2017 was solid year for Xbox One sales in spite of exclusvies.

[derpysquirtle64]

Pemalite said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Not reflective of Xbox One though because its a platform with quality content.

People generally dont argue that, instead they argue it has no exclusives due to sharing games with PC.

It's a legitimate concern though considering there are 125 million with 8.9 million concurrent users on steam back in 2015... And steam has continued to grow since then.
https://www.vg247.com/2015/02/24/steam-has-over-125-million-active-users-8-9m-concurrent-peak/

In-fact, Valve made a statement that they were adding roughly 1.5 million users per month.
https://www.polygon.com/2017/8/4/16095394/steam-users-count-2017-gaining-millions-per-month

There are literally hundreds of millions of PC gamers, Microsoft releasing all it's games on PC, means there are hundreds of millions of PC gamers which have zero incentive to buy an Xbox One...
PC does compete with console... And consoles need to appeal to PC gamers, their wallets are equally as valuable.

To be honest, looking at Microsoft software output for the last few years, I can say that they are doing the right thing now that they release everything on PC. Because they don't have system sellers right now. I can't see how these games can make PC-only gamers buy the console. They only had one 90+ rated game in the entire generation. And everything besides Halo/Gears/Forza struggles to sell 1m+ or even hit the 500k mark. The only games that sell well and create some hype are Halo/Gears/Forza entries and almost all the fans of these games already have an Xbox or will buy it at some point anyway I suppose. The only game that probably could sell some consoles which doesn't belong to these franchises and should have stayed exclusive is Cuphead. But looking at how Studio MDHR handles everything by themselves it is obvious that MS only paid for console exclusivity and that's it. Probably they haven't had enough faith that the game will sell that well I don't know.