What are your thoughts on this? Are you happy? Sad?
I’m extremely curious. If you asked me this as a kid, I would have been celebrating. I always thought games should be accessible to everyone. But now I’m questioning if Microsoft plans to keep the Xbox ecosystem alive.
Exclusive titles are/were the incentive to keep people on certain consoles. Currently, I think only gamepass and digital libraries would be the only reason to stay with Microsoft if they continue to make systems in the future.
Additionally, I’m curious as to how this could destabilize the market. With no direct competition for high end hardware (other than pc/the steam deck), Sony can kinda do whatever they please.
I definitely think Microsoft is going to abandon Xbox because I think the see the writing on the wall in so far as why they are in this market. I think there will always be a place for dedicated gaming hardware like the PS5, but I think it will become more of a niche purchase as time goes on and I think Microsoft does too. I think they don’t like the numbers they are predicting for future console sales, but they do like the ones they are predicting for cloud gaming, since, in theory, anything with a screen and an internet connection could be a console these days. I have no clue if it will pay off for them (personally I hope not), but as technology gets better, the more space for people to settle throughout the wide spectrum of compute power. Microsoft I think wants to try to fill as much of the space as possible.
Just as a final note, that is a touch on my more personal opinion. I hope cloud computing is seriously considered as a huge source of the carbon footprint of the world with how much power it consumes.