A software company with less than 500 employees and more than 100 MUSD in annual revenue and you're asking me to please think of the vulture capitalists that gutted it?
If every employee makes 100k (let's say that's an average. Some make more, some make less). That 50m in salary alone, not including benefits like 401k or health insurance. And that's just people costs. Doom dark ages sold somewhere between 800k-1m is the estimate. At 70$ a copy they might not have broken even if the lower end of the sales target is what was hit if you take into account benefits and people buying the game on sale.
I'm not saying to sympathize with the MS, but they blew a lot of money on a worse game than doom eternal or 2016 doom. It's just not penciling out I guess.
Game companies are always going through this and the only way to stay around a long time is to stay lean (like valve) and/or find a really lucrative business model.
Valve is a similar size to id tech. They have two tricks: be in a business other than games and be privately owned. The former gives them the ability to weather storms and the latter keeps the dagger away. This would not have happened if id were privately owned.
Notably MS is in a business other than games, so another way to frame this is "MS is losing and Valve is winning".
