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Mnementh said:
I think this analysis leaves out a big thing: that the console market is only a submarket to the bigger gaming market. In the past the console submarket as a whole was nearly consumed in the video game crash. Since then it has carved out it's niche. But that is changing.

By now PC-gaming and console-gaming - which were for a long time quite separate - are more and more similar, with games releasing on both submarkets. This is not a problem per se, but if one submarket gets into trouble it is easy for gamers and devs to jump to the other, as they are both quite similar in gaming choices by now. You already can see it, as some geographical markets (like China and Korea) nearly completely avoid consoles in favor of PC-gaming. In other regions it is the other way around.

The second challenge comes from the mobile area. Given, we have mobile games around for a while, and they are a pretty separate niche. But mobile devices get more powerful and devs more ambitious. The big problem for the mobile market is monetization.

But the biggest challenge ahead is cloud gaming. And that has the potential to completely remodel all other gaming markets. I actually think the Zenimax-acquisition is not so much to fight against Sony and Nintendo, but MS bulking up to fight the cloud-gaming wars.

The thing is, you only can see a consolidation in the console market by ignoring the outside. But the coming changes may destroy the console market completely, more likely though they will transform the role of consoles. And how the current companies will do under these circumstances and if other competitors join under the new possibilities is something that is quite hard to get a grasp on.

Is there going to even be much of a fight for the "streaming wars" because right now it looks like Microsoft is way ahead of anyone else and it looks like the board of directors is all in on becoming the Netflix of gaming, you don't just drop 7.5 billion on a gaming company if it wasn't approved by the top end of MS brass. 

If Sony decides to try to get into an acquistion fight with MS, I think that's going to end badly for them. They don't have the money to spend that MS has and if the XBox division now has the full support of MS to do whatever it takes to get that Netflix of Gaming goal accomplished ... well that could get ugly real fast for Sony.