It’s happened to the best of us: You’re deep into negotiations to get your semi-potent video game brands (Halo! Minecraft! Other things!) into the hands of a streamer that can really exploit the hell out of them. Sure, things have hit a few snags here or there, like a massive $300 million discrepancy over how much you think such a deal might be worth. But then, just as you might be hammering it all out: Boom. Basically everybody you were dealing with suddenly gets laid off in a huge corporate bloodbath that may or may not have been triggered by the U.S. government icing them out of a gigantic merger deal.
Such is the sad state of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming brand, per a new bit of reporting from Puck News, which says (via Games Radar) that the company was in negotiations with Netflix for an exclusive licensing deal for its various titles when, basically, everybody they were talking to suddenly got fired all at once. (Specifically, the deal was apparently being shepherded by Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s head of content, who was responsible for big chunks of Netflix’s TV and film decisions in recent years, and whose head was one of the big ones on the chopping block in last week’s layoffs.)
Microsoft and Xbox have been making noises for a month or two at this point about really wanting to get its games into theaters or onto streaming screens, even as Sony and Nintendo continue to score big successes. Not that it’s been all dire—Fallout‘s done pretty well for itself, and A Minecraft Movie made plenty of money. But there’s apparently a sense that there’s cash being left on the adaptation table. Of course, one of the issues with the Netflix deal that was in the works was how much money this all might have been worth the streamer presumably thought it was being generous by offering $500 million for a seven-year exclusive license, but the gaming studio balked, moving the price tag up to $800 million. It’s not clear how close either corporate entity was to bridging that pretty daunting gap, but now we’ll never know; the replacement of pretty much the entire Netflix top creative team axed the deal, leaving Microsoft to instead stick to individual licenses, including planned Minecraft and Diablo animated shows.
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