Halo’s MP beta release actually really stunted FH5’s growth I think. I don’t think that was deliberate at all so much as they needed Halo to ship by year end and wanted to have something notable to surprise us with on Nov 15th.
It would be interesting to see some analysis of release schedules on other streaming services (even non-gaming stuff) to see what patterns emerge wrt when big content lands at what cadence and how that affects success.
They already made several. They signed an agreement to not hold back CoD on PSX in any way for 7 yrs into the future, agreed that other major IPs (likely Diablo and Overwatch at the very least) would still launch on PSX, and embraced a whole suite of changes to their ecosystem that plays nice with pending tech antitrust legislation. They knew regs would require that stuff so they got out in front of it, which imho has helped them a lot so far both in PR and wrt the way regs will read the situation.