Xbox Asked Netflix for $800 Million and the Deal Collapsed

Microsoft asked Netflix for $800 million for seven years of exclusive rights to adapt Xbox characters into shows and films, after Netflix opened at $500 million, and the deal collapsed. The figures come from Puck, citing three people familiar with the talks.

The arrangement would have put shows and films built on Xbox characters on Netflix and nowhere else for the length of the term. Netflix declined to comment. Xbox is now said to be chasing smaller deals with more partners rather than handing one streamer the whole catalogue, which means more adaptations moving at once for less money per contract, and its own statement leaned on what is already in production rather than on what fell apart.

“We have received record-breaking interest in our I.P.; Netflix is a valued partner and we are excited for the forthcoming release of our Minecraft and Diablo animated series together, among other adaptations.”

— Xbox

Both of those animated series are Netflix projects, so the working relationship survives the failed negotiation. The track record behind the asking price is thinner than the number suggests. Paramount’s live-action Halo series debuted in 2022, returned for a second season in February 2024 and was cancelled five months later, and it remains the only live-action Xbox adaptation to reach air. Netflix, meanwhile, has signed separate agreements with several game makers over the past few years, which is the model the $800 million ask would have replaced with a single contract.

Netflix’s appetite for game IP has a number attached to it. Netflix received 100,000 new subscribers within six hours of Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look going live, the platform’s third spike of the year after the Stranger Things finale and the Rousey against Carano fight, with lapsed subscribers making up more than five percent of the audience that tuned in. I run a channel about open-world games and watched that presentation land harder than any publisher stream this year, which is the closest thing to a case for Microsoft’s number that currently exists.

Rockstar sold no rights to get that spike, which is the awkward part of a seven-year exclusivity arrangement. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 returned this week with all ten episodes at once, made by CD Projekt Red with Trigger and carrying a Hideo Kojima cameo, and it exists on the back of a single show agreement rather than a catalogue lockup. The season drops David and Lucy for four new leads with no single protagonist, and reviews have split on whether that works, which is the normal risk of one project rather than the risk of seven years of them.

The timing matters because of what Microsoft is spending elsewhere. New details of Project Helix revealed by Fortune put the next Xbox console somewhere between $1,200 and $1,800 for the 2028 holiday season, with a handheld in 2027, a Game Pass overhaul built around pick-and-choose add-ons, and further rounds of layoffs running through January. Fortune sourced that to its own people and Xbox has confirmed none of it, so it sits as a rumour next to a licensing figure that three sources stand behind.

Licensing is not the only place Xbox is being asked to open a cheque. Insider Tom Henderson wrote that Xbox might acquire BioWare after Electronic Arts shut the studio down, then argued against it, since a $300 million purchase plus $300 million of development would need roughly five million copies on Xbox platforms alone to break even. I read the $800 million ask the same way, as a figure set by what a catalogue feels worth internally rather than by what any of it has proven it earns on screen, and the gap between that and Netflix’s $500 million is where the deal died.