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EricHiggin on 08 October 2021
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Mr Puggsly said:
EricHiggin said:

The XB brand has been pocket change to MS so far, so throwing in the towel is/was pretty unlikely. XB clearly is there for a reason, whatever the reasons exactly, and means enough to keep around, even if it's not making tons of money, if not losing it. I wouldn't be surprised if behind the scenes, to MS, XB has always been seen as worthy considering it's kept SNY from potentially entering into other markets that are far more important to MS. Spending measly billions here, to continue easily making tens of billions elsewhere, would certainly make all of their consoles a success in that sense.

A lot of companies have tried to enter the video game market with mixed results. I assume MS sees value in what they've accomplished. The billions they've spent buying studios is something I never anticipated either. Therefore I don't think Sony entering other markets is really a concern per se, its an industry major companies want to be relevant in and MS has a legacy there between old PC games and entering the console market 20 years ago.

Just assume what very well might have occurred if MS never entered the console space, or if they did and only ever managed OG XB level sales each gen.

PS3 sales would have very likely landed beyond 100 mil even with all it's problems. SNY had plans way back then of an all encompassing ecosystem like Apple, Samsung, etc, have now, where Cell was in all SNY products.

In this case, you can bet MS saw this coming long ago, before even PS2, and at the very least, wanted 'their slice' of this with Windows, which was never going to happen with SNY then. Just look at PS3 already touching on Linux.

If you're MS, do you really want to potentially allow SNY to grow enough in the tech space and either use a competitors/non Windows OS/software, or perhaps even let SNY make their own for their all encompassing ecosystem?

How long before PS4 or PS5 was basically an affordable media PC with a non Windows full OS? 200 mil sales? 500 mil sales? 1 bil sales?

It would be way way smarter to start a console brand and toss a few billion at it every year to simply keep SNY in check. If you could eventually grow it and make seriously good use of it for MS overall then sure, get more serious about it, but if not, it would serve it's purpose regardless.