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Machiavellian on 05 December 2019
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thismeintiel said:
Darwinianevolution said:
I'm just wondering if they are having problems choosing their priorities: their home consoles or their new cloud-based platforms. No matter how it's spun, they eat into each other's markets and in house resources.

I think MS has made it clear that GamePass/xCloud is where they see their future.  With Scarlett, I think they are just seeing if it is financially beneficial to release more HW, not worrying about units sold, but profit.  This is why I doubt MS is going to be subsidizing the cost of Scarlett.  At most, I think they will try to break even, maybe take a small loss, covered by the sale of a single game.  It might be a case of figuring out what they can throw in there to match Sony, without having to sell it for more than $499. 

On the other hand, with the way Sony is talking, I wouldn't be surprised to see them subsidize the price by $100-$200.

I believe you are correct but for the wrong reasons and your conclusion is also incorrect.  MS is doing the cloud but not as a replacement for hardware.  If anything, the cloud looks to be an extension of the ecosystem not something of a replacement anytime soon.  If you read the Eurogamer article on XCloud you see that MS isn't trying to do what Google is doing and they are more focused on allowing Xbox games the ability to be played on mobile hardware like your Phone or Tablet.  MS is looking at the Cloud as an extension of their games platform and it very evident by Phill comments that Hardware still plays a big role in MS future.

Gamepass is also another extension of the ecosystem but it's geared to allow MS to concentrate on games and building a library of AA, AAA and Indie games to entice gamers to subscribe to the service which then pays for itself allowing basically what you see with Netflix where they can produce their own content from low to high quality content.  I am sure MS has a baseline of subscribers but I believe if they can get 30% of all Xbox users to sub to Gamepass the service will pay for all First and Second party content from your AAA to AA games.