possibly recurring $15 on Gamepass Ultimate than on the profits it'll make on a game released on PlayStation. We can't know the answer, but factor in limited market, multiplat gamers, porting costs etc and it's probably too close to call.
What difference does this make to whether games are going to be exclusive or not?
It benefits Microsoft to release as many games as possible as quickly as is sustainable. More quality games with shorter gaps between release dates means more incentive to stay subscribed. We don't have enough data to know what that means for Gamepass, but internally things are changing all the time. Bethesda's purchase hasn't happened overnight, and there's an internal schedule going forward probably for most of the generation with targets already written out, with Bethesda correct and present.
If you're suggesting some level of hidden cost because of the Bethesda purchase, where suddenly Ninja Theory and Obsidian are going to have games canceled and people leaving because of uncertainty, then you're asking me to disprove imagined scenarios in your head, and that's not a job anybody can do.
After having an okay argument in your last post, you've reverted to "Microsoft wouldn't leave that money on the table!" and that's disappointing.
Microsoft doesn't need money, it needs a way of making its vast fortune work for it. That means acquisitions and plenty of them while interest rates are low. Expect more purchases sooner rather than later.
And if you can't come up with a specific scenario where one of the biggest companies in the world needs to release its product on a competitor's device when they're not in a monopoly situation, then your suggestion holds no water.
The ball is in your court.