Pemalite said:
goopy20 said:
My theory is that MS will be exiting the console market after the next gen and, instead will focus on becoming the world's biggest cloud gaming platform provider. https://www.equities.com/news/microsoft-has-quietly-made-the-switch-of-the-century Just like with Amazon, this is where MS will be making the big $$$$. Unfortunately, that's also why they are not too fussed about winning the console war next gen because they're already looking past that.
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Microsoft won't exit the console market if it's still a profitable venture.
Not to mention the "brand" has pull in the PC and other markets outside of console as well.
goopy20 said:
As a content provider I just don't see MS doing that great against Nintendo or Sony, who will have a much stronger brand and will likely corner the market if gaming subscriptions does become the future. Off course, MS will make a ton of $$$$ if they can provide the Cloud platform for them. But even there they would have to compete with Google and Amazon and there's no guarantee the major content players like Nintendo and Sony would stick with Azure. I mean, didn't MS provide Netflix with their servers until they switched to Amazon? This is probably why MS is looking at Google and Amazon as their main competitors going forward.
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Microsoft is doing fine, they are leveraging the PC to give their content a larger market base... PC+XBox is certainly a larger audience than Playstation OR Switch.
What makes Azure a more ideal platform than what Google or Amazon offers is... Gaming related technologies and optimizations.
That might change, that might not.
And it's interesting you use Netflix as an example... Netflix still buys a ton of Microsoft technologies like PlayReady DRM.. But on the server side of things they have been with Amazon Web Services for a long time, before that they ran with their own servers... And there is talk they are doing some stuff on Google's services.
One company like Netflix can use multiple cloud providers at the same time.
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/longtime-amazon-web-services-customer-netflix-said-cozying-google/
goopy20 said:
I know they can't just build their own cloud server network overnight, but they won't need to as they're already using Azure for PsNow. If this whole Cloud thing does become the future, wouldn't it just like we're seeing now with Netflix? As a subscription service, they're far bigger than Amazon Prime and have a much better brand awareness, but Netflix uses Amazon's Cloud servers for their back-end.
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It took 7 years for Netflix to migrate to Amazons Cloud Servers, that's almost an entire console generation... I would imagine the logistics behind it all would have been pretty impressive on top of it.
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud-migration
So once a big platform is locked to a cloud provider... It's not just a simple "shift" to another provider, there are also significant costs in shifting as well... And this is what makes cloud computing like Azure so lucrative, you lock customers in for the long term.
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I don't know man. Lets say we fast forward 10+ years to the future and we're all gaming in the Cloud. Dedicated hardware is on it way out and people can now subscribe to a whole bunch of different game services that are all running on the Azure cloud. In the end consumers don't care about the back-end of things, they'll just look at which brand has the best content and subscribe to that service. It's why Netflix has a 90% market share. MS might have a some pull as a brand among pc gamers, but they simply doesn't have the content to compete with Nintendo or Sony when that happens, unless they can really pump out some amazing new ip's next gen. If we yould compare it to today's streaming video services, I see Sony becoming the Netflix of gaming, Nintendo will be comparable to Disney+ and MS will be Amazon Prime.
However, if MS is providing Nintendo, Sony etc. their streaming platform, they probably won't care if their own subscription service isn't doing great. They will make a fortune regardless, just like Amazon is doing now. They just need to make sure the big content players don't go with Google or Amazon Cloud servers instead.
Last edited by goopy20 - on 06 March 2020
