I know we joke and act the fool on here, but you spend 7.5 billion on something, you wanna recoup. 13 million Playstation copies from the PS3, PS4, and PSVR bought Skyrim. That's almost half of the 30 million copies they sold not including PC, Switch, and Xbox platforms.
Xbox division made right under 12 billion in revenue last year. That's REVENUE, not profit. They spent roughly 2/3 of that total buying Zenimax media.
Nadella and MS stockholders ain't tryin to hear no console war shyt. He bout his paper. They gotta recoup that money. Cutting off half your userbase for those Zenimax titles to please stans is retarded.
I don't know about Gamepass per say, but some of those titles are definitely being sold on non xbox and pc platforms. I don't see Gamepass this gen, but I wouldn't be surprised tho. The gen after this tho, I can see that esp for Xbox owned titles at least. Non xbox 3rd party games, I don't see it.